NONE OF THE THREE

The Water Act says in its own objects that Basin water has to be managed in a way that optimises economic, social and environmental outcomes, so someone needs to explain how we ended up with a plan that has delivered on none of the three.

Our farms have lost water and our towns have lost people, which everyone here already knows. What gets said far less often is that the river has not been saved either, because the Murray Mouth still needs constant work to stay open, the Coorong and the Lower Lakes are still in trouble, and carp still make up a huge share of the fish in parts of the system. More than a decade of buying water for the environment was supposed to fix that and it has not.

The reason sits inside the Act itself. Giving effect to international environmental agreements is written in as a binding legal duty, while our jobs, our farms and our communities are written in as something to be taken into account, so the environment sets the boundary and we only get to decide where inside it the pain lands. That is not the triple bottom line we were promised, and it has not even delivered the environmental result it was designed to protect.

Then there is section 100 of the Australian Constitution, which says the Commonwealth cannot, by any law or regulation of trade or commerce, abridge the right of a State or of the residents in it to the reasonable use of the waters of rivers for conservation or irrigation. The founders put irrigation in the founding document on purpose because they understood a dry continent lives or dies on how it uses its rivers, and a century on Canberra runs a plan that treats irrigation as the problem to be solved.

The Water Act is under independent review right now and submissions close 11.59pm on Monday 31 August. I have built something that makes it simple, so you tick the changes you support, it writes your submission in the format the review asks for, and it takes you to the government portal to lodge it. About five minutes, no jargon, no lawyer.

Have your say here: https://helen-water-act-submission.netlify.app

And if you have not backed the Federal Royal Commission into water yet, do it here: https://standupforwater.lovable.app/