A major element of Australia's food security that has only just started to receive increased media scrutiny in the past few months is water infrastructure.
Trying to get dams built in this country has become the very definition of a Sisyphean task.
It was reported last month that major dam building substantially slowed at the end of the 1970s and stalled around 1990.
There has been a less than 3 per cent increase in large dam storage capacity since then, which is startling when you consider that our population has risen by 50pc over that period.
Since 2003, only 20 dams have been completed, two in NSW, one in Queensland and the ACT and 16 in Tasmania.
It is hard to be critical of the current federal government, as they established a $1 billion fund to build dams when they entered parliament in 2013, but the state governments have shown little interest in cracking on and building the dams.
The thing that is most frustrating from my perspective is that some of the towns that are experiencing problems with their water supplies have been aware of this crisis for some time.
Many of them had similar problems with their water infrastructure during previous drought events and there has been insufficient work done to upgrade these storages in the intervening period.
Water policy has been one cock-up after another for the past few decades in this country, and you need to look no further than Queensland to get an idea of the magnitude of the problem (the proposed Traveston Dam, Rookwood Weir and Paradise Dam).
Let's be frank - for the last 30 or so years, any time a greenfield dam is proposed, there is a significant amount of pushback.
Inevitably, the identified site becomes a political hot potato, where report after report is commissioned to show the viability of the project, but there are always people sitting on the sideline trying their damnedest to kill it off - NIMBYism writ large - and they are the ones inevitably winning the fight.
We reached the truly absurd when the Victorian Water Minister recently said she was ruling out the building of any new dams, saying climate change would mean not enough water would flow into them to make them worthwhile.
This is all despite the fact that without new dams the population growth in Victoria risks sizeable reductions of available water per person by 2030.
We cannot keep kicking this can down the road. These water infrastructure problems are a weeping sore and this piecemeal, glacial approach to approving - or not-approving - critical water projects is well beyond a joke.
We talk about sustainable farming practices, but if we cannot make the towns that support these farmers sustainable and resilient by having a core basic need available to them, how are we going to attract people and investment to these areas? Once people leave, they don't come back.
From my perspective, there are two ways this problem could be tackled. Firstly, despite the fact that the constitution does not list water infrastructure and dams as a federal government responsibility, there is a precedent for responsibilities not listed in section 51 of the constitution to fall under federal government purview, namely establish a new government-owned corporation whose sole job is to build dams.
Regulation of corporations' rights were, up until the 1980s, largely the responsibility of the states, which obviously created enormous amounts of duplication and inefficiencies.
This was evident over many decades, and many attempts to fix the problem, but ultimately with agreement between the Commonwealth and all the states, the Corporations Act was enacted, and there is little doubt that it has streamlined all processes relating to the incorporation and operation of companies.
I fear that this sensible approach will be a bridge too far as the usual groups will scream to the heavens that their views are not being taken into account.
However, as stated above, our population continues to grow and our water storages are not increasing in lockstep, so at some stage in the not too distant future the wider population will start to demand action in this area.
The alternative is less palatable, namely amending the constitution by way of referendum. Given the track record of successfully changing the constitution by way of referendum, and how highly politicised the environmental campaign will inevitably be on the other side of this debate, this option probably does not even get out of the starting gate.
Now the usual suspects will spruik the case for increasing the number of desalination plants.
With respect, that is never going to work in the regions, as aside from the initial capital cost of the desalination plants, and the considerable ongoing costs with running them, the pipeline infrastructure and pumping costs alone would make this an option not even worth entertaining.
So in closing and with apologies to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, we need to get a move on as otherwise it will soon be a case of water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.
- Trent Thorne, agribusiness lawyer
