During my 20 years of involvment in the political process, I've regularly handed out how-to-vote cards at polling booths on election days. Invariably, the two to four hours of standing in the sun or rain are made not just tolerable but downright enjoyable thanks to the people representing other political parties (most are volunteers, although some are paid) who also hand out HTV cards. It is normal for all of us volunteers to engage in deep and meaningful dialogue about the strengths and weaknesses, hopes and deficiencies of their respective leaders or politicians or parties as a whole.
What amazed me when I first started handing out HTV cards is the commonality of beliefs and values shared by the multitude of people representing this wide spectrum of political parties and political thought. Virtually no matter who I spoke with, we agreed on 80 to 90% of topics that we chose to discuss. My personal view is that this mutual agreement shows how homogeneous our Australian population generally is. In turn, this provides one of the foundation stones on which one of the world's most successful democracies has been based since 1901.
In March 2006, Norman Geras, professor of politics at Manchester University UK produced a political manifesto. He and his supporters are undeniably socialists: they support many socialist philosophies and principles. Yet Geras and the manifesto emphasise support for America and much of what it stands for. He is bitterly critical of his left-leaning colleagues who are unthinkingly anti-American.
I've read the Manifesto and, while I reject some of its more socialist statements, nonetheless it contains much that most people committed to the principles of operation of parliamentary democracies would unhesitatingly support. It's reproduced below and more details are available from http://eustonmanifesto.org .
The Euston Manifesto
Wednesday, 29 March 2006
A. Preamble
We are democrats and progressives. We propose here a fresh political alignment. Many of us belong to the Left, but the principles that we set out are not exclusive. We reach out, rather, beyond the socialist Left towards egalitarian liberals and others of unambiguous democratic commitment. Indeed, the reconfiguration of progressive opinion that we aim for involves drawing a line between the forces of the Left that remain true to its authentic values, and currents that have lately shown themselves rather too flexible about these values. It involves making common cause with genuine democrats, whether socialist or not.
The present initiative has its roots in and has found a constituency through the Internet, especially the "blogosphere". It is our perception, however, that this constituency is under-represented elsewhere — in much of the media and the other forums of contemporary political life.
The broad statement of principles that follows is a declaration of intent. It inaugurates a new Website, which will serve as a resource for the current of opinion it hopes to represent and the several foundation blogs and other sites that are behind this call for a progressive realignment.
B. Statement of principles
1) For democracy.
We are committed to democratic norms, procedures and structures — freedom of opinion and assembly, free elections, the separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers, and the separation of state and religion. We value the traditions and institutions, the legacy of good governance, of those countries in which liberal, pluralist democracies have taken hold.
2) No apology for tyranny.
We decline to make excuses for, to indulgently "understand", reactionary regimes and movements for which democracy is a hated enemy — regimes that oppress their own peoples and movements that aspire to do so. We draw a firm line between ourselves and those left-liberal voices today quick to offer an apologetic explanation for such political forces.
3) Human rights for all.
We hold the fundamental human rights codified in the Universal Declaration to be precisely universal, and binding on all states and political movements, indeed on everyone. Violations of these rights are equally to be condemned whoever is responsible for them and regardless of cultural context. We reject the double standards with which much self-proclaimed progressive opinion now operates, finding lesser (though all too real) violations of human rights which are closer to home, or are the responsibility of certain disfavoured governments, more deplorable than other violations that are flagrantly worse. We reject, also, the cultural relativist view according to which these basic human rights are not appropriate for certain nations or peoples.
4) Equality.
We espouse a generally egalitarian politics. We look towards progress in relations between the sexes (until full gender equality is achieved), between different ethnic communities, between those of various religious affiliations and those of none, and between people of diverse sexual orientations — as well as towards broader social and economic equality all round. We leave open, as something on which there are differences of viewpoint amongst us, the question of the best economic forms of this broader equality, but we support the interests of working people everywhere and their right to organize in defence of those interests. Democratic trade unions are the bedrock organizations for the defence of workers' interests and are one of the most important forces for human rights, democracy-promotion and egalitarian internationalism. Labour rights are human rights. The universal adoption of the International Labour Organization Conventions — now routinely ignored by governments across the globe — is a priority for us. We are committed to the defence of the rights of children, and to protecting people from sexual slavery and all forms of institutionalized abuse.
5) Development for freedom.
We stand for global economic development-as-freedom and against structural economic oppression and environmental degradation. The current expansion of global markets and free trade must not be allowed to serve the narrow interests of a small corporate elite in the developed world and their associates in developing countries. The benefits of large-scale development through the expansion of global trade ought to be distributed as widely as possible in order to serve the social and economic interests of workers, farmers and consumers in all countries. Globalization must mean global social integration and a commitment to social justice. We support radical reform of the major institutions of global economic governance (World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, World Bank) to achieve these goals, and we support fair trade, more aid, debt cancellation and the campaign to Make Poverty History. Development can bring growth in life-expectancy and in the enjoyment of life, easing burdensome labour and shortening the working day. It can bring freedom to youth, possibilities of exploration to those of middle years, and security to old age. It enlarges horizons and the opportunities for travel, and helps make strangers into friends. Global development must be pursued in a manner consistent with environmentally sustainable growth.
6) Opposing anti-Americanism.
We reject without qualification the anti-Americanism now infecting so much left-liberal (and some conservative) thinking. This is not a case of seeing the US as a model society. We are aware of its problems and failings. But these are shared in some degree with all of the developed world. The United States of America is a great country and nation. It is the home of a strong democracy with a noble tradition behind it and lasting constitutional and social achievements to its name. Its peoples have produced a vibrant culture that is the pleasure, the source-book and the envy of millions. That US foreign policy has often opposed progressive movements and governments and supported regressive and authoritarian ones does not justify generalized prejudice against either the country or its people.
7) For a two-state solution.
We recognize the right of both the Israeli and the Palestinian peoples to self-determination within the framework of a two-state solution. There can be no reasonable resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that subordinates or eliminates the legitimate rights and interests of one of the sides to the dispute.
8) Against racism.
For liberals and the Left, anti-racism is axiomatic. We oppose every form of racist prejudice and behaviour: the anti-immigrant racism of the far Right; tribal and inter-ethnic racism; racism against people from Muslim countries and those descended from them, particularly under cover of the War on Terror. The recent resurgence of another, very old form of racism, anti-Semitism, is not yet properly acknowledged in left and liberal circles. Some exploit the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people under occupation by Israel, and conceal prejudice against the Jewish people behind the formula of "anti-Zionism". We oppose this type of racism too, as should go without saying.
9) United against terror.
We are opposed to all forms of terrorism. The deliberate targeting of civilians is a crime under international law and all recognized codes of warfare, and it cannot be justified by the argument that it is done in a cause that is just. Terrorism inspired by Islamist ideology is widespread today. It threatens democratic values and the lives and freedoms of people in many countries. This does not justify prejudice against Muslims, who are its main victims, and amongst whom are to be found some of its most courageous opponents. But, like all terrorism, it is a menace that has to be fought, and not excused.
10) A new internationalism.
We stand for an internationalist politics and the reform of international law — in the interests of global democratization and global development. Humanitarian intervention, when necessary, is not a matter of disregarding sovereignty, but of lodging this properly within the "common life" of all peoples. If in some minimal sense a state protects the common life of its people (if it does not torture, murder and slaughter its own civilians, and meets their most basic needs of life), then its sovereignty is to be respected. But if the state itself violates this common life in appalling ways, its claim to sovereignty is forfeited and there is a duty upon the international community of intervention and rescue. Once a threshold of inhumanity has been crossed, there is a "responsibility to protect".
11) A critical openness.
Drawing the lesson of the disastrous history of left apologetics over the crimes of Stalinism and Maoism, as well as more recent exercises in the same vein (some of the reaction to the crimes of 9/11, the excuse-making for suicide-terrorism, the disgraceful alliances lately set up inside the "anti-war" movement with illiberal theocrats), we reject the notion that there are no opponents on the Left. We reject, similarly, the idea that there can be no opening to ideas and individuals to our right. Leftists who make common cause with, or excuses for, anti-democratic forces should be criticized in clear and forthright terms. Conversely, we pay attention to liberal and conservative voices and ideas if they contribute to strengthening democratic norms and practices and to the battle for human progress.
12) Historical truth.
In connecting to the original humanistic impulses of the movement for human progress, we emphasize the duty which genuine democrats must have to respect for the historical truth. Not only fascists, Holocaust-deniers and the like have tried to obscure the historical record. One of the tragedies of the Left is that its own reputation was massively compromised in this regard by the international Communist movement, and some have still not learned that lesson. Political honesty and straightforwardness are a primary obligation for us.
13) Freedom of ideas.
We uphold the traditional liberal freedom of ideas. It is more than ever necessary today to affirm that, within the usual constraints against defamation, libel and incitement to violence, people must be at liberty to criticize ideas — even whole bodies of ideas — to which others are committed. This includes the freedom to criticize religion: particular religions and religion in general. Respect for others does not entail remaining silent about their beliefs where these are judged to be wanting.
14) Open source.
As part of the free exchange of ideas and in the interests of encouraging joint intellectual endeavour, we support the open development of software and other creative works and oppose the patenting of genes, algorithms and facts of nature. We oppose the retrospective extension of intellectual property laws in the financial interests of corporate copyright holders. The open source model is collective and competitive, collaborative and meritocratic. It is not a theoretical ideal, but a tested reality that has created common goods whose power and robustness have been proved over decades. Indeed, the best collegiate ideals of the scientific research community that gave rise to open source collaboration have served human progress for centuries.
15) A precious heritage.
We reject fear of modernity, fear of freedom, irrationalism, the subordination of women; and we reaffirm the ideas that inspired the great rallying calls of the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century: liberty, equality and solidarity; human rights; the pursuit of happiness. These inspirational ideas were made the inheritance of us all by the social-democratic, egalitarian, feminist and anti-colonial transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — by the pursuit of social justice, the provision of welfare, the brotherhood and sisterhood of all men and women. None should be left out, none left behind. We are partisans of these values. But we are not zealots. For we embrace also the values of free enquiry, open dialogue and creative doubt, of care in judgement and a sense of the intractabilities of the world. We stand against all claims to a total — unquestionable or unquestioning — truth.
C. Elaborations
We defend liberal and pluralist democracies against all who make light of the differences between them and totalitarian and other tyrannical regimes. But these democracies have their own deficits and shortcomings. The battle for the development of more democratic institutions and procedures, for further empowering those without influence, without a voice or with few political resources, is a permanent part of the agenda of the Left.
The social and economic foundations on which the liberal democracies have developed are marked by deep inequalities of wealth and income and the survival of unmerited privilege. In turn, global inequalities are a scandal to the moral conscience of humankind. Millions live in terrible poverty. Week in, week out, tens of thousands of people — children in particular — die from preventable illnesses. Inequalities of wealth, both as between individuals and between countries, distribute life chances in an arbitrary way.
These things are a standing indictment against the international community. We on the Left, in keeping with our own traditions, fight for justice and a decent life for everyone. In keeping with those same traditions, we have also to fight against powerful forces of totalitarian-style tyranny that are on the march again. Both battles have to be fought simultaneously. One should not be sacrificed for the other.
We repudiate the way of thinking according to which the events of September 11, 2001 were America's deserved comeuppance, or "understandable" in the light of legitimate grievances resulting from US foreign policy. What was done on that day was an act of mass murder, motivated by odious fundamentalist beliefs and redeemed by nothing whatsoever. No evasive formula can hide that.
The founding supporters of this statement took different views on the military intervention in Iraq, both for and against. We recognize that it was possible reasonably to disagree about the justification for the intervention, the manner in which it was carried through, the planning (or lack of it) for the aftermath, and the prospects for the successful implementation of democratic change. We are, however, united in our view about the reactionary, semi-fascist and murderous character of the Baathist regime in Iraq, and we recognize its overthrow as a liberation of the Iraqi people. We are also united in the view that, since the day on which this occurred, the proper concern of genuine liberals and members of the Left should have been the battle to put in place in Iraq a democratic political order and to rebuild the country's infrastructure, to create after decades of the most brutal oppression a life for Iraqis which those living in democratic countries take for granted — rather than picking through the rubble of the arguments over intervention.
This opposes us not only to those on the Left who have actively spoken in support of the gangs of jihadist and Baathist thugs of the Iraqi so-called resistance, but also to others who manage to find a way of situating themselves between such forces and those trying to bring a new democratic life to the country. We have no truck, either, with the tendency to pay lip service to these ends, while devoting most of one's energy to criticism of political opponents at home (supposedly responsible for every difficulty in Iraq), and observing a tactful silence or near silence about the ugly forces of the Iraqi "insurgency". The many left opponents of regime change in Iraq who have been unable to understand the considerations that led others on the Left to support it, dishing out anathema and excommunication, more lately demanding apology or repentance, betray the democratic values they profess.
Vandalism against synagogues and Jewish graveyards and attacks on Jews themselves are on the increase in Europe. "Anti-Zionism" has now developed to a point where supposed organizations of the Left are willing to entertain openly anti-Semitic speakers and to form alliances with anti-Semitic groups. Amongst educated and affluent people are to be found individuals unembarrassed to claim that the Iraq war was fought on behalf of Jewish interests, or to make other "polite" and subtle allusions to the harmful effect of Jewish influence in international or national politics — remarks of a kind that for more than fifty years after the Holocaust no one would have been able to make without publicly disgracing themselves. We stand against all variants of such bigotry.
The violation of basic human rights standards at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo, and by the practice of "rendition", must be roundly condemned for what it is: a departure from universal principles, for the establishment of which the democratic countries themselves, and in particular the United States of America, bear the greater part of the historical credit. But we reject the double standards by which too many on the Left today treat as the worst violations of human rights those perpetrated by the democracies, while being either silent or more muted about infractions that outstrip these by far. This tendency has reached the point that officials speaking for Amnesty International, an organization which commands enormous, worldwide respect because of its invaluable work over several decades, can now make grotesque public comparison of Guantanamo with the Gulag, can assert that the legislative measures taken by the US and other liberal democracies in the War on Terror constitute a greater attack on human rights principles and values than anything we have seen in the last 50 years, and be defended for doing so by certain left and liberal voices.
D. Conclusion
It is vitally important for the future of progressive politics that people of liberal, egalitarian and internationalist outlook should now speak clearly. We must define ourselves against those for whom the entire progressive-democratic agenda has been subordinated to a blanket and simplistic "anti-imperialism" and/or hostility to the current US administration. The values and goals which properly make up that agenda — the values of democracy, human rights, the continuing battle against unjustified privilege and power, solidarity with peoples fighting against tyranny and oppression — are what most enduringly define the shape of any Left worth belonging to.
Friday, June 30, 2006
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
AUSTRALIA'S SALINITY CRISIS. WHAT CRISIS?
On May 28, Channel 9's Sunday program ran a controversial article on salinity. The article questioned much existing orthodoxy of what scientists tell us are the problems and solutions to our salinity problem. Although it is less relevant to WA than to the Murray-Darling Basin, I've reproduced much of the article below as it makes interesting reading. In particular, some of you may remember a recent two part ABC Australian Story on Peter Andrews, a NSW farmer with very unorthodox views on managing water on farms. I was able to arrange for Peter to visit the Busselton area in the mid 1990s and his message, while not universally applicable, is nonetheless scientifically sound and, like this article on salinity, deserves greater airing.
AUSTRALIA'S SALINITY CRISIS: WHAT CRISIS?
May 28, 2006
Reporter : Ross Coulthart
Producer : Nick Farrow
Pyramid Hill farmer Ross Hercott. It's an apocalyptic story of environmental disaster we all know so well. The Murray Darling basin is being poisoned by salt. Adelaide's water supply is threatened, along with some of our most productive farmland — and our beautiful rivers are dying. It's a frightening scenario. But is it true? This week on Sunday, reporter Ross Coulthart takes a look at the real threat posed by salinity — and finds things are going badly wrong in public science.
As Coulthart reveals, some of the claims being used to support calls for billions of dollars to be spent on fixing a "looming salinity crisis" are simply not true. Salinity is a problem. But it seems nowhere as bad as we've been told by environmental groups, government departments and many in the media.
Claims that an area of land twice the size of Tasmania is under threat are false. The reality is a fraction of that. Even top scientists now admit the predictions of a disaster have been exaggerated.
They say this may be because the theory about what causes salinity in non-irrigation areas is flawed.
Worse still, scientists suggest a cheaper and easier solution for salinity problems is being ignored — for very unscientific reasons.
Sunday reporter Ross Coulthart: "It's a disaster for science. It's a disaster for farmers," one former CSIRO scientist tells Sunday.
Taxpayers have now given Government scientists billions of dollars to spend on efforts to understand and tackle salinity. But how solid is the science behind it?
TRANSCRIPT:
REPORTER ROSS COULTHART: It is an apocalyptic tale that is near Biblical in proportion. Here in Adelaide the people are told their drinking water is being poisoned by salt. Australia's most productive farmland is slowly drowning in a saline flood, the beautiful Murray River is dying. For many in public science, environmental groups and the media, this looming catastrophe has long been an article of almost religious faith. But what if much of this is nothing more than misguided pessimism, or as one eminent scientist describes it: a Gothic horror story?
DR JOHN PASSIOURA, honorary research fellow, CSIRO Plant Industry: Gothic horror stories appeal to people. I don’t think it’s as serious as we came to believe in the late nineties.
ROSS COULTHART: So can you give me a yes or no on whether the river system is dying?
PROFESSOR PETER CULLEN, director, Land and Water Australia: I don’t think the river is dying at the moment
ROSS COULTHART: We’ve already spent billions of dollars on the fix but in this month’s Budget, another half billion dollars was committed to fixing the Murray, salinity levels a major priority. You’ll also hear the evidence suggesting that something is very wrong in public science in Australia. Are we wasting billions of dollars on a dubious fix for salinity?
Picnic on the bed of the Murray
GEORGE WARNE, GM Murray Irrigation: The river is certainly not in crisis with salinity and the stories they’re talking about, the stories of doom and gloom, we think are grossly overstated.
ROSS COULTHART: We were being told that the Murray Darling river system is sick and in danger of dying. Is it?
DR JOHN PASSIOURA: I don’t believe so. If you talk to the people who are in the thriving communities along the Murray they would hotly dispute that.
ROBERT GOURLAY, MD Environmental Research Information Consortium: We are literally pouring this money down the drains they are creating.
ROSS COULTHART: Today you’ll hear how a growing number of scientists and farmers are now disputing the whole theory that supposedly explains how salinity occurs. They believe the orthodox explanation is just plain wrong.
DR BRIAN TUNSTALL, former CSIRO research scientist: It’s a disaster for science. It’s a disaster for farmers.
ROSS COULTHART: And here’s a few things you likely haven’t heard: Tree planting can actually make salinity worse. That, despite panicked claims to the contrary, this natural icon is not under threat of extinction. And the curious link between salinity and this famous art icon, ‘Blue Poles’.
For years we’ve been told that this river system is sick and in danger of dying if nothing’s done to cut the rising levels of salt that our bad land practices are dumping into it. But the river tells a different story. Here near Morgan on the Murray River is where Adelaide takes in its water supply so because of that it’s long been used as a benchmark indicator to measure for the salinity along the entire Murray Darling River system. And what it shows is really quite dramatic. That rather than increasing, salinity levels over the past twenty years have dramatically decreased. In fact they’re back to pre-World War Two levels. So what’s going on? Has the multibillion dollar fix for our river system been driven not by good science but by emotion and politics?
DR JENNIFER MAROHASY, Institute of Public Affairs: We don’t have a salinity crisis. We have an honesty crisis rather than a salinity crisis.
ROSS COULTHART: Gloria Griffiths has been fishing along the Murray River and its tributaries for the last quarter century. She and her Deniliquin Fishing Club colleagues are more than a little amused at the bleak claims that the river system is in crisis, and especially the notion that their beloved Murray Cod is in danger of extinction.
GLORIA GRIFFITHS: Each time you go out you pull in these beautiful cod you can see how healthy they are.
ROSS COULTHART: So what do you think when you read these newspapers from the big cities and they’re all saying the river’s dying and there’s no Murray Cod any more.
GLORIA GRIFFITHS: That they should get out and have a decent look themselves.
ROSS COULTHART: And on cue, Gloria caught us this equally glorious Murray Cod.
GLORIA GRIFFITHS: He looks pretty healthy. Yes actually this is the second one I’ve caught here today
ROSS COULTHART: Let’s put him back in before he gets upset. No-one denies an increase in the river flows would be desirable but as environmental scientist Dr Jennifer Marohasy from the Institute of Public Affairs argues, the notion that we’ve changed the Murray River from a mighty constantly-flowing watercourse to a trickle is challenged by early photos showing the river bed bone dry. Is this a sick river?
DR JENNIFER MAROHASY: No, it’s a bit murky but that’s how it is naturally.
ROSS COULTHART: And as for those who think the river should be returned to its natural state, think again. As Professor Peter Cullen acknowledges, we may now be trying to reduce salt in the river to artificially low levels. Do we know at all what the natural saline level was in the river system before we came along?
PROFESSOR PETER CULLEN: Well I don’t, but my expectation would be that from time to time it was very saline. But we’ve put human communities along that Murray who are taking water for drinking and irrigating and they have therefore pushed to manage and change that river so that it is usable by those communities.
ROSS COULTHART: But aren’t we putting an expectation on that river system that is far beyond what is naturally sustainable?
PROFESSOR PETER CULLEN: We are changing the river beyond what it was naturally. Naturally from time to time there would be no flow and it’d be salty.
ROSS COULTHART: As for the Murray cod, Dr Marohasy believes the grim predictions came about because the scientists who went looking for them were lousy fishermen.
DR JENNIFER MAROHASY: They went out and they surveyed for a couple of years and they apparently spent two million dollars on fishing gear and they concluded that there was no Murray cod in this region. And the fishermen were up in arms. They said: ‘But we’re catching Murray Cod, there’s Murray Cod in the river!’ What I did do was actually look at the commercial harvest for this region for those years and it was actually 26 tonnes of Murray Cod.
ROSS COULTHART: Support for Marohasy’s claims too from Professor Peter Cullen.
PROFESSOR PETER CULLEN: I think one can be confident we will be able to maintain Murray Cod populations.
ROSS COULTHART: Marohasy argues that a similar failure by government scientists lies behind the gloomy predictions that, unless governments commit billions of dollars, the Murray river system faces a salinity catastrophe. She analysed the official data, showing that salt levels had halved over the past 20 years near Morgan here in South Australia and it’s this data that has historically been used as a bench-mark for the river’s salinity health.
DR JENNIFER MAROHASY: They were back at what they were pre-World War Two levels. But everybody, at the same time I was talking to those guys and they were saying ‘yeah, you’re right salt levels have halved’, we had the front page of the CSIRO Land and Water website saying that salt levels ware increasing. But the data actually showed that salt levels had halved.
ROSS COULTHART: The levels of salinity at Morgan show there’s been an appreciable decrease in salinity levels in the entire MD River system over the past 20 years.
WENDY CRAIK, CEO, MDBC: Correct. And why? One, because we’ve been putting into place our salt interception schemes and they’ve been pumping salt out. And secondly, and a really important issue in recent years is the drought.
ROSS COULTHART: So why then, as benchmark salinity levels are the lowest in twenty years was the CSIRO still talking up the so-called ‘rising’ salinity problem on its website?. In June 2003, it said:
VOICEOVER READ: Salt levels are rising in almost all of the Basin’s rivers.
ROSS COULTHART: When these alarming claims were challenged by Marohasy, the CSIRO quietly dropped this sentence from its website. So why would scientists do this? Why make a representation that there is a huge problem when there isn’t?
DR JENNIFER MAROHASY: Maybe they were being driven by some environmental campaigning. And maybe they were concerned about continued funding if they’d fixed the problem.
ROSS COULTHART: For at least 30 years, the official explanation for salinity has been that cutting down trees and other land clearing is making groundwater rise, pushing salt up to root zones or the surface, killing plants. This explanation, called the Rising Regional Groundwater Theory, is used in all the models to predict salinity across Australia. But it’s never been proven. It’s still just a theory. Yet billions of dollars have been spent trying to fix salinity problems using solutions based on it.
Dr Maarten Stapper is a principal research scientist with the CSIRO. It’s a measure of the sensitivity of the debate that he insisted we emphasise he is speaking in a private capacity. For he is one of the dissident scientists who believes there’s something very wrong with the whole rising groundwater theory and the alarming predictions it makes. Are you a believer in the rising groundwater theory as an explanation for salinity?
DR MAARTEN STAPPER, principal research scientist, CSIRO: No. Not a full verdict on that it’s true for every situation.
ROSS COULTHART: Honorary CSIRO Research Fellow Dr John Passioura — who is also speaking in a private capacity — is a true believer in the theory but even he acknowledges it has its problems. That’s the theory that’s very much driven our scientific understanding of salinity for the last 20 or 30 years — right?
DR JOHN PASSIOURA: Yes
ROSS COULTHART: Is it right?
DR JOHN PASSIOURA: I believe the big picture is right. The difficulty is that when you have to start looking at the action on ground, you have to start dealing with the little picture.
ROSS COULTHART: Meanwhile former CSIRO research scientist Dr Brian Tunstall is happy to say he thinks the Rising Groundwater Theory is largely bunkum.
DR BRIAN TUNSTALL: It was never right and if you look at the reviews and if you look at the literature overseas, it’s not right. It’s unique to Australia.
ROSS COULTHART: Why does it matter though?
DR BRIAN TUNSTALL: Because of the wastage of money. Because we’re not fixing the problem. We’re spending money on it and we’re penalising farmers.
ROSS COULTHART: If there are villains in this tale of horror they’re the farmers and especially the irrigators. Popular wisdom has it that irrigation farming is doomed, the irrigators accused of greedily sloshing vast amounts of river water on to their farms, which in turn is washing mountains of salt out of the soil back into the rivers. It’s a perception that Deniliquin irrigation rice farmer Adam Wettenhall says is totally false.
ADAM WETTENHALL, Deniliquin irrigation rice farmer: I’d say to the doomsayers ‘instead of staying inside your ivory towers in Sydney and Melbourne and other cities, come out to the country and have a look.’
ROSS COULTHART: A decade ago the scientists were predicting that what’s happening here in this field today just wouldn’t be possible. This was a salinity hotspot. Back then, the groundwater was just below the surface and in danger of rising and wiping out this area completely with salinity. Ten years on, not only is the watertable now far lower, see for yourself, it’s a bumper harvest. One of the best ever. What did they say was going to happen here?
ADAM WETTENHALL: Basically if nothing was done about it we wouldn’t be here. And the irrigation, the whole irrigation in the area, the bulk of it would have gone under.
ROSS COULTHART: You proved them wrong
ADAM WETTENHALL: Yes definitely.
ROSS COULTHART: Official government predictions using computer modelling based on that Rising Groundwater Theory said that much of the irrigation farmland along the Murray was headed for disaster, as Murray Irrigation’s General Manager George Warne explains.
GEORGE WARNE: We were told that unless we took radical action more than a third of our farmland would basically be under water, that is, under saline water. And even if we took radical action a quarter of our farmland would be highly at risk.
ROSS COULTHART: By when?
GEORGE WARNE: By now. By 2006, 2010 and certainly by 2020 over 300,000 hectares would be suffering from high watertables.
ROSS COULTHART: That was a disaster being projected
GEORGE WARNE: That is a disaster scenario. And it certainly hasn’t been told out in what’s happened since
ROSS COULTHART: As Adam Wettenhall showed us, on a site near his farm, salinity can kill good farmland. And in irrigation farming, if too much water’s put on the land, salt can rise up to the surface with disastrous results. On their farm, Adam and Rob carefully monitor their water use and groundwater levels. Both feel it’s unfair that irrigators like them are still being demonised for washing salt into the river.
ADAM WETTENHALL: We can recycle every bit of water on the farm we’ve also planted an extensive amount of trees, planted crops like lucerne, deep rooted plants that suck up the water table and virtually treated water that comes onto our farm as liquid gold. We don’t let anything go below the root zone of the plant therefore we are using the water to its maximum ability.
ROSS COULTHART: So how much salt are you washing into the Murray River?
ADAM WETTENHALL: None. No water leaves this farm. What water comes onto this farm stays on this farm and we recycle every little bit.
ROSS COULTHART: From up above, it’s easy to see why the Murray-Darling river basin is this country’s foodbowl. With the irrigation industry’s share of river flows still a hot political issue, Murray Irrigation’s chairman Stewart Ellis, argues the irrigation farmers at least deserve credit for proving the doomsayers wrong on salinity.
STEWART ELLIS, Chairman Murray Irrigation: The predictions as you say are just so far out. The picture they were painting just hasn’t eventuated.
GEORGE WARNE: It hasn’t happened and we have got an area now of less than four farms out of a total of two and a half thousand that are affected by high water tables. It just seems that somewhere the science got it seriously wrong.
ROSS COULTHART: If science got its predictions so badly wrong on the salinity risks in irrigation areas, then what about dry-land salinity, where salt appears on land even though it’s not being flooded with irrigation water? Computer models based on the Rising Groundwater Theory predict that, by 2050, farmland more than twice the area of Tasmania could be wiped out by salinity. It’s scary and expensive. But while salinity is a problem is such extreme pessimism justified? In part two of our story you’ll hear from the dissidents who believe the real explanation for salinity and a possible cheap fix - has been suppressed.
ROBERT GOURLAY: There’s too much at stake in terms of the credibility of public science to admit to a major error in this area of science
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: People just don’t want to talk about those issues. They don’t want to get stirred into thinking that there is another way.
ROSS COULTHART: And yet, as a scientist, you’ve seen it work?
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Yes
ROSS COULTHART: You’re convinced it works
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Yes.
ROSS COULTHART: Courtesy of this month’s Budget, the Murray Darling Basin Commission has another half a billion dollars of taxpayers? money to spend. Much of it will be going on expensive schemes to stop salt reaching the rivers similar to this one in northern Victoria near Pyramid Hill. This is Pyramid Salt a private company funded with $13 million dollars of taxpayers’ money. Here they pump saline water from underground and harvest the salt it contains, for sale.
Does it make you laugh that people in Sydney are paying six bucks for a 250g box of salt that you blokes are desperate to throw away in this part of the world?
GAVIN PRIVETT, project manager, Pyramid Salt: No it doesn’t make me laugh. Actually, it makes me cry because the in-between guy is getting all the money.
ROSS COULTHART: But it’s only here at all because of an environmental blunder years ago, when attempts to lower the watertable under here ended up poisoning the Murray River.
GAVIN PRIVETT: Initially, what they looked at, they started putting drainage systems and then the problem was they realised they were transferring the problem from one place to another. They put in drainage systems. The next thing it was going into the Murray.
WENDY CRAIK: That’s true and I think that’s a fact of life, that science moves on, that people learn more about systems, learn more about what they should and shouldn’t do.
ROSS COULTHART: So it’s a multi-million dollar patch-up for a past mistake and it’s not a long-term solution for salinity.
GAVIN PRIVETT: You can’t put projects like this all over the place. One, people don’t eat enough salt. It’s a low value commodity. It’s not the answer to the problem. What we’re doing is we’re just intervening and I believe it’s probably as a short-term fix which we’re probably looking to buy some time.
ROSS COULTHART: Nearly 170 years ago, the explorer Major Thomas Mitchell climbed to the top of Pyramid Hill. He proclaimed the then rich farming country here in northern Victoria ‘Australia Felix’ or ‘Blessed Australia,’ perhaps an origin of the expression ‘the Lucky Country’.
He said this is one of the best pieces of land I have ever seen on the face of the earth. So when he got back to Sydney and people read his report they just bolted down here.
After the First World War, the town boomed again. Returning soldiers were given small blocks of land which they cleared, ploughed and swamped with irrigation farming. By the mid-1950s, much of the land was poisoned by salt. The rising watertable was officially thought to be the cause.
ROSS HERCOTT, Pyramid Hill farmer: What I don’t agree with is that the rising water-table causes salinity
ROSS COULTHART: Pyramid Hill farmer Ross Hercott has long campaigned on Australia’s salinity problems. He’s the first to admit not everyone sees eye to eye with him and his radical analysis of the problem. Hercott argues most dryland salinity isn’t caused by rising groundwater at all but by what many current farming practices do to the health of the soil. He’s designed a plough which opens up the ground yet doesn’t turn soil over like conventional ploughs do so it stops the earth becoming hard and compacted. He also believes that the millions of tonnes of acid fertiliser put on Australian farms every year cement the surface soil and increase salinity because the acid in the fertiliser reacts with minerals in the earth and forms much more salt.
Fourteen years ago Hercott was told much of this land was so saline it was near useless. Now the water in this well is fresh enough to drink, all because Hercott believes he stopped using fertiliser and opened up the soil with his special plough.
ROSS COULTHART: When did you first realise you were getting fresh water coming up in the well?
ROSS HERCOTT: Within a couple of years but we had the good stuff in 2002. There you go, you taste the water for yourself
ROSS COULTHART: That’s not bad. Not bad at all. Tests show it’s purer than rainwater. Not so the water coming out of the ground 500 metres away on the farm next door. That’s very salty, extremely salty. How salty is that?
ROSS HERCOTT: Twice as salty as the sea. 59000 ECs.
ROSS COULTHART: Now if the Rising Regional Groundwater Theory is right.
ROSS HERCOTT: This would be the same as that.
ROBERT GOURLAY:
ROSS COULTHART: Is Ross Hercott right?
ROBERT GOURLAY: He’s definitely right and he’s done all the right things
ROSS COULTHART: Rob Gourlay is one of a group of scientists who have studied Hercott’s methods. He too believes salt problems can be fixed by getting soil healthy again.
ROBERT GOURLAY: This country has put millions of dollars into salinity by treating the symptoms. They have not looked at the cause. The cause is our soil health. Yet we continue to pump ground water. We continue to put in large draining systems and plant trees and we haven’t addressed the cause. The implications are enormous for our agricultural system and the survival of our regional economies.
ROSS COULTHART: Brian Tunstall is a former CSIRO soil scientist who now works with Gourlay, helping farmers fix salinity problems.
DR BRIAN TUNSTALL: Farmers have realised that there is not a massive groundwater system. That planting trees on the hills is not solving the problem. But they can solve the problem by planting grasses and other vegetation locally so that they get local solutions.
ROSS COULTHART: This is Gulgong in mid-NSW. Colin Seis is getting great results from land he was told was at high risk from salinity. His salt solution — planting his crops in with native grasses. It’s meant he’s one of the few farmers in his district who can plant anything in the current drought.
Now what would be the orthodox explanation for how to fix the salinity problem that you have?
COLIN SEIS: The orthodox thing would be either to plant all this down to trees or plough it up, destroy these native grasses and put lucerne in here.
ROSS COULTHART: And what would that have done?
COLIN SEIS: Made the salinity worse, probably.
ROSS COULTHART: Seis, who was last year’s Conservation Farmer of the Year in NSW, also doesn’t use ploughs but drills his crops in to avoid compacting the soil. He has also not used super phosphate fertiliser for 25 years
COLIN SEIS: I see it as basically growing a plant and then getting addicted to super phosphate almost like a drug. We couldn’t afford the $20-30,000 of super phosphate any longer so we started to look at other ways of doing it. I always had a belief that if we pulled the fertiliser out our native grasses would return. And that’s exactly what happened.
ROSS COULTHART: Right next door to his rye crop is land blighted by salt. Fifteen years ago government scientists suggested he fix it by planting trees. Why is this land sick and that land okay?
COLIN SEIS: The main difference is that we’ve still got our native grasses in there, our native grasslands in there which are managing the water better than here. Whereas the trees have been planted on this side really aren’t doing the job.
ROSS COULTHART: This is the orthodox fix for though, isn’t it, for the groundwater problem?
COLIN SEIS: Yes.
ROSS COULTHART: If that’s right?
COLIN SEIS: Yes. Yes.
ROSS COULTHART: Clearly planting trees here hasn’t done a thing?
COLIN SEIS: No. It hasn’t
ROSS COULTHART: The grasses add mulch to the soil, build up carbon, allowing it to hold much more water and they help flush out salt. Initial research by scientists from the CSIRO supported Seis’ unconventional approach. But, as he tells it, their bid to get funding for a more intensive study was rejected.
COLIN SEIS: The CSIRO people I remember at the time were astounded that it got knocked back. Almost all of the research work that has been attempted to be done on pasture cropping gets rejected.
ROSS COULTHART: There are a heck of a lot of reputations riding, Colin, on the theory that this problem is caused by rising groundwater?
COLIN SEIS: Yes. But maybe they’re wrong.
ROSS COULTHART: Professor Peter Cullen, a director of the peak research body Land and Water Australia denies that salinity science funding has become politicised.
PROFESSOR PETER CULLEN: I’ve not seen any evidence of that. I mean there’s often people who have contrary views. Sometimes they are wanting to get research funds. Sometimes they might be right. But I haven’t seen any evidence of suppression.
DR JENNIFER MAROHASY: There’s some fantastic scientists and it’s sometimes very hard for them to honestly report their results.
ROSS COULTHART: Remember that painting we showed earlier? For many Queensland farmers this work by Jackson Pollock called ‘Blue Poles’ is about as much use for predicting salinity problems on their land as the work of State Government scientists. It’s a standing joke that ‘Blue Poles’ looks pretty much the same as this official salinity hazard map. That’s why farmers call it ‘Red Poles’. But for them it’s no laughing matter. Farmers have been forced to plant trees — or stopped from clearing land — because of those ominous red blotches. But Brian Tunstall’s research on the ground shows the watertable in these areas is often too far down to be the cause of salinity.
DR BRIAN TUNSTALL: There’s no groundwater system for over a hundred metres down. And yet they have the groundwater model, the Rising Groundwater model producing high levels of salinity.
ROSS COULTHART: And that’s just not true?
DR BRIAN TUNSTALL: Well there’s not any groundwater system there to create it
ROSS COULTHART: And what do they say when you say where’s the groundwater that supposedly causing this salinity?
DR BRIAN TUNSTALL: I’ve never had a response.
ROSS COULTHART: For much of the past two decades we’ve been told the Murray is in crisis. And all of those grim predictions of disaster were based on that one theory, that water tables are rising across whole regions, and that massive tree planting would fix the problem. But the evidence now is that tree planting can sometimes be disastrous
DR JOHN PASSIOURA: Tree planting can be counterproductive. And the reason for that is trees, young trees use more water than what might have been used before. The result of that being there is less runoff of fresh water into the streams.
ROSS COULTHART: Murray Darling Basin Commission boss Wendy Craik now admits many of the predictions of disaster were badly wrong. A decade ago in 1993, the MDBC predicted that dryland salinity was increasing at a rate of 10 to 15 percent per annum. It’s not happening is it?
WENDY CRAIK: Well I think Ross that it’s fair to say that as a result of the consensus of science at the time organisations make, because of that consensus of science, provide the best information they can to decision-makers. That’s life.
ROSS COULTHART: In 2000, Wendy Craik was heading the National Farmers’ Federation. At the height of the salinity hysteria she called for $65 billion to be spent on fixing Australia’s land and water crisis — with a whopping 37 billion to come from taxpayers.
WENDY CRAIK: We were basing our recommendation on the best available information at the time.
ROSS COULTHART: But that information was wrong wasn’t it?
WENDY CRAIK: Subsequently I think we would say, we wouldn’t, I wouldn’t support that particular line.
ROSS COULTHART: Imagine if those billions of dollars had been expended on what you now acknowledge are incorrect models that were talking up the threat of salinity?
WENDY CRAIK: As a taxpayer I am just as happy as you that we didn’t actually do that
ROSS COULTHART: Even inside Australia’s peak science body many are now questioning what causes salinity. CSIRO principal research scientist Maarten Stapper says he too thinks salinity is actually caused by poor soil health. So touchy is the current debate in scientific circles that several scientists we spoke to felt unable to talk publicly. Maarten Stapper did but as a private citizen.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: But the cause of most of the salinity in the dryland is on land where there’s no rising watertable and it’s caused by the lack of organic carbon and life in the soil.
ROSS COULTHART: If your solution to this problem is right then we’re wasting hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars on trying to fix salinity aren’t we’
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Yeah. That’s money working on symptoms and not the cause of the problem.
ROSS COULTHART: So when you’ve been saying inside the CSIRO there’s a microbiological explanation for salinity, what do they say?
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Oh silence. No reaction.
ROSS COULTHART: Do you concede it’s possible you’re wrong?
WENDY CRAIK: What I would concede is it’s possible further information might refine the models but I find it hard to believe that rising groundwater tables are not a major cause of salinity.
ROSS COULTHART: The debate over what causes what we’ve long been told is one of the biggest environmental problems in this country will doubtless rage for many years to come. But while the scientists argue, farmers like Colin Seis are getting on with their own solution. And they’re doing just fine.
How long before conventional science catches up with you?
COLIN SEIS: Probably 50 years. I don’t know. Hopefully, sooner than that.
AUSTRALIA'S SALINITY CRISIS: WHAT CRISIS?
May 28, 2006
Reporter : Ross Coulthart
Producer : Nick Farrow
Pyramid Hill farmer Ross Hercott. It's an apocalyptic story of environmental disaster we all know so well. The Murray Darling basin is being poisoned by salt. Adelaide's water supply is threatened, along with some of our most productive farmland — and our beautiful rivers are dying. It's a frightening scenario. But is it true? This week on Sunday, reporter Ross Coulthart takes a look at the real threat posed by salinity — and finds things are going badly wrong in public science.
As Coulthart reveals, some of the claims being used to support calls for billions of dollars to be spent on fixing a "looming salinity crisis" are simply not true. Salinity is a problem. But it seems nowhere as bad as we've been told by environmental groups, government departments and many in the media.
Claims that an area of land twice the size of Tasmania is under threat are false. The reality is a fraction of that. Even top scientists now admit the predictions of a disaster have been exaggerated.
They say this may be because the theory about what causes salinity in non-irrigation areas is flawed.
Worse still, scientists suggest a cheaper and easier solution for salinity problems is being ignored — for very unscientific reasons.
Sunday reporter Ross Coulthart: "It's a disaster for science. It's a disaster for farmers," one former CSIRO scientist tells Sunday.
Taxpayers have now given Government scientists billions of dollars to spend on efforts to understand and tackle salinity. But how solid is the science behind it?
TRANSCRIPT:
REPORTER ROSS COULTHART: It is an apocalyptic tale that is near Biblical in proportion. Here in Adelaide the people are told their drinking water is being poisoned by salt. Australia's most productive farmland is slowly drowning in a saline flood, the beautiful Murray River is dying. For many in public science, environmental groups and the media, this looming catastrophe has long been an article of almost religious faith. But what if much of this is nothing more than misguided pessimism, or as one eminent scientist describes it: a Gothic horror story?
DR JOHN PASSIOURA, honorary research fellow, CSIRO Plant Industry: Gothic horror stories appeal to people. I don’t think it’s as serious as we came to believe in the late nineties.
ROSS COULTHART: So can you give me a yes or no on whether the river system is dying?
PROFESSOR PETER CULLEN, director, Land and Water Australia: I don’t think the river is dying at the moment
ROSS COULTHART: We’ve already spent billions of dollars on the fix but in this month’s Budget, another half billion dollars was committed to fixing the Murray, salinity levels a major priority. You’ll also hear the evidence suggesting that something is very wrong in public science in Australia. Are we wasting billions of dollars on a dubious fix for salinity?
Picnic on the bed of the Murray
GEORGE WARNE, GM Murray Irrigation: The river is certainly not in crisis with salinity and the stories they’re talking about, the stories of doom and gloom, we think are grossly overstated.
ROSS COULTHART: We were being told that the Murray Darling river system is sick and in danger of dying. Is it?
DR JOHN PASSIOURA: I don’t believe so. If you talk to the people who are in the thriving communities along the Murray they would hotly dispute that.
ROBERT GOURLAY, MD Environmental Research Information Consortium: We are literally pouring this money down the drains they are creating.
ROSS COULTHART: Today you’ll hear how a growing number of scientists and farmers are now disputing the whole theory that supposedly explains how salinity occurs. They believe the orthodox explanation is just plain wrong.
DR BRIAN TUNSTALL, former CSIRO research scientist: It’s a disaster for science. It’s a disaster for farmers.
ROSS COULTHART: And here’s a few things you likely haven’t heard: Tree planting can actually make salinity worse. That, despite panicked claims to the contrary, this natural icon is not under threat of extinction. And the curious link between salinity and this famous art icon, ‘Blue Poles’.
For years we’ve been told that this river system is sick and in danger of dying if nothing’s done to cut the rising levels of salt that our bad land practices are dumping into it. But the river tells a different story. Here near Morgan on the Murray River is where Adelaide takes in its water supply so because of that it’s long been used as a benchmark indicator to measure for the salinity along the entire Murray Darling River system. And what it shows is really quite dramatic. That rather than increasing, salinity levels over the past twenty years have dramatically decreased. In fact they’re back to pre-World War Two levels. So what’s going on? Has the multibillion dollar fix for our river system been driven not by good science but by emotion and politics?
DR JENNIFER MAROHASY, Institute of Public Affairs: We don’t have a salinity crisis. We have an honesty crisis rather than a salinity crisis.
ROSS COULTHART: Gloria Griffiths has been fishing along the Murray River and its tributaries for the last quarter century. She and her Deniliquin Fishing Club colleagues are more than a little amused at the bleak claims that the river system is in crisis, and especially the notion that their beloved Murray Cod is in danger of extinction.
GLORIA GRIFFITHS: Each time you go out you pull in these beautiful cod you can see how healthy they are.
ROSS COULTHART: So what do you think when you read these newspapers from the big cities and they’re all saying the river’s dying and there’s no Murray Cod any more.
GLORIA GRIFFITHS: That they should get out and have a decent look themselves.
ROSS COULTHART: And on cue, Gloria caught us this equally glorious Murray Cod.
GLORIA GRIFFITHS: He looks pretty healthy. Yes actually this is the second one I’ve caught here today
ROSS COULTHART: Let’s put him back in before he gets upset. No-one denies an increase in the river flows would be desirable but as environmental scientist Dr Jennifer Marohasy from the Institute of Public Affairs argues, the notion that we’ve changed the Murray River from a mighty constantly-flowing watercourse to a trickle is challenged by early photos showing the river bed bone dry. Is this a sick river?
DR JENNIFER MAROHASY: No, it’s a bit murky but that’s how it is naturally.
ROSS COULTHART: And as for those who think the river should be returned to its natural state, think again. As Professor Peter Cullen acknowledges, we may now be trying to reduce salt in the river to artificially low levels. Do we know at all what the natural saline level was in the river system before we came along?
PROFESSOR PETER CULLEN: Well I don’t, but my expectation would be that from time to time it was very saline. But we’ve put human communities along that Murray who are taking water for drinking and irrigating and they have therefore pushed to manage and change that river so that it is usable by those communities.
ROSS COULTHART: But aren’t we putting an expectation on that river system that is far beyond what is naturally sustainable?
PROFESSOR PETER CULLEN: We are changing the river beyond what it was naturally. Naturally from time to time there would be no flow and it’d be salty.
ROSS COULTHART: As for the Murray cod, Dr Marohasy believes the grim predictions came about because the scientists who went looking for them were lousy fishermen.
DR JENNIFER MAROHASY: They went out and they surveyed for a couple of years and they apparently spent two million dollars on fishing gear and they concluded that there was no Murray cod in this region. And the fishermen were up in arms. They said: ‘But we’re catching Murray Cod, there’s Murray Cod in the river!’ What I did do was actually look at the commercial harvest for this region for those years and it was actually 26 tonnes of Murray Cod.
ROSS COULTHART: Support for Marohasy’s claims too from Professor Peter Cullen.
PROFESSOR PETER CULLEN: I think one can be confident we will be able to maintain Murray Cod populations.
ROSS COULTHART: Marohasy argues that a similar failure by government scientists lies behind the gloomy predictions that, unless governments commit billions of dollars, the Murray river system faces a salinity catastrophe. She analysed the official data, showing that salt levels had halved over the past 20 years near Morgan here in South Australia and it’s this data that has historically been used as a bench-mark for the river’s salinity health.
DR JENNIFER MAROHASY: They were back at what they were pre-World War Two levels. But everybody, at the same time I was talking to those guys and they were saying ‘yeah, you’re right salt levels have halved’, we had the front page of the CSIRO Land and Water website saying that salt levels ware increasing. But the data actually showed that salt levels had halved.
ROSS COULTHART: The levels of salinity at Morgan show there’s been an appreciable decrease in salinity levels in the entire MD River system over the past 20 years.
WENDY CRAIK, CEO, MDBC: Correct. And why? One, because we’ve been putting into place our salt interception schemes and they’ve been pumping salt out. And secondly, and a really important issue in recent years is the drought.
ROSS COULTHART: So why then, as benchmark salinity levels are the lowest in twenty years was the CSIRO still talking up the so-called ‘rising’ salinity problem on its website?. In June 2003, it said:
VOICEOVER READ: Salt levels are rising in almost all of the Basin’s rivers.
ROSS COULTHART: When these alarming claims were challenged by Marohasy, the CSIRO quietly dropped this sentence from its website. So why would scientists do this? Why make a representation that there is a huge problem when there isn’t?
DR JENNIFER MAROHASY: Maybe they were being driven by some environmental campaigning. And maybe they were concerned about continued funding if they’d fixed the problem.
ROSS COULTHART: For at least 30 years, the official explanation for salinity has been that cutting down trees and other land clearing is making groundwater rise, pushing salt up to root zones or the surface, killing plants. This explanation, called the Rising Regional Groundwater Theory, is used in all the models to predict salinity across Australia. But it’s never been proven. It’s still just a theory. Yet billions of dollars have been spent trying to fix salinity problems using solutions based on it.
Dr Maarten Stapper is a principal research scientist with the CSIRO. It’s a measure of the sensitivity of the debate that he insisted we emphasise he is speaking in a private capacity. For he is one of the dissident scientists who believes there’s something very wrong with the whole rising groundwater theory and the alarming predictions it makes. Are you a believer in the rising groundwater theory as an explanation for salinity?
DR MAARTEN STAPPER, principal research scientist, CSIRO: No. Not a full verdict on that it’s true for every situation.
ROSS COULTHART: Honorary CSIRO Research Fellow Dr John Passioura — who is also speaking in a private capacity — is a true believer in the theory but even he acknowledges it has its problems. That’s the theory that’s very much driven our scientific understanding of salinity for the last 20 or 30 years — right?
DR JOHN PASSIOURA: Yes
ROSS COULTHART: Is it right?
DR JOHN PASSIOURA: I believe the big picture is right. The difficulty is that when you have to start looking at the action on ground, you have to start dealing with the little picture.
ROSS COULTHART: Meanwhile former CSIRO research scientist Dr Brian Tunstall is happy to say he thinks the Rising Groundwater Theory is largely bunkum.
DR BRIAN TUNSTALL: It was never right and if you look at the reviews and if you look at the literature overseas, it’s not right. It’s unique to Australia.
ROSS COULTHART: Why does it matter though?
DR BRIAN TUNSTALL: Because of the wastage of money. Because we’re not fixing the problem. We’re spending money on it and we’re penalising farmers.
ROSS COULTHART: If there are villains in this tale of horror they’re the farmers and especially the irrigators. Popular wisdom has it that irrigation farming is doomed, the irrigators accused of greedily sloshing vast amounts of river water on to their farms, which in turn is washing mountains of salt out of the soil back into the rivers. It’s a perception that Deniliquin irrigation rice farmer Adam Wettenhall says is totally false.
ADAM WETTENHALL, Deniliquin irrigation rice farmer: I’d say to the doomsayers ‘instead of staying inside your ivory towers in Sydney and Melbourne and other cities, come out to the country and have a look.’
ROSS COULTHART: A decade ago the scientists were predicting that what’s happening here in this field today just wouldn’t be possible. This was a salinity hotspot. Back then, the groundwater was just below the surface and in danger of rising and wiping out this area completely with salinity. Ten years on, not only is the watertable now far lower, see for yourself, it’s a bumper harvest. One of the best ever. What did they say was going to happen here?
ADAM WETTENHALL: Basically if nothing was done about it we wouldn’t be here. And the irrigation, the whole irrigation in the area, the bulk of it would have gone under.
ROSS COULTHART: You proved them wrong
ADAM WETTENHALL: Yes definitely.
ROSS COULTHART: Official government predictions using computer modelling based on that Rising Groundwater Theory said that much of the irrigation farmland along the Murray was headed for disaster, as Murray Irrigation’s General Manager George Warne explains.
GEORGE WARNE: We were told that unless we took radical action more than a third of our farmland would basically be under water, that is, under saline water. And even if we took radical action a quarter of our farmland would be highly at risk.
ROSS COULTHART: By when?
GEORGE WARNE: By now. By 2006, 2010 and certainly by 2020 over 300,000 hectares would be suffering from high watertables.
ROSS COULTHART: That was a disaster being projected
GEORGE WARNE: That is a disaster scenario. And it certainly hasn’t been told out in what’s happened since
ROSS COULTHART: As Adam Wettenhall showed us, on a site near his farm, salinity can kill good farmland. And in irrigation farming, if too much water’s put on the land, salt can rise up to the surface with disastrous results. On their farm, Adam and Rob carefully monitor their water use and groundwater levels. Both feel it’s unfair that irrigators like them are still being demonised for washing salt into the river.
ADAM WETTENHALL: We can recycle every bit of water on the farm we’ve also planted an extensive amount of trees, planted crops like lucerne, deep rooted plants that suck up the water table and virtually treated water that comes onto our farm as liquid gold. We don’t let anything go below the root zone of the plant therefore we are using the water to its maximum ability.
ROSS COULTHART: So how much salt are you washing into the Murray River?
ADAM WETTENHALL: None. No water leaves this farm. What water comes onto this farm stays on this farm and we recycle every little bit.
ROSS COULTHART: From up above, it’s easy to see why the Murray-Darling river basin is this country’s foodbowl. With the irrigation industry’s share of river flows still a hot political issue, Murray Irrigation’s chairman Stewart Ellis, argues the irrigation farmers at least deserve credit for proving the doomsayers wrong on salinity.
STEWART ELLIS, Chairman Murray Irrigation: The predictions as you say are just so far out. The picture they were painting just hasn’t eventuated.
GEORGE WARNE: It hasn’t happened and we have got an area now of less than four farms out of a total of two and a half thousand that are affected by high water tables. It just seems that somewhere the science got it seriously wrong.
ROSS COULTHART: If science got its predictions so badly wrong on the salinity risks in irrigation areas, then what about dry-land salinity, where salt appears on land even though it’s not being flooded with irrigation water? Computer models based on the Rising Groundwater Theory predict that, by 2050, farmland more than twice the area of Tasmania could be wiped out by salinity. It’s scary and expensive. But while salinity is a problem is such extreme pessimism justified? In part two of our story you’ll hear from the dissidents who believe the real explanation for salinity and a possible cheap fix - has been suppressed.
ROBERT GOURLAY: There’s too much at stake in terms of the credibility of public science to admit to a major error in this area of science
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: People just don’t want to talk about those issues. They don’t want to get stirred into thinking that there is another way.
ROSS COULTHART: And yet, as a scientist, you’ve seen it work?
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Yes
ROSS COULTHART: You’re convinced it works
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Yes.
ROSS COULTHART: Courtesy of this month’s Budget, the Murray Darling Basin Commission has another half a billion dollars of taxpayers? money to spend. Much of it will be going on expensive schemes to stop salt reaching the rivers similar to this one in northern Victoria near Pyramid Hill. This is Pyramid Salt a private company funded with $13 million dollars of taxpayers’ money. Here they pump saline water from underground and harvest the salt it contains, for sale.
Does it make you laugh that people in Sydney are paying six bucks for a 250g box of salt that you blokes are desperate to throw away in this part of the world?
GAVIN PRIVETT, project manager, Pyramid Salt: No it doesn’t make me laugh. Actually, it makes me cry because the in-between guy is getting all the money.
ROSS COULTHART: But it’s only here at all because of an environmental blunder years ago, when attempts to lower the watertable under here ended up poisoning the Murray River.
GAVIN PRIVETT: Initially, what they looked at, they started putting drainage systems and then the problem was they realised they were transferring the problem from one place to another. They put in drainage systems. The next thing it was going into the Murray.
WENDY CRAIK: That’s true and I think that’s a fact of life, that science moves on, that people learn more about systems, learn more about what they should and shouldn’t do.
ROSS COULTHART: So it’s a multi-million dollar patch-up for a past mistake and it’s not a long-term solution for salinity.
GAVIN PRIVETT: You can’t put projects like this all over the place. One, people don’t eat enough salt. It’s a low value commodity. It’s not the answer to the problem. What we’re doing is we’re just intervening and I believe it’s probably as a short-term fix which we’re probably looking to buy some time.
ROSS COULTHART: Nearly 170 years ago, the explorer Major Thomas Mitchell climbed to the top of Pyramid Hill. He proclaimed the then rich farming country here in northern Victoria ‘Australia Felix’ or ‘Blessed Australia,’ perhaps an origin of the expression ‘the Lucky Country’.
He said this is one of the best pieces of land I have ever seen on the face of the earth. So when he got back to Sydney and people read his report they just bolted down here.
After the First World War, the town boomed again. Returning soldiers were given small blocks of land which they cleared, ploughed and swamped with irrigation farming. By the mid-1950s, much of the land was poisoned by salt. The rising watertable was officially thought to be the cause.
ROSS HERCOTT, Pyramid Hill farmer: What I don’t agree with is that the rising water-table causes salinity
ROSS COULTHART: Pyramid Hill farmer Ross Hercott has long campaigned on Australia’s salinity problems. He’s the first to admit not everyone sees eye to eye with him and his radical analysis of the problem. Hercott argues most dryland salinity isn’t caused by rising groundwater at all but by what many current farming practices do to the health of the soil. He’s designed a plough which opens up the ground yet doesn’t turn soil over like conventional ploughs do so it stops the earth becoming hard and compacted. He also believes that the millions of tonnes of acid fertiliser put on Australian farms every year cement the surface soil and increase salinity because the acid in the fertiliser reacts with minerals in the earth and forms much more salt.
Fourteen years ago Hercott was told much of this land was so saline it was near useless. Now the water in this well is fresh enough to drink, all because Hercott believes he stopped using fertiliser and opened up the soil with his special plough.
ROSS COULTHART: When did you first realise you were getting fresh water coming up in the well?
ROSS HERCOTT: Within a couple of years but we had the good stuff in 2002. There you go, you taste the water for yourself
ROSS COULTHART: That’s not bad. Not bad at all. Tests show it’s purer than rainwater. Not so the water coming out of the ground 500 metres away on the farm next door. That’s very salty, extremely salty. How salty is that?
ROSS HERCOTT: Twice as salty as the sea. 59000 ECs.
ROSS COULTHART: Now if the Rising Regional Groundwater Theory is right.
ROSS HERCOTT: This would be the same as that.
ROBERT GOURLAY:
ROSS COULTHART: Is Ross Hercott right?
ROBERT GOURLAY: He’s definitely right and he’s done all the right things
ROSS COULTHART: Rob Gourlay is one of a group of scientists who have studied Hercott’s methods. He too believes salt problems can be fixed by getting soil healthy again.
ROBERT GOURLAY: This country has put millions of dollars into salinity by treating the symptoms. They have not looked at the cause. The cause is our soil health. Yet we continue to pump ground water. We continue to put in large draining systems and plant trees and we haven’t addressed the cause. The implications are enormous for our agricultural system and the survival of our regional economies.
ROSS COULTHART: Brian Tunstall is a former CSIRO soil scientist who now works with Gourlay, helping farmers fix salinity problems.
DR BRIAN TUNSTALL: Farmers have realised that there is not a massive groundwater system. That planting trees on the hills is not solving the problem. But they can solve the problem by planting grasses and other vegetation locally so that they get local solutions.
ROSS COULTHART: This is Gulgong in mid-NSW. Colin Seis is getting great results from land he was told was at high risk from salinity. His salt solution — planting his crops in with native grasses. It’s meant he’s one of the few farmers in his district who can plant anything in the current drought.
Now what would be the orthodox explanation for how to fix the salinity problem that you have?
COLIN SEIS: The orthodox thing would be either to plant all this down to trees or plough it up, destroy these native grasses and put lucerne in here.
ROSS COULTHART: And what would that have done?
COLIN SEIS: Made the salinity worse, probably.
ROSS COULTHART: Seis, who was last year’s Conservation Farmer of the Year in NSW, also doesn’t use ploughs but drills his crops in to avoid compacting the soil. He has also not used super phosphate fertiliser for 25 years
COLIN SEIS: I see it as basically growing a plant and then getting addicted to super phosphate almost like a drug. We couldn’t afford the $20-30,000 of super phosphate any longer so we started to look at other ways of doing it. I always had a belief that if we pulled the fertiliser out our native grasses would return. And that’s exactly what happened.
ROSS COULTHART: Right next door to his rye crop is land blighted by salt. Fifteen years ago government scientists suggested he fix it by planting trees. Why is this land sick and that land okay?
COLIN SEIS: The main difference is that we’ve still got our native grasses in there, our native grasslands in there which are managing the water better than here. Whereas the trees have been planted on this side really aren’t doing the job.
ROSS COULTHART: This is the orthodox fix for though, isn’t it, for the groundwater problem?
COLIN SEIS: Yes.
ROSS COULTHART: If that’s right?
COLIN SEIS: Yes. Yes.
ROSS COULTHART: Clearly planting trees here hasn’t done a thing?
COLIN SEIS: No. It hasn’t
ROSS COULTHART: The grasses add mulch to the soil, build up carbon, allowing it to hold much more water and they help flush out salt. Initial research by scientists from the CSIRO supported Seis’ unconventional approach. But, as he tells it, their bid to get funding for a more intensive study was rejected.
COLIN SEIS: The CSIRO people I remember at the time were astounded that it got knocked back. Almost all of the research work that has been attempted to be done on pasture cropping gets rejected.
ROSS COULTHART: There are a heck of a lot of reputations riding, Colin, on the theory that this problem is caused by rising groundwater?
COLIN SEIS: Yes. But maybe they’re wrong.
ROSS COULTHART: Professor Peter Cullen, a director of the peak research body Land and Water Australia denies that salinity science funding has become politicised.
PROFESSOR PETER CULLEN: I’ve not seen any evidence of that. I mean there’s often people who have contrary views. Sometimes they are wanting to get research funds. Sometimes they might be right. But I haven’t seen any evidence of suppression.
DR JENNIFER MAROHASY: There’s some fantastic scientists and it’s sometimes very hard for them to honestly report their results.
ROSS COULTHART: Remember that painting we showed earlier? For many Queensland farmers this work by Jackson Pollock called ‘Blue Poles’ is about as much use for predicting salinity problems on their land as the work of State Government scientists. It’s a standing joke that ‘Blue Poles’ looks pretty much the same as this official salinity hazard map. That’s why farmers call it ‘Red Poles’. But for them it’s no laughing matter. Farmers have been forced to plant trees — or stopped from clearing land — because of those ominous red blotches. But Brian Tunstall’s research on the ground shows the watertable in these areas is often too far down to be the cause of salinity.
DR BRIAN TUNSTALL: There’s no groundwater system for over a hundred metres down. And yet they have the groundwater model, the Rising Groundwater model producing high levels of salinity.
ROSS COULTHART: And that’s just not true?
DR BRIAN TUNSTALL: Well there’s not any groundwater system there to create it
ROSS COULTHART: And what do they say when you say where’s the groundwater that supposedly causing this salinity?
DR BRIAN TUNSTALL: I’ve never had a response.
ROSS COULTHART: For much of the past two decades we’ve been told the Murray is in crisis. And all of those grim predictions of disaster were based on that one theory, that water tables are rising across whole regions, and that massive tree planting would fix the problem. But the evidence now is that tree planting can sometimes be disastrous
DR JOHN PASSIOURA: Tree planting can be counterproductive. And the reason for that is trees, young trees use more water than what might have been used before. The result of that being there is less runoff of fresh water into the streams.
ROSS COULTHART: Murray Darling Basin Commission boss Wendy Craik now admits many of the predictions of disaster were badly wrong. A decade ago in 1993, the MDBC predicted that dryland salinity was increasing at a rate of 10 to 15 percent per annum. It’s not happening is it?
WENDY CRAIK: Well I think Ross that it’s fair to say that as a result of the consensus of science at the time organisations make, because of that consensus of science, provide the best information they can to decision-makers. That’s life.
ROSS COULTHART: In 2000, Wendy Craik was heading the National Farmers’ Federation. At the height of the salinity hysteria she called for $65 billion to be spent on fixing Australia’s land and water crisis — with a whopping 37 billion to come from taxpayers.
WENDY CRAIK: We were basing our recommendation on the best available information at the time.
ROSS COULTHART: But that information was wrong wasn’t it?
WENDY CRAIK: Subsequently I think we would say, we wouldn’t, I wouldn’t support that particular line.
ROSS COULTHART: Imagine if those billions of dollars had been expended on what you now acknowledge are incorrect models that were talking up the threat of salinity?
WENDY CRAIK: As a taxpayer I am just as happy as you that we didn’t actually do that
ROSS COULTHART: Even inside Australia’s peak science body many are now questioning what causes salinity. CSIRO principal research scientist Maarten Stapper says he too thinks salinity is actually caused by poor soil health. So touchy is the current debate in scientific circles that several scientists we spoke to felt unable to talk publicly. Maarten Stapper did but as a private citizen.
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: But the cause of most of the salinity in the dryland is on land where there’s no rising watertable and it’s caused by the lack of organic carbon and life in the soil.
ROSS COULTHART: If your solution to this problem is right then we’re wasting hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars on trying to fix salinity aren’t we’
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Yeah. That’s money working on symptoms and not the cause of the problem.
ROSS COULTHART: So when you’ve been saying inside the CSIRO there’s a microbiological explanation for salinity, what do they say?
DR MAARTEN STAPPER: Oh silence. No reaction.
ROSS COULTHART: Do you concede it’s possible you’re wrong?
WENDY CRAIK: What I would concede is it’s possible further information might refine the models but I find it hard to believe that rising groundwater tables are not a major cause of salinity.
ROSS COULTHART: The debate over what causes what we’ve long been told is one of the biggest environmental problems in this country will doubtless rage for many years to come. But while the scientists argue, farmers like Colin Seis are getting on with their own solution. And they’re doing just fine.
How long before conventional science catches up with you?
COLIN SEIS: Probably 50 years. I don’t know. Hopefully, sooner than that.
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