Water politics

Containing six of Australia’s seven longest rivers (the Murray, Darling, Paroo, Warrego, Murrumbidgee and Lachlan), the Murray–Darling Basin links up several lakes and important wetlands, including 16 that are listed under the Ramsar Convention. These include the large Macquarie Marshes, near Coonamble, and the chain of nine Menindee Lakes, in the far west of New South Wales, not far from Broken Hill. Near the mouth of the Murray, it enters the Coorong, a shallow and very long lagoon, before reaching the ocean southeast of Adelaide.

Since large-scale irrigated farming began in the Murray–Darling Basin during the 1970s, Australia has grappled with how to balance this water-intensive agriculture with the environmental flows needed to keep the river system in good health, while supplying cities and towns that use Murray–Darling water. Management of the system is shared across the relevant states and the Commonwealth, and is governed by the Murray–Darling Basin Plan water-sharing roadmap. Irrigation water allocations have become politicised, and the National Party in particular has a history of being heavily pro-irrigation.

Water challenges in the basin are heightened because the level of flow cannot be predicted. The Millennium drought affected the basin from 2001 to 2009, and more recently a dry period between 2017