Describing the situation as "unprecedentedly dangerous", PM John Howard announced on April 19 that no water will be allocated to irrigators in the Murray-Darling basin after June 31, unless there is substantial rainfall and therefore water inflows to the basin in the next six weeks.
The announcement came after the government received a report from the federal-state Murray-Darling Basin Commission (MDBC) that examined water availability in the basin's river system in the face of the worst drought on record. Scientists say the drought has been exacerbated by changing weather patterns caused by global warming due to the burning of fossil fuels, particularly coal.
The Murray-Darling basin, which covers 14% of Australia's land area, accounts for 40% of its agricultural output. Howard said he feared food imports might be needed if the basin's crops failed. Economists warned that if this happened, food prices could quadruple within the next few months.
The planned cut-off of irrigation water to the basin's 50,000 farmers is aimed at preserving water for use by townships along the river system, especially Adelaide, which draws most of its water from the Murray River — around 1800 gigalitres each year.
Environmental scientist and Australian of the Year Tim Flannery told journalists at an international fuel conference in Melbourne on April 20: "Unless we get rain in the Murray-Darling system over this winter it's likely that there may only be 1400 gigalitres of water flowing through the system this year."
Six months ago, on November 1, the Murray-Darling Water Crisis Management Council (formed by local governments in the river basin) warned the Howard government that water management engineers had assessed that — based on the amount of water being released down the river from the storage system — the Murray had about 24 weeks of water left in it.
The council proposed that the Howard government immediately order construction of a temporary weir at Wellington to stop water flowing out of the mouth of the Murray into the vast shallow Alexandrina and Albert lakes, from which millions of litres of water evaporate every day. According to the council, a weir at Wellington would have secured water for Adelaide and many of the drought-hit areas of farming along the Murray.
The council's warnings about the severity of the water crisis and its proposed emergency solution were ignored by the Howard government. Instead, the government commissioned a report from its MDBC bureaucrats, which has only confirmed the warning given to the government back in November.
Indeed, the MDBC reported in December that, "Inflows for the season to date (six months, June to November) have been only 610 GL which is 68% of the previous recorded minimum of 1090 GL observed in 1902 and only 7% of the long-term average of 8400 for the same period".
In the meantime, 500 gigalitres of water has flown down the Murray into the two South Australian lakes, leaving only 360 gigalitres in the upper Murray system for downstream water supplies.
The Howard government's approach to the growing Murray-Darling basin water crisis has been the same as its approach to the impending catastrophe of global warming — deny the severity of the crisis and the need for immediate effective action until it is too late to fix the problem.
The Howard government argues that massively cutting Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by rapidly replacing the use of coal with renewable energy technologies would "damage the economy and cost jobs". This is really code for "damage corporate profits". Putting corporate profits ahead of the well-being of working people is the guiding policy of the Coalition and Labor governments, at both the federal and state level.
The increasingly severe climate change catastrophes we are facing demand urgent and radical public policy measures that put social needs ahead of private greed.