In the wake of St Barnaby’s latest resurrection/resuscitation, the ABC news flashed up with a story about an aborted attempt by his National Party of opportunists, carpetbaggers and grafters to rewrite the Murray-Darling Basin plan, a 2012 bipartisan agreement about how to use the water that flows down Australia’s longest river system.
Being a typical urban dweller who had only a loose grasp of this plan and why it continues to generate such heat nearly a decade since it was legislated, I issued an invitation via Twitter for someone to explain it to me. How lucky I was to hear from prominent Sydney barrister Richard Beasley, who has literally written the book on the subject.
Living up to its title, ‘Dead in the Water: A Very Angry Book About Our Greatest Environmental Catastrophe…The Death of the Murray-Darling Basin’ is a passionately argued, thoroughly researched and ultimately damning account of not only the Murray Darling environmental tragedy but the grim state of our politics.
Beasley is better placed than most to write this bird’s eye view of the saga, having been the Senior Counsel Assisting at the Murray-Darling Royal Commission, which was established by the South Australian Labor Government in 2018 and conducted by Commissioner Bret Walker SC – in the face of the outright refusal of the Commonwealth to cooperate.
Any reservation one might have of tackling a book about environmental law by a distinguished SC is quickly dispelled when Beasley confesses on the opening page that he is one of the “raving inner city lunatics” that then National Party leader Michael McCormack warned us about when a chunk of Australia was on fire in the summer of 2019.
He is not anti-farming, he stresses at the outset. Neither is he against ‘the bush’. But he is very, very angry at the ‘illegality’, ‘maladministration’, ‘gross negligence’ and ‘incomprehensible decision making’ (quoting from the Royal Commissioner’s 2019 report) that has marred the implementation of the Basin plan this past decade.
“This book is about my nominee for the low point of public administration and governance in Australia so far this century – the drafting and implementation of our most important environmental project, the $13 billion Murray-Darling Basin Plan. This book is in part an attempt to increase the number of people howling with informed outrage.”
In fact, if you’re not howling with informed outrage after reading this impeccably detailed (and expletive-laden) history of incompetence, corruption and illegality, you may need to check your pulse. It’s a story that starts, inspirationally, with a piece of ground-breaking legislation (the 2007 Water Act) and ends with one million dead fish.
The Water Act, Beasley notes, was one of John Howard’s few genuinely positive contributions to Australian life – his political deathbed conversion (under Malcolm Turnbull’s persuasion) to accepting the reality of climate change. This monumental piece of legislation recognised that excessive irrigated agriculture (‘hydro-denialism’ Beasley calls it) was destroying the environment. It called for a Basin Plan, based on the best available scientific knowledge, to promote the wise use of water resources and to set a long-term sustainable level of take.
The ‘Fish Genocide’ story comes toward the end of a litany of years of mismanagement, corruption and special, behind-closed-doors government deals with irrigators – in this case, the NSW government and the Murray Darling Basin Authority agreeing to the rapid emptying of the Menindee Lakes. The result was the loss of 23,000 hectatres of breeding habitat for native fish. Beasley deftly weaves into his narrative references to Elvis Costello (‘Pump it Up’) and Shakespeare (‘A Plague on Both Your Houses’). But he saves his best analogy for the fish story:
“Jesus would be thoroughly pissed off by the Menindee Lakes supply measure. You might recall he once had two fish, but fed 5000 people with them. The Menindee Lakes supply measure is a Basin Plan supply measure that is kind of the opposite. With this project, the NSW government, MDBA etc; are taking about five million fish and turning them into two. Through a process of murder.
If you want to understand what went wrong with the mismanagement of our precious water system and the ecological catastrophe we are facing – even BEFORE taking into account what rising global temperatures will do to us in the coming decades – you must read this book. But it was the even bigger picture which interested me most. Beasley notes , with characteristic ferocity, that the mismanagement, lies and outright corruption over water are part of a devolution in Australian public life since 2001 when the Howard government sent SAS officers onto the Norwegian ship Tampa to tell the 433 refugees sheltering on board that Australia would not tolerate “queue jumpers”. Now, we live in a country where reason and science are disrespected, human decency is tossed aside, the truth and the environment come second to winning political advantage and the people who will be most affected by the death of the Murray-Darling (those living in the basin) will be treated like the canaries in the coal mine of climate change.
“How about making plans for (the certainty of a future with less water) instead of pulling publicity stunts like making Barnaby Joyce the Drought Envoy or continuing with a pathetic, non-science-based culture war about whether half a dozen f&*kwits or 50,000 of the world’s best scientists are right about global warming? The Coalition’s lack of action on climate change over the last decade, and the reduction in water that will mean for the basin, is negligent to a level that is scandalous.”
In the final chapter (‘My Basin Plan’), Beasley suggests that John Lennon would have made an excellent CEO of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, based on the lyrics to his song ‘Gimme Some Truth’. He says the song reflected the mood he was in after finishing his work on the Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission. It also describes my mood after reading his incendiary, angry and vitally important book. Get the truth. Read it.
(Please, also seek out Margaret Simons’ Quarterly Essay on this subject)
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