‘I’ve told you before not to drink your juice that quickly! Juice is expensive, Paul—if you’re going to drink that quickly, you can have a glass of water.’
The parental incantation above has long reverberated around the nation. What it demonstrates is not that kids guzzle their juice, but that despite living on the planet’s second driest continent, we continue to undervalue and fundamentally disrespect its water resources.
In particular, the environmental values of rivers and wetlands receive scant attention compared to consumptive uses of water. In Victoria, which has the mainland’s greatest density of rivers and streams, 78 per cent of the state’s total river length is in moderate, poor or very poor condition. Put another way, 44 per cent of river basins have less than ten per cent of river length in good or excellent condition.
Victoria’s legislative framework is simply not geared to ensuring that rivers remain healthy. It is the only state—except the Northern Territory—that does not assign the environment a baseline volume of water sufficient to sustain ecosystem values. Instead, the environment is forced to compete with other users for entitlements to water. Indeed, Victoria’s Water Act 1989 (Vic) prioritises water for domestic, stock and irrigation uses above that for the environment.
Even where the environment does hold an entitlement to water, there is no guarantee that it will receive its share. A telling example is that of the Kerang Lakes—a group of wetlands on the Murray in north-west Victoria that are listed under the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Significance.
The Kerang Lakes has the state’s only self-contained environmental allocation. But despite this, the area’s water entitlement, first issued in 1987, was not used again until 1995. Since that time, 10,000ML or more of the area’s annual 27,600ML allocation has been sold on the temporary water market three times. Justifications for the sales have included limited need for the water owing to natural ecological cycles. But service delivery costs facilitated by the Act were at least as relevant. In 2001–02 they totalled an enormous $122,647—a figure well beyond the environment’s capital resources.
The current legislative arrangement is clearly not a satisfactory one. The Act will need to be reformed to place a higher emphasis on protecting, and where possible restoring, in-stream values of water. How this is to occur is a huge problem, and continues to be the subject of conjecture.
First, the Act needs to guarantee the environment a