Mike Wade: Lessons we shouldn’t learn from Down Under

At the peak of Australia’s millennial drought, lawmakers sought to resolve water shortages by overturning their historic water rights system with the 2007 Water Reform Act and put water management into the hands of their federal government. Nearly a decade on, the Act and subsequent Murray-Darling Basin Plan have led to fallowed farmland, unemployed farmworkers and struggling businesses in rural communities – the same problems California’s Central Valley is already facing.

Australia’s drought solutions are no answer for California

As California lawmakers spend time in Australia on a fact-finding mission to help combat our own multiyear drought, they need to be aware the adoption of Aussie-type reforms might only make California’s water-supply situation worse, at least for our state’s food producers. Those participating in the tour include Assembly Minority Leader Kristin Olsen of Riverbank and State Water Water Resources Control Board Chairwoman Felicia Marcus, among others.

Australia’s attempt to resolve many of its own water-supply issues are creating the same scenarios that already exist in the parched Central Valley – unemployment and the economic ripples that affect farm jobs and the businesses that depend on them.

Under Australia’s 2007 Water Reform Act, water management shifted from the Australian states to the federal government. As an excuse for implementing a national water-management plan, then-Prime Minister John Howard said, “The old ways of managing the (Murray-Darling) Basin have reached their use-by date.”

Sound familiar? How many times have we heard that California’s “antiquated system of water rights” is overdue for change.

The trouble with change is ... things change. In Australia, farmers ended up with less water.

According to Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) news reports, community impacts have been severe. The community of St. George lost over 42,000 acre feet of water with no socio-impact assessments to determine how the community would be affected.

The changes in water rights and subsequent transfers have caused vast quantities of irrigation water to be sold out from under local communities with devastating effects. Mayor Donna Stewart of Balonne Shire said in an ABC news report that water sales authorized under the water rights reform act have had the effect of creating a permanent drought in rural communities.

Sounds a lot like Firebaugh, East Porterville, Mendota and other Central Valley communities. Which community is next, Modesto or Merced?

According to Stefanie Schulte, policy manager at the New South Wales Irrigators’ Council, what started out as a 10-point plan and $8 billion investment (in U.S. dollars), “has transformed into a complex and confusing framework that often does not achieve its ‘environmental’ objectives but leaves farmers and rural communities with significantly less productive water to grow food and fiber.”

If California’s visiting politicians bring anything back with them from Australia, it should be a better understanding that solutions must come from the bottom up and include farmers and the rural communities. Wholesale changes to California’s water-rights system is the wrong way go about solving our water crisis. Simply rearranging the water rights we have will undoubtedly create winners and losers, just like it did in Australia.

That is bad news for the farmers who grow our food and in the long run, for the families who want to buy California’s fresh bounty at the grocery store.

This story was originally published October 28, 2015 at 11:47 AM with the headline "Mike Wade: Lessons we shouldn’t learn from Down Under."