In all the discussion about irrigation in Australia, you rarely hear the word “people”. There is “the environment”, there are “social impacts”, and there are “irrigators”, but not people.
Recently, in a long trek around the southern end of the Murray-Darling Basin for Rural Press, I met people, and understood that the effects of drought and policy change can’t be held at arms length with faceless generalisations.
What’s happening in the region has a face, and it is the face of you and I, wherever we are.
The academic term “socio-economic impacts” fails to describe the fact that the impacts of change, whatever they may be, are on real people, with real family photos on the mantelpiece, real favourite armchairs, and real friends in real communities. Like all of us, they take pride in their work when there’s something to be proud of, educate their kids, and every now and then stop and delight in a lovely day or glorious sunset at the place they call home.
Right now, the people who are called “irrigators” are wondering how it has come to pass that the form of agriculture they practice has put them on the wrong side of society's ledger.
Until this century, irrigators used the water and the infrastructure that governments had handed them to grow food and fibre in an enormously effective way. They fed us and our nation’s bottom line, built their lives, and their communities, and had a distinct and important purpose in the fabric of Australian society.
Then came a drought, not of their making, and the word “irrigator” began to acquire some new connotations: greedy, wasteful, environmental vandals.
If this is true of the irrigation community, it’s true of us all.
We’re all part of a society that, without us really noticing, has come to pollute too much and use too many resources. So hands up, all those who volunteer to step aside from our wasteful ways? Who is going to stop using products made of fossil fuels, stop visiting the supermarket, and live off what they can grow?
All Australians since World War II have consumed like there’s no tomorrow—only here tomorrow is.
We’re all in for an adjustment, but for most of us it will be slow and/or voluntary. For irrigators, adjustment has been forced and fast, and made all the more painful because somehow, it’s all their fault.
The adjustment in water use is necessary, but the language should change.
There are no “irrigators”, as such; only people who use irrigation water to grow food—the most fundamental and non-negotiable activity of humanity.
Politics, the environmental movement and the media need to accord this occupation some dignity. Let the adjustment take its course, but recognise that it’s altering the lives of people—real people just as proud and comfortable with their profession as any politician, environmentalist or journalist.
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