Salinity conference

Background to the study and role of the steering committee
Mr Ian Thompson

I have worked in the field of natural resource management for nearly 20 years, but I think it is worth just remembering or giving you an example of why we need good information, how things change, and why information to underpin our programs is important.

Some years back, in 1992, I was participating in the early days of the Murray-Darling Basin initiative, and gee, we were proud of ourselves. We had discovered salinity as a big problem. The River Murray was going to have 30 EC in it over 30 years, we were going to put in interception schemes around the irrigation areas and along the river to keep the water quality high so South Australia could drink the water. We knew the cost of it and what it was going to do to the plumbing fittings in Adelaide. And it was groundbreaking stuff at the time – $37 million a year I think salinity was going to cost the country.

Well, that was over 10 years ago. In regard to dryland salinity at the time we used the term 'gradual deterioration'. There was this big problem: there were groundwater mounds under the irrigation areas. Since then this gradual deterioration has turned into a dryland flood. If we come forward to now, we find even the Murray-Darling Basin Commission did its own salinity audit, and surprised itself that 60 per cent of the salinity comes from dryland sources but nearly 100 per cent of the money was being spent on preventing the obvious around irrigation areas. And it was going to increase by 50 per cent in 50 years, and we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars, not tens. So the world moves on. We'd have only discovered that if we had done the audits, the surveys, if we had looked at where the salinity was – it was not just salinity in the Mallee, it was not just salinity around Loxton or the MIA, it was dryland salinity.

I think that just underlines the fact that we do need good methods, we need good methods that everyone accepts and we need something where you can make a comparison across states. A lot of the focus for the National Action Plan, revamped Natural Heritage Trusts and the Murray-Darling Basin Commission's new Salinity Management Strategy was driven by things like the National Land and Water Resources Audit and the commission's own salinity audit. Information is important.

We now recognise that we are not going to solve those problems through interception schemes alone, but gee, they give us a good breathing space. We are going to have to tackle things on the ground. Dryland salinity means we are going to have to know where the salinity is, and we are going to have to tackle it at the regional, catchment, farm and ultimately paddock level. The approach that governments at state and Commonwealth level have taken to all natural resource management problems now is a regional approach. Government didn't take a regional approach because it was a new flavour of the day – highly complex problems need solutions that can be tailored to the local level. So the aim was to empower local communities to be able to understand their problem, tailor solutions to those problems, and then undertake the trade-offs at the local level. But they can only do that if they have access to the best information about issues that spread beyond the region, even beyond the state in some cases. So there is also a role for national, regional and state or multiregional information to make the system work.

In particular, they have got to be able to identify what the problem is and where it is. With salinity, as you all know, it is varied across the landscape. It is pretty clear now it doesn't all occur in a massive similar place. Although in some places it does, in other places – in the upland areas of New South Wales and Victoria and probably parts of Queensland – there are bits of salinity here and bits there. If regions are to make sensible decisions about salinity, and still maintain their productive base and maintain their biodiversity, they are going to need good ideas about where this is, and we are going to have to tailor our money. I said the cost of salinity might be hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The amount of money governments can afford to put into this may approximate that, but it may be unlikely. The money is going to have to be well targeted. We will need to know where the salt is, how much is there, what is happening to it. Is it a significant issue, is it not a significant issue, which bits should we deal with first, should we be taking a triage approach and handling the bit that is handleable and letting some areas go, as has happened in parts of Western Australia? Regions are going to have to make very hard decisions about investing in this, and they are going to have to be informed by good information.

Regions are good at bringing communities along with them, but they are not usually salinity mapping experts, they are not experts in all areas of technology. Salinity mapping has been controversial over the last few years – there are a number of different techniques, a number of different players in the field – and words like 'salinity hazard' and 'salinity risk' are bandied about. This has caused confusion and has provided the opportunity for some politicians to win a few points off each other. But I think at the end of the day, if we do not organise ourselves around similar terminology, understanding what technology can work best in which regions, we run the risk of losing the community and losing overall battle against the salinity trend.

For this reason the Australian government took the view that, since it was supporting a lot of this with cold, hard cash, it would be important to bring together a group of experts who may not always talk to each other as frequently as might be desirable, for time and money and other reasons, to come to some sort of consensus about what could be done best in what region, what languages could be used, what technologies were best. The aim is to bring together all the views and not to say someone has got it right and someone has got it wrong, because my understanding is that no-one has got it right and no-one has got it wrong – there are techniques that work here, techniques that work there, there are techniques that might be compatible with other techniques, there are things that might fit in, depending on what other activities you are carrying out in a region. It is to get an understanding of all that and then be able to put it forward in a simple language that the community can understand and use and invest in.

What I understand from the products of the review we have today is that they outline what each method is capable of and they include an assessment of their costs and benefits, and how useful that product is in moving from mapping to catchment based solutions to managing salinity in the landscape. What I myself would like to see come from that is, as I said, a document and some consensus language that people can use so we do not confuse those people in the community who are trying to address the problem.

I would also like to see that each of these techniques will continue to develop into the future, and that we do not freeze ourselves in time and say, 'Well, we really liked drilling holes in the ground and it's very good, and we're going to keep doing it forever,' but as technology changes we are able to move on. The Australian government and the Natural Resource Management Standing Committee are very much looking forward to the results of this work so they can use it to inform scientific underpinnings of program investments now and into the future. So we are looking forward to receiving the report and the advice
you give.

Thank you.