Return of rain reignites Australia water wars between farmers and conservationists

2 June 2012 (Sydney Morning Herald) – Rivers are flowing again, but so is the friction over water rights among states and between farmers and conservationists, writes David Humphries. The last time we dropped in on the Kennedys, their cotton property Whitegates resembled a setting for The Grapes of Wrath. Dust into dust, and under dust to lie. Paddocks denuded, channels and dam floors riven with fissures, water – the make-or-break elixir of farm life – a memory as emotionally suffocating as the dust pall over nearby Condobolin, out on the Lachlan where Clancy used to drove. In 2006, Pat Kennedy was five years into drought. The tears he shed at the thought of his apparent failure to convert a showpiece $10 million cotton irrigation investment into a secure haven for his wife, Sue, and their four children helped soften a nation’s heart and loosen government purse strings on drought relief and to alleviate the emotional stress it causes. Kennedy thought circumstance couldn’t get worse. But it did. ”We went into another drought, the drought of all droughts,” he says now. The irrigation tap was turned off for another four years. No water, no crop, no income, no lookers when the Kennedys put Whitegates up for sale. The bank came looking for its money, culminating in an eviction notice, and the Kennedys sold practically their entire farm equipment at big discounts futilely trying to sate repayment demands. And then the heavens opened, the Lachlan replenished, storage overflowed and a rushed crop kept wolves from the door. Kennedy now dares to plan for the day Whitegates can afford to establish son Tom, 14, on another irrigation property. Out in these parts, and further west, men and women hardened by nature’s capriciousness coo in a child’s wonderment at the turnaround. The dust has settled, the grasses have erupted from prolonged dormancy, crops are flourishing and rivers are flowing. The change is evident in people’s steps, in the scrubbed-up towns, in the business of main streets, in the return of confidence. ”No one alive has seen the country like it is now,” says Ashley Wielinga, general manager of Warren shire council, on the Macquarie. Eight years of drought, he says, have left the district stripped of skilled seasonal labour, and irrigators are having to incorporate technology advances that came along when they didn’t have crops. ”But opportunities will bring the workers back,” says Wielinga, with as much hope as conviction. ”And the resilience of the place you can’t put down in words.” Kennedy, 51, standing atop his 1000 hectares of bleach-white cotton, says: ”It’s blue skies, sunny days, Wyangala [dam] is full and everyone’s happy.” Well, happier certainly. The rains have washed away the worst excesses of drought gloom – no one kids themselves it won’t return – but irrigators reckon they’re now in a new fight for their survival. Whisky’s for drinking, Mark Twain is said to have observed, but water is for fighting over. And a fight there is in eastern Australia’s irrigated farmlands; with a seemingly irreconcilable stand-off between those who want irrigators to surrender some of their lifeline so that rivers and wetlands get more water, and those who fear water entitlements will be cut to levels uncommercial. NSW, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia, for instance, reckon the Murray Darling Basin Authority’s plan to divert 2750 gigalitres to environmental needs is a stinker and have vowed to frustrate it at every turn. But their motives differ. […]