Prime Minister, we have a water problem

When you think about it, most politicians were brought up in the suburbs. Water and farming are things you see learn about on television.

Instead of bringing in a new order for co-operative federalism, the Rudd Government has been working overtime to screen this daylight robbery. The long awaited Land Water Australia Report 2002-2009 was gutted and the LWA was disbanded.

Our Prime Minister, chief of staff in the Goss government during this time, has done nothing to help his besieged Minister for Water solve this profligate lunacy.

Then there’s Coliban Water a corporatised company with a Veolia representative on the board supplying water to an area a quarter the size of Victoria. Coliban is taking water from the Goulburn River and offering unlimited amounts of it to the highest bidders around Bendigo. To hell with the dying river system and to hell with any environmental concerns, let’s make money while the sun shines.

Another iconic river system, the Snowy, is being allowed to die a slow death at the mercy of two state governments and Canberra. The Environmental Defender’s Office has notified the Snowy River Alliance that the formal agreement made between the New South Wales, Victorian and federal governments to increase environmental flows is virtually meaningless because it is not binding on the signatories.

The Snowy River is also the centrepiece for a major, hidden threat to our water future: Australia’s obligations under two major international agreements, Goods and Trade in Services (GATS) and the Australian American Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA).

The Howard government decided to put the Snowy Scheme on the market.

Dr Patricia Ranald explains:

A very broad community campaign developed against the sale, on the grounds that private and possibly transnational foreign ownership would reduce the ability of governments to regulate both water flows and electricity supply for public interest and environmental reasons.

The Federal Government sought to diffuse the campaign by announcing it would amend the sale legislation to limit transnational investment to 35 per cent of total shares, and require the management of the scheme to be located in Australia. However, the Federal Government then reportedly received legal advice that such regulation could be directly contrary to AUSFTA investment chapter, which did not exclude water or energy services and forbids any limits on foreign ownership of assets worth less than $800 million. The Federal Government share of the scheme fell below this threshold.

The Government was reportedly highly embarrassed by the prospect of any public discussion of the possibility of its own proposed nationalist safeguards being in conflict with AUSFTA (Myer 2006). The Prime Minister hurriedly withdrew the sale legislation altogether, announcing that he was responding to community concerns about privatisation, and the sale did not proceed (Howard, 2006). This was clearly a victory for the community campaign. However, it also showed that some government departments were unaware of the restrictions placed on government policy by AUSFTA, and were not willing to defend these restrictions publicly.

Confronted by internal problems and external threats, how are we going to solve our water mess? Well, we could be decisive and follow the “governator”. Arnie has just declared a state of emergency in California prompted by a three-year drought. He wants to set up an all powerful water management organisation to guarantee the state’s water future.

Just what we need: decisive action, accountability and an iron hand to overrule parochial interests.

Ensuring water remains in public hands and the introduction of an independent water authority similar in structure to the Reserve Bank would make sense. But Canberra isn’t interested.