Watering Australia must be a priority.
Water security is one thing the COVID-19 virus won’t let us forget.
Watering Australia must become our number one issue. The health pandemics or any other crisis should not overshadow it. If we want life in the bush to flourish, we must change a few priorities. If your politicians are not pushing for improving our water resources, replace them.
Due to significant growth in immigration in recent years, recurring severe droughts, floods, and fires are causing severe environmental degradation. In addition, competing interests, such as grazing, irrigation, urban water supplies, and upstream and downstream users, have reached a critical stage as demand for our food and fibre grows.
Regional communities can withstand most crises, but without water, we can only look forward to these communities of all shapes and sizes going into a state of long-term decline. In Australia, water security is the principal driver of regional, rural and remote community growth and prosperity.
Many of us hope the COVID-19 pandemic is a real wake-up call for everyone, starting with our politicians and bureaucrats, whose thinking always seems to be behind reality when it comes to watering Australia.
Beautiful towns and villages won’t exist without watering them.
Australia’s highly variable precipitation levels are a significant barrier affecting effective water management. Australian rainfall is more unstable than the rest of the world, as the Southern Oscillation drives it, not the seasonal changes. To have the same reliability in supply, dams in Australia need to be six times as massive as those in Europe. And twice as large as the world average to ensure water sources during dry seasons.
Water reform was first on the national agenda in 1994 at the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting, when a strategic framework was created. As a result, knowledge of surface and groundwater systems continued to grow, and awareness of sustainable water markets increased—but not nearly enough.
Further water reform was agreed to at the 2004 COAG meeting under a national blueprint, the National Water Initiative. But still, those with responsibility for our water resources are too big on rhetoric and low on action. We need more people who can get their minds around projects like the Snowy Scheme, the Ord River Irrigation Scheme, and the Bradfield Scheme. If we can manage these projects, we can certainly build a few more dams and divert the flow of a few coastal rivers.
Quotable Quotes.
“Thousands have lived without love; not one life without water”. W. H. Auden
“Water is the most critical resource issue of our lifetime. With the health of our waters being the principal measure of how well we live on the land”. Luna Leopold