Our Addiction to Water

 Soon we’ll hit level 8 water restrictions, which means we can only drink shiraz or merlot. Water restrictions have become the norm for Australian towns and cities. But is all that time spent figuring out when your street number corresponds with the alignment of Venus really worth it? Or do we ‘city folk’ do it purely to make ourselves feel better?

 The sad truth is that whatever we do in the cities and towns will have little impact, and any impact it does have won’t be toward saving the environment. Residential water users consume 2.2 Million megalitres, which sounds like a lot, that is until you compare it with the 16.6 million megalitres used by agriculture (check it all out at the ABS ).  A megalitre, by the way, is one million litres, and a gigalitre is a thousand megalitres. But we’re not really concerned with the ‘gigas’ and the ‘megas’, rather the fact that 16.7 is almost eight times as much as 2.2.

 With our cities expanding and the government pushing for population growth (‘have one for the country!’), residential water use can only increase. No matter how many water tanks we build and pools we empty, we account for less than than one seventh of the problem. We are already being pretty efficient (and so we should) so now we need to find other ways of saving water . Water restrictions are a easy distraction to the real issue, and it’s also easier to say than the real issue, which is quite a mouthful. That issue is (drum-roll please), mismanaged and unsustainable water allocation in rural Australia.

 As Kath & Kim would ask, ‘what ‘pacifically does that entail?’ well, I’m glad they asked. Governments, both state and federal have been giving water to the wrong people in the wrong places. Handouts under the guise of ‘drought assistance’ let farmers continue farming unsustainable crops in dry areas - instead of helping them relocate into sustainable industries. This is exactly the type of economic protectionism that both sides of parliament rail against. Considering we are the driest continent (bar Antarctica), support for water thirsty crops such as cotton and rice is, to be blunt, just plain stupid.

 Australia does not have enough water to sustain healthy ecosystems and an expanding agricultural industry and a population. Sacrifices have to be made and we have to prioritize. No matter how much money is thrown at the issue, we can’t make more rain (we have dances for that). Desalination and water recycling are costly and only delay the inevitable. We have to move away from unsustainable farming practices and refocus our economy on other industries, and with a booming mining sector now would seem the best time to do it. At the moment we have the resources and the dynamic economy that we need in order to make the landing for those affected as soft as possible. So why aren't we doing it?

 Well, it all comes down to politics. To borrow an appropriate quote from author Authur Stringer, “Society, my dear, is like salt water, good to swim in but hard to swallow.” No one, least of all a politician, wants to face up to the truth. No one wants to be responsible for the murder of the iconic Aussie farmer leaning against a shovel who is, as John Howard put it, part of our “national psyche”. Well rice and cotton farmers don’t use shovels anyway. It’s not as if we have to sacrifice every single farm and crop, we just have to cut back to a reasonable level. We should do this using basic economics, if revenue can’t cover the cost of water, then you get the help you need to have a ‘fair go’ at something else. We have to ask ourselves whether the huge environmental and economic cost of saving every single farmer is worth it just to protect our ‘national psyche’.