The Basin State
The Origin of an Idea
The Origin of an Idea
My name is Ben.
I’m a sixth-generation Australian, a descendant of William Allmon, a convict sent here in 1800, when the non-Indigenous population was about 5000, and the amount of traffic jams were zero.
The idea for The Basin State came to me 208 years after William was sent here instead of the gallows, when I was stuck in traffic with about 5000 other people. It was 2008, and I was listening to a radio report announcing that the four States were again at an impasse regarding the Murray Darling Basin. As I sat there, the drivers around me fuming, none of us moving, it occurred to me that this was a familiar theme – that the States were in conflict over a shared environmental system. This was a dilemma I’d heard my whole life, and indeed went back almost to William’s time.
It never changed.
It couldn’t, because the fundamental setup was flawed. A river system doesn’t stop at a State or Council boundary, and with 126 Councils, 4 States, a Territory, and a Federal Government, all with different rules, regulations, aims and interests, you’ve got a recipe for the same gridlock I found myself in that day.
“Wouldn’t it make sense if the Basin were its own State?” I thought, “then at least there’d be only one government, one bureaucracy, one electorate that would all make decisions that they would then live with. That would ensure consistency of governance across the entire Basin, as well as accountability.
“Then, inside that State, base the Council boundaries on the river catchments. One Council to one river (instead of four Councils to a river, or seven, or, as with the Murray, thirty-eight). That would ensure consistency of local governance across the length of the river, as well as accountability.”
I mulled over this for the next hour, until I finally escaped my gridlock…but here, 16 years later, the Basin still hasn’t escaped its own. Nor can it, as long as the present arrangement stands.
Why should every Australian care about this? Because chances are that something - or everything - we’ve eaten or drunk today has come from Australia's biggest and most important river system. It supplies water for 3.6 million people. It's where 40% of the nation's agricultural produce is grown, including 100% of our rice, 96% of our cotton and 74% of our grapes - a total annual output of food and fibre worth $24 billion. It is home to over 2 million people, 40 First Nations, 95 threatened species, and 16 wetlands of international importance. Every Australian has a stake in the cultural, environmental and economic value of the Murray-Darling Basin.
But until we change the fundamental problem of a multi-jurisdictional river system, nothing will ever improve.
So how did we get into this predicament, and how do we get out of it?
“...as a matter of reason and logical forecast, the division of the existing colonies into smaller areas to equalise the distribution of political power, will be the next great constitutional change.”
- Sir Henry Parkes.
The Problem
Australia is our home. Like any home, moving in was done in a bit of a rush – Europeans unloaded the removalist truck as fast as they could and told themselves they’d figure out the layout of the house later. Over time, they built walls in a haphazard manner, creating rooms in strange places, and eventually settled on a house design – the State borders signed off at Federation in 1901. A testament to the visionary architect Henry Parkes, it satisfied the priorities of the time, and was an important part of Australia’s evolution.
But generations later we have inherited the house, its shape determined by people in a hurry and with no understanding of the land it sits on. The design of the rooms no longer makes sense, if it ever did, but because the walls have been up for more than century, we rarely wonder why they are where they are. Today, there is not a single person alive who was present at Federation, the consecration of this piecemeal, rush-job of a house, so there’s nobody to offend if we decide to renovate. And why shouldn’t we? We have inherited a house that is dysfunctional, that cannot continue as it is.
Perhaps the biggest problem we’ve inherited is the plumbing – the Murray-Darling Basin - which everybody in the house can see is degrading by the day, but which despite good intentions never gets fixed. Can’t get fixed, because the fundamental design of the house prohibits it being fixed. The best way to solve the plumbing would be to knock all the walls down, renovate, and rebuild for the people who live here now. But unlike a home – where the first thing a new owner does is plan how they’re going to repaint, rewire, render, and repair the multitude of issues they’ve discovered after moving in – we are strangely unwilling to effect a single alteration. Why? No homeowner in history has ever said, “we can’t change a thing because that’s how the last bloke liked it.”
Perhaps it’s not unwillingness, but that it has simply not occurred to anyone that the house can be altered. Indeed, the architects – those who drew up the Constitution – not only foresaw a time when the house would need renovating, they included clauses and mechanisms to enable and encourage it. And in a house where the most important room – where we grow most of our food and fibre – is crippled by a design where five stakeholders (QLD, NSW, VIC, SA & ACT) are in perennial disagreement over its management, it is vital to ask that question: why aren’t we willing to renovate?
Why aren’t we willing to Refederate?
The Solution
Since 1838, new States have been proposed again and again, but always repeating the same original mistake: more arbitrary lines on a map. Refederation is different - States whose borders are informed by the landscape, and, more importantly, the waterscape. Let us allow the arbitrary borders to fade, and in their place let the natural environment govern the shape of our governance.
Let us ask the people who were already living here when the rest of us moved in to help rebuild, from the ground up, together this time. To take their rightful place as mentors on custodianship of the land and water. After all, they’ve lived here for a while. They know a thing or two about living in this land - demonstrated in a myriad of ways, such as the Brewarrina fish traps, built by people coming together, co-operating, sharing, and ensuring that they take just enough for themselves and leave enough for those further along.
The depth of Indigenous knowledge of how to live in a system like the Murray-Darling is evidenced by the fact that it was still here when Europeans arrived. It was in good nick. Cared for. Like a farmer will care for their land, like a homeowner will care for their home, because like the Mob, they know that their lives, and the lives of those who come after, depend upon caring for it.
The power base of the current system is in the State capitals, none of which are in the Basin. It’s like saying that the house isn’t owned by the people that live in it - it is in fact an investment property, divided into four shares, and those four owners live in mansions by the sea; in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Adelaide. These four often argue over what happens to the house, because each has a different priority.
The people actually living in the house – the Basin’s residents - are constantly asking the owners for what they need, but the owners mostly ignore them, are too busy with their mansions to listen. When they do decide to do something about the house’s plumbing, landscaping, or architecture, their actions are irrelevant at best, counterproductive and destructive at worst.
Because they don’t live in the house, and so don’t understand it.
The people living in this dysfunctional house look at each other and say, “if only there were some way we could buy this place…then we could look after it properly. We may not all see eye to eye, and have different visions of what the house could be, but at least we all live here, and will have to compromise and live with the decisions we make.”
Well, there is a way.
A Basin State.
“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
- Thomas Sowell.