I haven’t posted much lately as I’ve been busy preparing for, and, for the last few days, attending the Annual Conference of the Australian Agricultural & Resource Economics Society, which ends today. This year it’s been held in Sydney, by the beach at Manly. The weather has been great and the beach tempting, but I’ve barely had time to do more than look out the window at it, as the quantity and quality of papers has been great. In particular, there has been a lot of work on salinity (irrigation-related and dryland) which I’ll be going over for some time to come.
The conference has crystallised some of my concerns about policy in this area, which I’ve referred to in the past, and will probably write more about soon. Broadly speaking, I think it’s time for governments to bite the bullet and either scale back entitlements of water for irrigation (in catchments where over-allocation is clear) or else buy them back from irrigators to be used for environmental and urban flows. At present, there is a lot of resistance to doing this, and a big focus on technical solutions.
John Quiggin 
Is there a website from which papers can be downloaded?
If you read the weekly Times (which is my unfortunate professional duty) you’ll find out just how little political capital there is in this idea. Victoria has been spending a lot of money trying to make an efficient system, because it’s politiclly so so much easier to upgrade infrastructure than take away an éntitlement’. And Labor in Vic is on the nose in country areas, because of a (misplaced IMHO) belief that they pander too much to greenies. Ungrateful farmers really dont care about the long-term sustainability of their landscape and their assets.
Gordon, a v quick google gave me this: http://come.to/aares
The NSW government announced last November a $105 million fund to buy back water entitlements for environmental flows, so that’s a start (I’m not sure how far that money will go in addressing these problems).
(Of course, they wouldn’t have to do that if the water hadn’t been over-allocated in the first place, nor if environmental flows had always been given an appropriate priority in water sharing plans, not just provided if there’s leftover water after irrigators take their entitlements.)