In a piece worthy of Bjorn Lomborg, perennial environmental Pollyanna Alan Moran quotes stats in yesterday’s Fin (subscription required) to prove that everything is roses with the Murray-Darling and that the the sacred property rights of irrigators should not be interfered with. Here’s an extract
Upstream of Morgan in South Australia, salinity levels have been reduced over the past 20 years, and now are at the levels observed in 1938 when salinity was first measured.
Hence, for 1500 kilometres, the river’s agriculture has not adversely affected salinity, which is evident only for the last 200 kms in South Australia.
Similarly, there is no data to support claims that river usage is threatening to eradicate native animals and plants. In fact, the Murray Darling Basin Commission has only recently embarked on a systematic appraisal of the environmental health of the system.
Hence there is little evidence to justify a need for drastically curtailing productive agricultural uses of the river to bolster environmental flows designed, for example, to flush out salt and increase floods of forested areas.
Yet a chorus of voices wants Murray Darling water to be redirected from productive uses to such flows. Simon Crean has endorsed plans to divert 1500 gigalitres, some 20 per cent of the irrigators’ water in the Murray system, to environmental flows.
There are so many distortions here that it’s hard to know where to begin. But the biggest one, and a standard Lomborg tactic, is that Moran tries to argue against environmental policies by pointing to improvements generated by those very policies. As the Murray-Darling Basin Commission points out, significant reductions in salinity have been achieved only since 1990, when a Cap was imposed halting growth in extractions and thereby restricting rights previously exercised or assumed by irrigators (these rights are and were various and complex, and can’t be treated as inalienable private property rights in the simplistic fashion posited by Moran). I’ll be posting more on this in the future as my research gets into higher gear.
John Quiggin 
I would have thought Alan Moran would have said let all people using the water pay the proper cost.
This would eliminate cotton, tobacco and rice growers and boost water levels.
Has Al had a touch of the Paddys?
Has Al had a touch of the Paddys?
A touch of the what?
Sir Paddy of Quadrant and SMH fame. Former adviser to Bill Hayden
As a more detailed explanation for Kieran, “a touch of the Paddy’s” is a reference to Padraic Pearse McGuinness, a bombastic rightwing commentator in the ex-Marxist style, though he traces his roots back to the libertarian Sydney Push (more on this here and was never a Marxist. McGuinness now edits Quadrant magazine (same history and general line as Encounter), to which I have referred a few times on this blog.
I understood Lomborg as making more or less the opposite point: that doomsday environmentalists who call for radical change often ignore that fact that existing, moderate, cost-benefit tested regulations have already reversed the trend of many of the problems about which they complain.
Mork, try and find any instance where Lomborg supports any environmentalist proposal, whether or not it is moderate, cost-benefit tested etc.
Pity you did not look at the data before you commented on it. In fact the level of salinity at Morgan in SA shows no change since 1938. An increase in salinity can be inferrred up until the early 1890s after which it has improved; in other words the improvement pre-dated the cap (which was introduced in 1995 not 1990).
I doubt however that this will change your already well-formed pre-conceptions
For those interested, the data on which I relied is graphed here. (The full report, including details of the estimation procedure is here (PDF file)). Moran’s argument is based on raw MDBC data (not taking account of events like the drought of the early 1980s). You can look at the data here (Word file)
Moran is correct to say that the Cap was not imposed until 1993-94. It is more appropriate to refer to the Salinity and Drainage strategy. This strategy incorporates a mixture of engineering measures to intercept salt, diversion of water from irrigation to dilution flows and restrictions on irrigation developments, which culminated in the Cap. I invite readers to read the MDBC report, and make up their own minds.