Kenneth Davidson in The Age puts his finger on the Brack/Brumby Government's long resistance to the national Murray-Darling Basin plan. In doing so he discloses the way that the politics of the Murray continues to be about protecting the irrigation industry at the expense of the environment.

He states the reality that Adelaide and South Australia's main provincial towns depend on the Murray for most of their water ( a proposed desalination plant will lessen this dependence for Adelaide) and then adds:

Without flushing rains or 200 gigalitres from the Dartmouth Dam on the upper Murray, the water that Adelaide pipes from the Murray below Murray Bridge will be undrinkable. But if the water that is available from Dartmouth is allocated to the environment, it won't be available to irrigators further up the Murray.This explains why the Brumby Government delayed for 15 months signing up to the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, which is supposed to give ultimate authority for allocation of the water to federal Water Minister Penny Wong. Either the system must get well above average rainfall during the coming winter, sufficient to flush out the lower reaches of the Murray, supply Adelaide and keep irrigators alive or Wong will have to choose between Mildura and Adelaide as to who gets the 200 gigalitres of water held in reserve in the Dartmouth dam.

There you have it. The irrigation industry is fighting to to retain use of all rural water in the name of development, without getting smart and thinking about ways to do more with less. The Brumby government is captured by the irrigation industry, which requires substantial subsidies and protection to survive.

Davidson says that there is no real choice. If the southern river Murray system dies, Mildura and the other irrigators along the southern Murray will die as well. If salt and sulphuric acid damage is limited to Lake Alexandrina, the irrigators and the towns along the southern Murray can be kept on life support until there is a permanent increase in the flow of water into the Murray system.

As Davidson points out the irrigator's argument is that extra water can be be found by spending federal and state billions upgrading irrigation infrastructure to reduce leakage and evaporation, withe the irrigators taking half of the water saved. Since the water leakage finds its way into the river system Fixing leaks is classic robbing the river to save the irrigators. The only money the authority should spend is on the compulsory acquisition of licences within the framework of a sustainable cap on water extraction.