- If you're a fan of US author Michael Lewis, as I am, you will devour this magnificent book. Hamilton and Kells have the same ability to critique a complex issue by grounding the story in the voices of ordinary participants or victims. In this case the voices of small farmers and Indigenous leaders who bring real world experience and age old traditional knowledge to today's dreadful water management crisis.
- The Murray-Darling Basin is Australia's greatest environmental asset. Its 77,000 kilometres of ancient rivers, creeks and wetlands, along with its dams and locks constructed over the last century, are an immeasurably important contribution to the nation's food production and regional economy. It covers a million square kilometres - an area larger than France. But because '...the political and economic structures of modern Australia cut across catchment boundaries...The die was cast for more and more fighting over less and less water’.
- The real damage was done in the 1980s, when neo-liberalist free-market economics became fashionable. ‘…the water market was a natural place to experiment with free-market principles…the free marketeers embraced the idea that the decentralised decisions of market participants would achieve a more efficient water allocation than central planners ever could’.
- A principal legacy of Victorian politician Alfred Deakin (and later Prime Minister) in the late 1880s was legislation that ensured water ownership could not legally be separated from land ownership, thus guaranteeing water availability to family farms and communities. A century later that radically changed. 'Unbundling' became the driving reformist agenda. All states welcomed it. And banks too.
- Hamilton and Kells then take us on a deep dive into the practices of the financial traders. They provide plenty of stories and examples. They take us into the Michael Lewis Flash Boys territory of rapacious Wall Street traders who are all about micro-profiteering, not giving a fig about the real world destruction of lives and livelihoods that result. It was all about cornering the market, squeezing everything they could out of it.
- The book's final chapter, The Betrayal, is compulsory reading. Here's a quote:
Top level regulators and agencies such as the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, the Productivity Commission and the ACCC assembled and published report after report. Between 1989 and 2020 more than 300 major water reports were produced in Australia...Brimming with fuzzy logic, linguistic ambiguity, categorical confusion, statistical insignificance, motherhood statements, statements of the obvious and statements of the obviously false, they are now useful only for recycling...
A once-in-a-generation scandal. A government authorised mega-theft.
This review by Jeff Sparrow in The Saturday Paper is spot on:
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/culture/books/2021/09/30/sold-down-the-river/163067760012378
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