Concerned,

I have no particular commitment to confrontation (boycott). What i wonder is how do such sensible ideas as trickle irrigation subsidies get implemented in the very near future, at least before 2019 or even at any time? What might bring this about?

As for your Lake Eyre suggestion, it has enourmous tourist potential too, especially scuba diving - sink a few ships and trams and things. or even dumped car bodies to attract fish.

The potential storage of lake Eyre to sea level is 200 cubic kilometres. The world ocean surface area is 361 million square kilometres. So roughly speaking filling Lake Eyre will drop sea level by 0.5 mm. This sets back the climate change effect on sea level rise by 6 months or so.

This would be a much bigger impact (on sea level) than the purported benefit of the Kyoto protocol which is that Kyoto will set back climate change by 9 days apparently (according to some analyst anyway).

Heck with that sort of outcome, maybe we can get the UN to pay for it!

The increased rainfall will reduce the impact of summer bushfires in Victoria as well, since the dry Victorian summer is a key cause of the bushfire risk.

1) We know that trickle irrigation can slash irrigation water use by 50% or more for the same productive outcome in terms of crop yield.

2) We know that the cost of installing trickle irrigation is high enough that its cheaper for the farmer to use extra water by wastefully flood irrigating (which leaches into subsoil or unproductively grows weeds or evaporates without making it back to the river). So they save the up front investment cost of the tickle irrigation.

Solution:

Offer to subsidise the cost of installing trickle irrigation in return for “locking up” a portion of their water allocation. “Locking up” a portion means leaving some of their allocated water in the river.

The farmer wins because they end up with a more valuable easier to manage farm and they also get lower future annual water costs. Their productive capacity is unchanged.

The nation wins because it substantially reduces drought-risk on farms.

It is good for the rivers because they get more water.

It greatly increases our food security, that is we get more food per unit water.

It will help address to perhaps a small extent the recent inflation in the price of the food we buy.

This question (for which I have no convenient answer) goes to the role and heart of the Greens, not just as a parliamentary movement but now more than ever as a manifestation of an extra-parliamentary and community movement.

There are so many other similar predicaments, the big one of course is that political “progress” on climate change moves at an irrelevantly slow pace.

The direct action campaigns of the Franklin River and Northern N.S.W. forest movements were undoubtedly a big part of the genesis of the Greens party. These movements, while initially electorally marginalised, created a power to change government policies and directly challenge the vested interests of more powerfull stakeholders in decisions about the areas being protected.

I do not subscribe to the view that the power of these historic extra parliamentary campaigns was direct action, putting our bodies in the way of destructive machinery. I believe the direct action was/is a form of sensational theatre that managed to create a sensational controversy that caught the nation’s attention. It was the tip of the iceburg, the bulk of which lay in the years of hard work and community organising (such as has been occuring with the Murray/Darling).

Perhaps a direct action campaign like the good old days might work, but I suspect the occupation of big irrigating properties to stop their consumption would be a bit more problematic than occupying a forest or river.

However a high profile, nationally co-ordinated (maybe even internationally) boycott of the produce of the big irregators would, apart from threaten the economic viability of some of the big irrigators if they did not adapt to the river, it would create a national, sensational controversy outside of the parliament that the parliament would have to respond to.

The Greens have become quite competent in parliamentary business. However some of its extra parliamentary campaigning skills have, I believe, atrophied. The election has become both the ends and the means. Sorry for sounding like a boring old fart, but the original vision of the Greens was with the politicians as the tip of the iceburg of a broad community movement, the parliamentary strategy was to assist and facilitate the agendas of the community movements.

While being paliamentarily competent, today the Greens also have a huge national and international network and a media machine. Who else amongst the people’s ecology movement has such a thing?

The boycott idea is an example, not a proposal. The scope of extra-parliamentary activity that the Green Machine can engage in is very broad. A stark contrast to the limitations of the parliament’s agenda.

But in terms of the Murray/Darling, it seems that the parliamentary agenda is not enough, of itself, to save it.