Tony Windsor's comparison is apt: Australian city dwellers would certainly resent it if a Government-commissioned report was put out for public discussion, recommending that one third of their electricity supply, or one third of their suburban road network, should be closed down.
Irrigated agriculture systems, like electric grids and city road transport networks, are human engineering constructs. They are not gifts of nature. And like electric and road grids, irrigation systems trigger by their existence a government's duty of care to the human communities that they sustain.
Particularly when those systems were built with the blood, sweat and tears that went into the building of our Murray Darling Basin (MDB) irrigation communities over the past 100 years.
We see now, in the latest MDB Report, the results of a perverse alliance of convenience between two extremist ideologies: the market rationalism which only values water as a tradeable good to be sold to the highest bidders, and the deep green environmentalism which opposes any interference to natural ecologies for purposes of building and sustaining human settlements.
To the latter ideology, any irrigation system (or any major water storage and diversion system like the Snowy Mountains Scheme) is actually an unacceptable interference with nature.
Here are some principles which I hope might better inform the current debate:
First, irrigation is intrinsically a good thing for human civilisations. It collects and stores rainwater falling in arid, mountainous, high rainfall areas, and then reticulates this water by controlled means to flat, easily-tilled fertile-soil plains where food can be grown more safely and efficiently.
Irrigation makes sense, as the best means of sustaining human food security under conditions of irregular rainfall in the wrong places. It is as old as Ancient Babylon or Egypt.
Second, if it is proposed to withdraw substantial quantities of water from the existing irrigation-based human settlements in the MDB, in order to restore (temporarily, until the next drought cycle hits) ecological health to the MDB river system, it must not be left to the chance vagaries of market forces to decide who stays and who goes.
It could be the big high-profit mechanised cotton and rice farms that stay, and the small mixed farmers, orchardists and horticulturalists that will go one by one. This is not a good social outcome. It will destroy human communities. We are part of the ecology too.
To claim that the Government will buy back water only from 'willing sellers' misses the key sociological point.