It was broader than water, but he stressed that the past was irretrievable and we couldn’t patch it up. What was needed was an acceptance that a new climate regime was in prospect and to proactively make the best of it.

He was stunned by how similar countries in that particular latitude were experiencing the same problems. Californian irrigators had been told to expect 15% of their normal allocation. Spain was in similar trouble etc, etc.

To my mind, that makes a lot of the ‘cotton vilification’ spurious. If cotton is only grown in years when there is adequate water, then surely it is better we grow it here than importing our cotton from somewhere else, whose farming methods might be far more dubious than ours. (ditto for rice, of course).

All of that aside, the MDB is only a ‘food basin’ because of irrigation. If that’s not sustainable – and a host of environmental problems, from die back of redgums to salinity, suggests it’s not – we may be better off spending the money getting farmers to move production elsewhere (there is elsewhere, it’s just elsewhere the land isn’t so cheap) or to radically change their farming practises.

I have a bumper crop of apples this year, and had last year as well, despite not giving them a drop of water and record low rainfalls. If irrigated orchards and other permanent crops were shifted back to areas such as this (higher in the valleys) then they would have a much better chance of survival.

We need to drastically rethink the way we farm and where we farm. This will mean good science driving really hard decisions, but in the long term will result in a more effective use of the resources we have.

I think the point is probably that we could grow heaps of food even in a reduced Murray-Darling system if we gave away cotton, rice and other large scale commodity crops for export and concentrated on higher value crops, whatever they might be. Dairying is another that requires huge amounts of water to produce anything edible.

Furious, I assume you are referring to SA getting shuttled off the end of priorities when the Vics are using peak power. I’m not clever enough to solve that one. I do think that desal should be powered by renewables.

But desal as planned is surely only a supplement to existing reservoirs and the Murray. In the long run I’d hope that Adelaide could be independent of what comes down the river if I were living there. I know that is a big ask, but I suspect competition for that freshwater is going to test civil relationships everywhere in the future.

Michael Cusak, I’m not sure that I’d entirely agree with that first sentence. Much of the best soils in both states lie to the west of the Great Dividing Range. Your second sentence is an assertion in need of substantiation – can you provide any evidence to support your claim?

Emergency action is required, and Senator Xenaphon has decided to force the issue.

He is a courageous man…this is no cynical stunt!

Farmers not only collected water from their own property but any that was flowing by, for example a drain on the side of a road or a railway line. Evaporation here in Brisbane is 1.8m pa so it would be more where this caper is practiced.

Farmers are pretty offended if it’s suggested that the rain that falls on their property does not automatically belong to them. but clearly a riparian system is a whole system and their patch is only part.

I believe there is no internationally accepted method of determing water rights. The three main ones are:

1. First in best dressed

2. Upstream users take what the want

3. Everyone in the riparian system has a stake which needs to be considered collectively (the so-called Helsinki system, which seems the most rational).

All three have fed into the history of the MD system, it seems to me, and all three are quite prevalent around the world.

There is a fourth. I may be downstream, but I’m bigger and tougher than you and if you don’t let the water come through I’ll come and sort you out (Egypt and the Nile?)

Adelaide’s problem is that it is doesn’t have the political clout you need if you’re downstream and it’s not actually party of the riparian system.

That’s why, contra hannah’s dad, I’d be going for desal if I were in their shoes. Things could get brutal going forward, especially with Melbourne throwing a siphon into the works.

The earliest that the next half-senate election can be called is 7 August 2010. If the PM goes to an election before that, it must be House Of Reps only, or a double-dissolution (which requires a trigger).

Frankly, if I were a political cynic, it’s one I’d be happy for the ALP to take on. At least in Victoria and NSW, the places where farmers would go ape are approximately the same places that elect people like Sophie Mirabella by 20% margins.

I reckon you got it right in your first post. Having read Strange Sound’s amendment, it would not do much for the current state of affairs.

My main reason is that the Murray Darling Basin Commission is at present morphing into the Muuray Darling Basin Authority and are trying to figure out how they relate to the Water Act 2007 and its amendment 2008. This package would make no difference as to how the river is operated.

If Senator Xenophon was serious, he would prescribe the quantity of buyback for the Living Murray Program. That would actually require an amendment to the variouys water acts, not grandstanding with a stimulus package.

If the funds were brought forward, my view is that the admistering bodies are in no position to use them wisely.

The other issue is that the price of entitlements is tied to scarcity, research shows that the priced of entitlements is strongly liked to seasonal prices, in the same way that alpine properties go up during a good snow season. Why buy more water entitlements when there is no water?

The bloke’s a dill, or those giving him advice are worse.