Listening to John Howard and the state premiers discussing the drought, the Murray-Darling basin and water policy is increasingly difficult, especially if you've ever given the natural world more than a passing thought. The sight of any Australian government claiming 'green credentials' leaves me gobsmacked, especially given the liberties taken with our natural environment in the last decade.
Actually, I think the premiers are worse than Howard, although his environmental credentials are hardly stellar. They talk endlessly about water shortages, citizens are harangued about saving the precious liquid, and quotas imposed and then, literally in the next sentence, the same premiers are talking about "the need to increase population," as though more people won't need more water.
Take Victoria's Steve Bracks: in one breath he talks about water shortages and dam levels being dangerously low, and in the next says Melbourne needs a million more people by 2025. Or Jon Stanhope of the ACT: he preaches jeremiads on Canberra's dire water shortage, and then announces four new Canberra suburbs full of Mac-mansions.
At present Australia is a net exporter of food, producing probably three times more than we actually consume ourselves. But at what cost to the environment? One of the unmentionable (and nowadays politically incorrect) questions in Australia is how many people the continent can sustain while retaining some respect for the integrity of the landscape. Political parties, including the Greens, scamper for cover the moment population policy is mentioned. But Australia is not infinite; there is a limit to our productive capacity, and we may well have already exceeded it.
Then there are vested interests to consider, the irrigators, the cotton and rice producers, and the people who believe that the entire purpose of the natural world is for it to be exploited. These producers talk about how they 'feed the nation' and contribute to exports. But rarely have we heard about the cost to our great rivers, like the Snowy, which are now reduced to pale imitations of their former selves, to say nothing of the salinity that besets the earth.
Then we're told the drought is the fault of global warming.
This is only partly so. It's much more the fault of farming practices totally out of sync with the landscape. Since the time of squatters, we've been abusing the continent through endless clearing, deliberate wide-scale burning, compaction of the soil by hard-hoofed animals, over-grazing, abuse of the river systems, damming,