For a newspaper that promotes itself as fit reading material for the intelligensia, you might think it would disengage its blatant neo-conservative rhetoric and treat issues with a degree of detachment. Now in case you might be wondering if it was the newspapers unashamedly pro-Abbott viewpoint, its slavish support for the mining industry in its campaign against any new taxes or its long running campaign to denigrate and destroy the governments educational building program that has prompted this post I will point you to today’s outstanding example of journalistic nonsense in the guise of a front page story (with heart rending photo) “Floodwater won’t reach Murray mouth”>
Verity Edwards tells her readers that not a drop of the once in a hundred year floods in Queensland will make it to SA. Ok, hardly a drop, and if you read the front page you might be excused for thinking that somehow it’s the fault of the government which has “failed to deliver on its troubled deal with the states to manage the river system”.
Really? I can sympathise with the plight of Langhorne Creek grapegrower Tom Keelan and the people of Adelaide who depend on the Murray for drinking water (poor bastards) but buried in the story by Verity are two or three interesting facts.
Estimate of water entering into the system from Qld – 6700 GL
Water reaching Minindee Lakes system (now empty) – 2100GL – note this is public water for use of the town of Broken Hill and backup to Adelaide’s storage
Water extracted or diverted to private storage – 1700 GL
which seems to leave about 400GL arriving in South Australia ( a bit more than a drop).
Apparently the land where the water landed is very flat – who would have guessed – and the water has a habit of seeping into the ground (really) or evaporating! I guess this is meant to explain why the 6100 GL of water falling in the catchment area means a third of it makes its way into the river at Minindee except for – the little gestimate of 1700GL which gets diverted to PRIVATE storage.
You see for the agricultural business sector, there are two sorts of water, mine and what’s left. Mine comes first, it’s the water that disappears into private storage, all those dams that farmers throw up across all the natural water courses on their properties. When those dams fill up they overflow to the next dam and the next until eventually a bit of water makes its way into a public water course.
Then there is the water that disappears underground and makes its way into the underground water table. This table might become a spring somewhere else so any self respecting private enterprise agricultural businessman knows they better sink a few hundred bores and get that water before it runs out.
What’s left is what private interests haven’t managed to lock up. A third. And because it’s a shrinking cake the politics are bitchy. So one state wants more than the next and all the time private interests are looking to grab more. Instead of slating the federal government for trying to do something the Oz would do better to actually explore why it is that so little water winds up in a public resource and how we might deal with that in the future. What the Oz want’s its intelligent readers to think is that the issue is how the government manages a public asset, which is one aspect of the story. What the Oz doesn’t want the public to question is the political and moral questions surrounding the seemingly untouchable notion of private property even when the property is water. Its what you get for reading the Oz.
