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“Clever compromise is the only hope.
“When Mark Twain decreed “whisky is for drinking, water is for fighting over”, he might as well have been talking about the Murray-Darling river system.
“He was supposedly referring to the 1850s California gold rush and the need for water to sustain burgeoning mining settlements. But in Australia, the famous author who during a visit in 1896 likened the Murray to the Mississippi where he grew up, was more prescient than he could have realised.
“For 114 years, since Twain’s visit and the coincidental collapse of the Murray’s first irrigation settlement scheme, at Mildura, vested interests have been doing just what he advocated: fighting over water, without resolution.
“As the furore over the Murray-Darling Basin Authority’s guidelines for a basin-wide water plan have highlighted, an agreement cannot be reached on how the water resources of the 1 million square- kilometre Murray-Darling river system, of which the Murray is the most important part, should be managed. Nor is accord likely to occur while the protagonists – irrigators, farm groups and river townspeople on one side and environmentalists, scientists and bureaucrats on the other – are ideologically so far apart.”
Read more: Sydney Morning Herald
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