Month: September 2018

A national, rural, political dream

Sleep was elusive. Fevered dreaming stood in its place. [1]

Just suppose for a moment that, within the Australian Labor Party (ALP), a subgroup was once created for those with a particular interest in coastal erosion.

The people who join this movement have no desire to subvert or depart from the principles of the ALP; they are through and through ‘labor’ people by inclination.

It’s just that, within the broader Labor Party, they want to be seen to represent the particular interests of people around Australia who are worried about coastal erosion.

It’s not made explicit, but in the beginning most of those who join the movement do so because they believe that a tailor-made organisation will help with an overall ecological, conservationist approach.

The movement goes so well that the ALP’s administration agrees that those who wish to do so can have their membership fees diverted to and used by the new entity. With the increased organisational capacity that results, it becomes – in effect – a political party within a political party.

It adopts the name Labor for the Coast (LfC).  It holds conferences, produces publications, and develops its own positions on issues relating to coastal erosion.

As time passes, the range of issues with which LfC becomes concerned expands. There are people concerned with rising sea levels and the impact on areas settled by human habitation – including on the value of property. There are those concerned with retention of the ecology of coastal regions. There are those who want to see coastal areas more developed, and those who don’t. There are those concerned about industrial run-off; and wind farms; and maritime infrastructure.

But whatever their specific interest in the matter, members of the organisation are still, first and foremost, supporters of the Australian Labor Party.

Time passes. At some future Federal Election, Labor for the Coast announces that it intends to run its own candidates in seats where its issues are of a particularly high profile. This causes a problem for the ALP, which has to decide whether to step aside and give free rein to LfC, or to run their own candidates in what might be called ‘three-cornered contests’.

More time passes. The range of issues with which LfC purports to have a special interest, and special expertise, grows broader. Sometimes there are so many complex and conflicting aspects to the management of Australia’s coastline that it isn’t clear what LfC’s position actually is.

Some of its members fear that its original purpose – to protect the coastline – has been  watered down or perverted.

The public profile given to particular aspects of the challenge varies from year to year. After traumatic and damaging events which have particular impact on coastal areas, such as cyclones, floods and bushfires, support for the party tends to increase.

But one thing never varies and that is the close political, philosophical and organisational relationship between the ALP and Labor for the Coast. Whether in government or opposition, the larger party and its smaller, more specialised partner work together in what becomes known as the Alliance Government or the Alliance Opposition.

Time passes. One of the curious things that happens is that the policies of LfC seem to take on their own credibility and have their own status – quite separate from the positions or priorities of the ALP. It’s as if the prosecution of beliefs and policies by what is still a partial subgroup of the senior partner will assuredly lead to action by the greater whole if the Alliance wins government.

Retrospective analysis of the results of one particular Federal Election show that in the twelve seats won by LfC, a critical number of votes were cast because of LfC’s proposed policies relating to residential development, coastal wetlands and the management of run-off. These voters failed to recognise that the ALP had no specific policy positions on these more detailed issues. What this meant was that, when the Alliance won government – thanks in part to the seats won by LfC – there was in fact no corporate or party-wide commitment to those proposed policies.

The practice that developed was for the ALP and LfC to enter into a negotiated agreement, the terms of which were not publicly revealed, relating to Ministerial positions and policy matters to which the Alliance Government would commit.

People who voted for LfC for particular reasons were in the dark as to the status of the promised policies and programs relating to those matters. Nevertheless the organisation prospered. For a period of time LfC had branches in every state and territory – even in the ACT which, apart from Jarvis Bay, has no coastline at all. At its peak, LfC had federal representatives from each State and the Northern Territory.

Time passed. The management of Australia’s coastline failed to improve from the point of view of all the major interest groups.

Gradually, the senior partner in this curios political arrangement came to realise that issues relating to Australia’s coastline and its management were so important as to require its serious and focused consideration. There seemed no good reason why coastal management should be the preserve of or the responsibility of a particular subgroup. It should not be farmed out in this way.

LfC became a decidedly rickety construct. It only survived at all through the next period because of the myth it had built up that it was the only group defending the interests of Australia’s coastline against the people of the inland.

The expertise on coastal management issues which had gravitated for some years to LfC was readopted into the senior partner. LfC was gradually whittled away as the ALP recognised the importance and potential value of having its own focus on the challenges besetting Australia’s coastline.

The writing was on the wall for LfC when, in a couple of jurisdictions, it merged back into the ALP. There was a curious, misty period (described by one writer as ‘furtive’) in which LfC operated exclusively at the state level, being unable or unwilling to get members elected to Federal Parliament.

Its credibility and reputation were damaged by errors of judgement made by some of its leaders who, during the full flood of LfC’s status, were among the top dogs in national politics.

The future of LfC depended on just one jurisdiction for some years. Even this was not due to the inherent strength of its policy positions and any uniqueness with which it supported them in government. Rather, as historians have since pointed out, the quarantining of people of a particular bent from the ALP itself meant that the LfC had a significant impact on the factional balance within the parent party.

Time passed. The LfC was further eroded.

There was confusion about exactly who LfC was trying to represent. Was it the people who lived and worked on the coast, or the broader group who cared about management of the coastal fringe? Either way it was expecting too much of one organisation to represent all of those who lived in coastal areas: the young and the old, environmentalists and those involved in real estate development or heavy industry, those with bank loans and those dependent upon investment income.

Like King Canute, those clinging on to LfC pointed out that all of its Parliamentary representatives were people from coastal areas. Other people wondered whether having no representatives from the kinds of community in which one third of Australia’s population live was an advantage or disadvantage for LfC’s policy thinking.

Historically there was little evidence of LfC parliamentarians delivering services or infrastructure for coastal people unless it was supported by the ALP. This is the natural circumstance in which a junior party to an Alliance will find itself. But if all of the LfC  initiatives are supported by the ALP, what is the point of the LfC?

Before too long Alliance Governments were a thing of the past. Thereafter, whenever the Labor Party was more popular than the Liberal Party or independents, the government installed was badged simply ‘ALP’.

Life then seemed much clearer – including for people who cared about coastal management, – and the choice between the major parties much simpler.

And it was no longer possible for people’s vote to be won over in an election campaign by ‘promises’ made by a subgroup of the ALP and to which the ALP itself owed no loyalty or commitment.

– – – –

Then it was morning and such fevered speculation could end.

[1] Although he is entirely innocent of any knowledge of this piece, I am indebted to Stephen James Holt, the author of an article about politics which appeared in the Canberra Times on 15 August 2018.

Access to health services: Medicare and financial means

Note: this piece was published in Croakey, Australia's social journalism project enabling debate and investigations of health issues and policy, on 13 September 2018. My thanks to Ruth Armstrong, Editor.

The central purpose of Australia’s Medicare is to give all eligible persons three things: the choice to receive, free of charge, the services provided by public hospitals; no-cost or low-cost services from general practitioners and certain medical specialists; and no-cost or low-cost access to medicines listed on the Schedule of Pharmaceutical Benefits.

Much has been made of Medicare’s ‘universality‘ – the assertion that its provisions relate equally to all eligible persons, irrespective of their location or income.

In reality however, some people’s access to Medicare is limited by circumstances beyond their control. Barriers to seeing a doctor can include information (eg they’re not aware of the services that exist), logistics (eg distance), service queuing (eg the doctor’s books are closed or they’re booked out), and cost factors.

Given the intention of Medicare to ensure that no-one is deprived of access to health services because of their financial means, the last of these – cost factors – is an issue with which we should be particularly concerned. Currently there is insufficient evidence about affordability and access.

Evidence of out-of-pocket costs

The Senate’s Community Affairs References Committee has produced two reports in recent years concerned, in part, with out-of-pocket healthcare costs.

The first, Out-of-pocket costs in Australian healthcare (2014) dealt with trends in aggregate out-of-pocket expenditure by Australian health consumers, the composition of the expenditure, and such things as international comparisons.

The second, Value and affordability of private health insurance and out-of-pocket medical costs (2017), concerned the interaction between private health insurance and co-payments (or ‘gaps’) and the difficulties faced by consumers in estimating them.

Neither of these inquiries considered the relationship between the dollar value of costs paid by an individual and their ability to access necessary health services.

One measure of the price paid by individuals for access to necessary health services is the AIHW’s well-developed dataset relating to out-of-pocket costs paid for a specified category of services that are subsidised by Medicare.

In 2015-16, Australians spent $29.4 billion out-of-pocket in total on health-related expenses – or about $1,195 per person. This compares with $141 billion spent on health by governments, private health insurers and accident compensation schemes.

The costs paid by patients were for prescription and non-prescription medicines, dental services, hospital services, aids and appliances (including glasses, wheelchairs and hearing aids), expenses (such as allied health services) not subsidised by Medicare and, finally, non-hospital services that are subsidised by Medicare.

This last category includes general practice and specialist fees, diagnostic imaging, pathology and obstetric services. In 2016–17, around 9 in 10 Australians used one or more of these services. Governments contributed $19.0 billion towards them, with around $3.0 billion being paid by patients from their own pockets. This category therefore comprises only 10% of the total paid out-of-pocket ($3.0b of $29.4b).

Of this $3.0 billion, 34% was for specialist services, 25% for GP services, 12% for diagnostic imaging services (including radiology) and 6.6% for obstetric services.

Costs for services subsidised by Medicare

The services for which patients paid this $3 billion are the subject of the Healthy Communities: Patients’ out-of-pocket spending on Medicare services, 2016–17 report, which shows that, nationally, half of the patients receiving the specified Medicare-funded services paid something for them from their own pockets, and half had the full costs paid by the government.

This 50:50 split can be compared with the fact that, in the same year, 86% of all GP services were bulk-billed, while 66% of patients had all of their GP services bulk-billed.

The report then details a wide range of dollar figures for out-of-pocket costs for groups of people who live in specific ‘local areas’ (there are 340 statistical local areas (SLAs) in Australia) and, at a more highly-aggregated level, in particular Primary Health Networks (PHNs) (there are 31 PHNs).

There are figures about the incidence of out-of-pocket costs and their median (mid-point) value, where they exist, by PHN and SLA – with numerous comparisons made.

More prominence should perhaps have been given in the report to the statement in the fine print, as it were, at the end of the document:

“Factors that affect out-of-pocket costs

Local area variation in the amount that patients spend out-of-pocket on health services is influenced by a number of factors, including:

  • the type and amount of health services required to meet a patient’s needs
  • income and lifestyle, which can influence a patient’s ability to pay fees
  • the fees charged by health providers in a local area (at the discretion of the health provider and may be influenced by differences in operating costs)
  • the availability of bulk-billed services
  • differences in the availability and use of non-hospital primary and specialist services that are subsidised by Medicare (some people may use services not funded by Medicare, including allied health services or a hospital emergency department, or may be unable to get services due to other factors, such as the availability of nearby health care providers).

Variation in out-of-pocket costs and patients’ experiences of cost barriers can highlight gaps in access to affordable health services. However, if an area has high out-of-pocket costs, it does not necessarily mean that people living there have difficulty obtaining these services, as service use is also influenced by a person’s financial situation and needs.” (emphasis added)

What this means is that most of the dollar figures in the report are more ‘data’ than ‘information’, because they shed no light on the relationship  between the level of out-of-pocket costs paid and an individual’s status with respect to access to health service

False assumptions

There may be an underlying assumption that the higher the costs paid by an individual from their own pocket, the worse their service access situation.

This would be a false construct. Someone who has paid zero out-of-pocket costs could be a person in clinical need of the specified services but with no access to them, for one or more of the reasons specified above: lack of knowledge, lack of access due to distance or their inability to meet the actual or perceived cost.

Someone with high annual out-of-pocket costs could be a healthy person with good knowledge and easy access to the specified services.

Two individuals paying the same amount from their own pocket may well have radically different abilities to pay: one regarding the cost as a discretionary payment they choose to make, the other having to forego other critical expenses. For these reasons, even the national aggregates of out-of-pocket costs are not informative.

We read that patients living in metropolitan PHN areas were less likely to incur out-of-pocket costs than patients in regional PHNs. There is no way of knowing to what extent this is due to differences in the availability of the services, in their charging policies, in the need of patients for the services, their attitude to paying for them or other factors.

Similarly, the finding that those in metropolitan areas who did have out-of-pocket expenses paid higher amounts, could relate to the unit cost of services, providers’ decisions about bulk billing, the number of services accessed per year, or the availability and use of services not funded by Medicare, including allied health services, or a hospital emergency department.

The report does not include figures about access to services that are not within the Medicare system, such as dentistry and allied health. And the ABS’s 2016-17 Patient Experience Survey reminds us that poor access to dental services, due to their cost, is a serious matter – and one that is worse for people living in areas of socio-economic disadvantage.

For a fuller picture of the relationship between a family’s financial means, their location and their access to health services, data series relating to out-of-pocket costs need to be integrated with other health access, economic and population data. We need to know the relative significance of the factors that contribute to different dollar figures for different people.

Clearer evidence of cost barriers

As well as their data about out-of-pocket costs, both the AIHW’s Healthy Communities: Patients’ out-of-pocket spending on Medicare services, 2016–17 and the ABS’s 2016–17 Patient Experience Survey also report on a data series that may illustrate more about cost barriers to health service access than the dollar value of out-of-pocket costs.

This is the proportion of people in particular groups who delayed or failed to keep an appointment with a health professional because of cost.

Across Australia in 2016-17, 6.5% of people aged 15 years or more reported delaying or not having a specialist, GP, imaging or pathology service when they needed it due to cost. This represents an estimated 1.3 million people. Nationally, 4.1% of people who needed to see a GP (an estimated 663,000 people) delayed or did not see a GP due to cost.

Other findings from the ABS for this data series for 2016-17 were:

  • over two thirds of people (68%) had received a prescription for medication from a GP in the previous 12 months, with 7% of them delaying or deciding against filling it due to cost;
  • one in fourteen people (7%) who needed to see a medical specialist delayed or did not see a medical specialist due to cost; and
  • 18% of those who needed to see a dental professional delayed seeing or did not see one due to cost.

Critically where financial means were concerned, people living in areas of most socio-economic disadvantage were more than twice as likely to delay seeing or not see a dental professional due to cost than those living in areas of least disadvantage (26% compared with 11%).

Such direct relationships between financial means (in this case inferred by an area’s level of socio-economic disadvantage) and access to services are of concern and should be further researched.

In the meantime it should be noted that spatial variations in such a measure (eg between different PHNs) are confounded by the same factors as for out-of-pocket costs. Consider, for example, the statement that:

7.3% of people aged 15 and over who needed to see a medical specialist delayed or did not see a medical specialist due to cost (which represents an estimated 538,000 people). This proportion was highest for people living in major cities (7.7%) and lowest for people in outer regional, remote and very remote areas (5.1%). (emphasis added).

 This last sentence could be explained by the fact that fewer people in regional, remote and very remote areas were referred to a specialist in the first place – or they lacked access for other (non-cost) reasons.

The clinical importance of delay

Without further information it is impossible to judge the clinical importance of the figures relating to delayed or cancelled health appointments. Where visits to a GP are concerned, the patient may have been in real clinical need or, alternatively, they may have been ‘doctor shopping’ or among ‘the worried well’.

Also, such self-reporting by survey respondents may reflect a real inability to meet the cost of the service, or only their fear of being unable to meet the cost they believe would be incurred.

The costs of both a GP visit and a visit to the Emergency Department of a public hospital are covered by Medicare. But it is nevertheless worth noting that the ABS reports that, in 2016-17, people living in outer regional, remote and very remote areas were almost twice as likely to report visiting a hospital Emergency Department because a GP was not available when required, than those living in major cities (29% compared with 17%).

The importance of not being able to see a general practitioner or other primary healthcare professional in good clinical time is almost certainly reflected in the fact that, as shown in Australia’s Health 2018, the rate of potentially preventable hospitalisations increased with the remoteness of a person’s usual residence. This effect was most pronounced for Indigenous Australians.

Improving the available information

Australia is blessed with good data relating to health and well-being, thanks to the ongoing activity of impressive national agencies and the collaboration of states and territories and health professional bodies.

It is therefore surprising that so little is known about the relationship between patients’ financial means and their status with respect to health service access.

The situation could be improved with more publicly available analyses of the data sets relating to health, socio-economic status and other characteristics of people and the places in which they live. It may be the case that these datasets are already being integrated or synthesised.

Because of the frequency with which the characteristics of non-metropolitan areas serve to place their residents at a disadvantage in access to health services, and health outcomes, these further analyses would be a particular boon to the rural and remote health sector.

This said, seeking some certainty that low income is not prejudicing access to health services for anybody should be a national priority, and one to which Big Data agencies and the Medical Research Future Fund should turn their attention.

Too much talk of “drought”, and not enough about “water management”

Too much talk of

Calling for an integrated, holistic focus on water and natural resources management

Note: this piece was first published in Croakey on 26 August 2018. My thanks to Croakey’s Editor, Melissa Sweet.

It is a mistake to try to reduce the frequency or impact of drought through something narrowly defined as “drought policy”. The problems in dealing with drought can only be dealt with through an integrated approach to the management of Australia’s natural resources.

As the former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull reminded us in a recent radio interview, in a hot, flat and relatively dry continent with poor soils, “we have got to be smart about the way we use water.” (See previous commentary on Turnbull’s interview with ABC Broken Hill.)

When a prolonged period of below-average rainfall threatens serious human, animal and ecological costs, specific emergency assistance should be available, subject to known, fixed (and, if possible, objective) criteria.

But at every moment, in good times and bad, public policy should be dealing with water management in all its aspects.

Some will argue that, for both political and professional reasons, an integrated, holistic approach to natural resource management across the nation is unlikely. A report card on the key elements of national water management shows that progress has been made and that further opportunities exist, with the management of groundwater resources being an area that is not as well advanced and understood as others.

There are nine key elements of water management in Australia.

1. Management of the Murray-Darling Basin

The management of Australia’s water resources basically starts and ends with the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB), both because of its size and because of the political, economic and social challenges it poses. It covers a million square kilometres (about 14 percent of Australia’s landmass), is home to over two million people and in it is produced around one-third of the national food supply.

Management of the MDB has been famously difficult due to the complexity of the issue and the fact that the Commonwealth and four state governments all have vital interests in it. If water management in the MDB is done well, the processes and lessons learned can be applied in other catchments.

The central challenges are twofold: to be sure that there is an appropriate balance between waters withdrawn from the system, mainly for irrigation, and the waters left in it for environmental purposes; and to be sure that there is a fair balance between the four states along the rivers’ path.

Currently there is agreement among all parties to a Basin Plan, with the four states agreeing to develop a compact to enforce the agreed water rules. Despite the dry times in much of the eastern States, there are good signs of continued commitment to the Plan.

However, below-average rainfall for a prolonged period will test the political strength of such an agreement and potentially threaten the ecological sustainability of the Basin.

2. Decisions about water infrastructure

There has been much debate about whether Australia has an “infrastructure deficit” and, if so, how large it is and what elements it comprises.

“Australia has nearly 600 different local, state and territory Governments that, together with the Australian Government, fund and plan infrastructure. Through this multitude of players, our infrastructure development is slow and delivery risks are high, which constrains our productivity and makes our projects less attractive for potential investors.” (The National Infrastructure Plan, Infrastructure Australia, 2013.)

Given the proportion of Australia’s population who live in the major cities and the undoubted congestion they experience, the bulk of recent discussions about infrastructure has been about transport: roads, bridges, railways and public transport systems. However, the management of Australia’s water resource is critically affected by decisions made on infrastructure, including those made at the national level.

Infrastructure for the storage, reticulation and application of water in agriculture and other industries is one of those areas in which new capital spending may not be necessary. This is because there has been, and remains, capacity to make better use of existing infrastructure. It is not a question of building new irrigation systems from scratch, but what additions and adjustments should be made to the existing system.

A significant new focal point relating indirectly to water infrastructure has emerged as a result of the nation’s electricity generation woes. There are plans for the construction of ‘Snowy 2.0’. Whatever the truth about the costs and benefits of Snowy 2.0, it is not a matter that should affect inter-jurisdictional agreement about the allocation of water in the system.

The 2016-17 Federal Budget provided funds for a National Water Infrastructure Loan Facility and for the National Water Infrastructure Development Fund. The latter is “accelerating the detailed planning and construction of water infrastructure projects that will deliver new and affordable water, enhance water security and help stimulate regional economic development including through primary industries and new and expanded agriculture”.

Money from the Fund is provided to state and territory governments on the basis of their matching dollars. A substantial proportion of the Fund is to be committed to water infrastructure feasibility studies and projects in northern Australia.

Referring to the Rookwood Weir near Rockhampton, Michael McCormack said: “Water infrastructure is vital for drought-proofing communities and flood mitigation.” His colleague Matt Canavan, more colourfully, has said that Rookwood Weir is an economic game changer for the region: “a ribbon of water through dusty plains that will fuel a billion-dollar boom in farming output across Central Queensland”.

3. Facilitation of integrated catchment management

Integrated catchment management (ICM) is now accepted as a valuable means of protecting land and water resources, native vegetation and biodiversity.

The approach recognises that land and water use and environmental impacts are interconnected and that actions in a catchment have cumulative impacts on areas downstream. It sees those involved in land use planning, natural resource management, agriculture, conservation and the community working together to plan and manage programs at catchment level.

The Murray-Darling Basin Plan can in effect be seen as a major ICM program – perhaps the largest in the world.

ICM has largely been driven by voluntary action through the Landcare movement. To be most effective, the geographic units within which ICM is being applied need to be recognised (or mandated) in statutory plans or regulations that have legal force.

Also, to ensure effective catchment planning and local action, data must be collected and managed at an appropriate scale, and must be easily available to land owners and managers.

In the right conditions ICM is an effective means for translating national and state natural resource management strategies into local action.

4. The encouragement of regenerative agriculture

As regenerative farmer Charles Massy has written:

Agriculture, in occupying 38 percent of the Earth’s terrestrial surface, is both the largest user of land on the planet and humankind’s largest engineered ecosystem.

Because it is based on plants, which take carbon out of the atmosphere to make and store sugars through photosynthesis, and because these plants have roots growing in the ground, a healthy agriculture has the potential to bury huge amounts of carbon for long periods.

Excessive carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (largely due to the release of long-stored carbon through burning fossil fuels) is, we now know, one of the key causes of the greenhouse effect. Absorption of excess carbon dioxide also makes the world’s oceans more acidic.

Moreover, when a healthy agriculture puts more long-lasting carbon into the soil while minimising the loss of such carbon, this in turn has a major impact on the water cycle and its crucial role in thermoregulation (i.e. climate control) of the planet.

But the problem is that traditional industrial agriculture – through practices such as burning vegetation for land clearing, using fossil fuels (in fertilisers and chemicals, and to power farm machinery), overgrazing, ploughing and fallowing – emits, rather than stores, carbon.

But it need not be this way. An ecologically and socially enhancing agriculture – what I call ‘regenerative agriculture’ – can reverse this harmful carbon-emitting signature of industrial agriculture. It can do this via various methods, but all are based around revegetation and inculcating healthy, living soils…”

(Call of the Reed Warbler – A New Agriculture, A New Earth, UQP, 2017.)

5. Short-term emergency support

It is a mistake to try to reduce the frequency or impact of drought through something narrowly defined as drought policy.

The only part of drought that ought to be treated separately is the provision, in certain specified and serious circumstances, of short-term assistance to minimise the costs to humans and animals of a situation that could not reasonably have been expected or planned for.

The Commonwealth and State Governments should agree on objective criteria that will be used to ‘switch on’ this short-term emergency assistance – perhaps region by region, to reflect the disparate situations relating to natural resources and climatic incursions.

These are the only circumstances in which the terms ‘drought support’ and ‘drought policy’ should apply.

6. The science of climate and water management

The geological record shows that the Earth has experienced dramatic changes in temperature within the period of a human generation in the distant past.

This attests to the fact that climate is affected by feedback, making it susceptible to small changes in conditions. These conditions are “oceanic processes (such as oceanic circulation), biotic processes (ie. plants), variations in solar radiation received by Earth, plate tectonics and volcanic eruptions, and human-induced alterations of the natural world”.

This last is what is currently causing global warming and the ‘climate change’ now of such concern. The mechanism for these human-induced effects is the proportion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere: including methane, chlorofluorocarbons and carbon dioxide.

The science of climate is so complex that it is still not possible to say what connections there are between each successive new incident of drought, flood or fire – feast or famine – and climate change as defined.

The other sciences involved in natural resource management, in contrast, are relatively settled.

Understandings based on the scientific method must be the basis of decisions and action about all aspects of natural resource management, including those relating to water.

Australia has a long and proud record of research and development in the area, although recent trends in the level of public funding for scientific research across the board is causing concern.

Over the last few years, and fuelled by the last drought, significant investment has been made in water information in the Bureau of Meteorology.

This provides ready public access to information, for the first time, on surface water, groundwater and soil moisture. Taken together these give a detailed and accurate measure of land-based system capability.

One of the BOM’s maps is of Landscape Water Balance, information on a daily basis about Root zone soil moisture, Upper soil moisture, Lower soil moisture, Deep soil moisture, Deep drainage, Actual evapotranspiration, Potential evapotranspiration, Runoff and Precipitation.

Such rich data has never before been available and provides one of the bases for an integrated approach to water management. It is unclear what use has been made of these data in decisions relating to the current dry in NSW and Queensland.

7. Agriculture, settlement and town water

Australia is familiar with patterns of agricultural production being prescribed by Nature. Best-known in the category is Goyder’s Line, which, in effect, joins places in South Australia with an average annual rainfall of 10 inches (250 mm). The line was conceived and ‘mapped’ in 1865 by George Goyder, Surveyor-General to South Australia, with areas to the line’s north being judged “liable to drought” and those to the south deemed arable.

Such lines have already been inexorably re-drawn by changes in rainfall pattern and more can be expected.

Although it tends to receive less public attention than the effects of drought on farmers and their animals, the pattern of rainfall also has serious implication for settlement in rural Australia.

An increasing number of rural places are seeking growth and development through the settlement of immigrants. If Australia’s population is to continue to grow apace and somehow to be actively distributed across rural and regional areas, town water supplies constitute a critical matter for attention.

8. Water reticulation and on-farm storage

This element of national water management relates to the ways in which water is transported from place to place, and how run-off is captured and stored – including on farms.

Irrigation channels and rivers/creeks/lakes are the most important sources of the water used in agriculture. In 2016-17, just over 22,000 (of 88,000) agricultural businesses used water for productive purposes.

The total volume of water used was 9.9 million megalitres, of which 9.1 million was used for irrigation. Of the 9.9 million, 37 percent was sourced from irrigation channels, 29 percent from creeks, rivers and lakes, 18 percent from groundwater and 13 percent from on-farm dams or tanks. (http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/4618.0)

In his Broken Hill interview, Malcolm Turnbull said:

Wherever we can, what we need to do in managing water in a hot, dry continent, is where we can possibly do it, we should pipe it rather than running it in open channels.

Where we can configure storages so that they are deeper, then you have less evaporation”.

Over the last decade, investments costing several billion dollars have been made in replacing inefficient channels with pipelines and increasing the efficiency of remaining open channels to reduce water loss. In effect these investments in the efficiency of water infrastructure purchased water for the environment. The easy projects have been completed.

The development of Northern Australia constantly faces the challenge of finding deep, efficient water storage sites.

9. Sustainable groundwater management

Groundwater resources are absolutely critical in Australia and in some areas provide the only reliable water supply for settlements and industry.

There are currently some serious arguments relating to the impact of various categories of land use on groundwater resources. Chief among them is coal seam gas exploration and production. Science and political processes will continue to be tested by this phenomenon and it is to be hoped that appropriate decisions will be made with minimal divisiveness among the people and communities involved.

Monitoring of groundwater resources will remain critical with increased pressure likely from industry, climate change and, potentially, from closer settlement. This is another area in which investment in the BOM’s data capacities has made great strides forward.

The relationship with drought is obvious. In dry times when run-off is reduced, a sustainable groundwater resource is even more critical.

In conclusion

The environmental and economic prosperity of Australia depends on water. Succeeding with water management at national, state, catchment and local areas is therefore critical. For this success to be assured, water management practices will need to continue to be determined by science and understanding.

In times of water shortage, the focus must remain an all elements of its management and incidence of drought should not be allowed to affect the strategic course of natural resource management activity.

As a nation we need to continue to be sympathetic to any unmanageable events that endanger the health and well-being of citizens. But sympathy is no basis for the development of longer term policies that will, among other things, minimise the incidence and extent of drought.