NSW towns facing “water emergency”

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By Leith van Onselen

I reported yesterday how Sydney’s water storages are “dropping faster than they have in decades”, despite falling average water use, which comes as the city’s population continues to balloon on the back of mass immigration:

Today, The Guardian reports that NSW towns including Dubbo and Tamworth are facing a water emergency within months:

Towns in western and central New South Wales, including Dubbo, Nyngan, Cobar, Walgett and Tamworth, are facing a crisis in their water supplies within a few months unless it rains, prompting emergency planning by water authorities.

And on properties throughout the Murray-Darling basin, irrigators are bracing for their water entitlements to be reduced to around 10% of their usual allocations, which will severely constrain agricultural production.

A week before the election, the Murray–Darling Basin Authority issued a “sobering assessment” of the outlook for the Murray Darling river system in the communique from its monthly meeting.

“Since July 2018, inflows to the River Murray System have remained in the driest 7% of records, the head of River Management,” the executive director, Andrew Reynolds, told the board.

In other words, in the 114 years of record-keeping, this result is among the nine or 10 driest years. And it’s getting worse.

For some towns the crisis will hit within one to three months, depending on whether there is any rainfall. For others it will be little longer.

The Burrendong Dam which services towns like Dubbo, Cobar and Nyngan on the Macquarie river, is at 5.9% and even with stringent water restrictions, will be empty within 12 months on current trajectory. The problem is there is no ground water that can be accessed by bores, so authorities are exploring the option of building emergency pipelines…

With little rainfall and very dry soils, almost no water is reaching the river system, and inland dams are falling. Unless spring rains fall, the Murray Darling basin will be in the grip of a crisis…

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It’s a similar situation in regional QLD:

…nearly two-thirds of the state remains officially in drought.

Agriculture Minister Mark Furner said on Wednesday morning he had accepted the recommendations of local drought committees to drought declare five additional shires and extend or issue part drought declarations in four others…

It means that 65.2 per cent of Queensland is officially still in drought at the end of the summer wet season.

The Morrison Government last year launched a ‘migrants to the bush’ decentralisation policy, which aims to shift migrants away from the major cities to the regions. As usual, no consideration was given as to where the additional water supply needed to cope with substantially larger populations would come from.

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Remember, much of Regional Australia is located far away from the ocean, meaning that water desalination is not available. This makes decentralisation an impossible pipe dream.

With water supplies in both the cities and regions under immense pressure, where is the sense in addition a Canberra-worth of people to Australia’s population every year via mass immigration? Where will the water come from and how much will it cost?

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Water scarcity remains the elephant in the room of the population debate, and the key issue that Australia’s mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ boosters deliberately ignore, including The Guardian.

It’s time to hold these shills to account.

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About the author
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.