Matthew Abraham: We’ve wrecked the Murray-Darling but SA’s desalination plant isn’t the answer

It’s taken us more than a century to wreck the Murray-Darling river system but we’ve finally done it — but will dusting off the $2 billion desalination plant to save turn our white elephant into a white knight? Probably not, writes Matt Abraham.

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It seemed like a good idea to get the three bowel screen specimens out of the butter compartment in the fridge and drop them off at the lab, conveniently located behind the doctor’s surgery.

It’s not like they were taking up much space.

The chunky pooper-scooper models have been superseded by dinky, green dipsticks that click hygienically into small containers filled with a magic liquid.

But, even in a zip-lock bag, having your dipsticks cheek by jowl with the Lurpak is a mind over matter thing.

So, popping in to the lab collection centre should have been a good idea. Only it was a bad idea.

While inside for a few minutes, some dickhead stole the cash out of my wallet, which was in the car. The car has an auto-lock feature, which is a good idea.

Except it doesn’t always auto-lock. Which is a bad idea. This time it decided not to lock itself.

It’s a good idea to trust your fellow humans.

It’s a really bad idea to leave anything valuable in a car, and then trust the car to lock itself. Even in broad daylight. Even in Malvern. What is the world coming to?

Robberies aside, it’s been a big week in South Australia for the good-idea-bad-idea conundrum.

At first glance, it seems like a good idea to dust off our $2 billion mothballed monolith, the desalination plant sulking on the cliffs near O’Sullivan Beach, and use it to save the Murray-Darling river system.

White elephant becomes white knight.

The Marshall Government’s floundering Environment Minister, David Speirs, has proposed cranking up the enormous desal plant to its full 100GL/year capacity, or about half Adelaide’s domestic water supply, to do just that.

As reported by The Advertiser and Sunday Mail’s national affairs editor Matt Smith, the minister is spending $2 million on a feasibility study into his desal thought bubble as he’s “open to any way in which we can fast-track the delivery of the 450GL of environmental water required for the health of the river”.

Federal Water Minister David Littleproud said he’s happy to look at any project “that stacks up”.

Labor’s water spokesman Tony Burke said he’ll be surprised if the desalination option adds up “but if they want to do more work on it and see whether or not it adds up, then I’ve got no instinctive problem with it”.

You could safely float the paddlesteamer PS Emmylou sideways through those lukewarm responses.

After being mothballed for years, the Port Stanvac Desalination Plant is about to be brought online.

Minister Speirs is one of the Marshall team’s brighter sparks but he’s struggling in political quicksand after siding with the upstream states to dud the Murray-Darling of a previously negotiated 450GL of environmental flows.

His desal proposal plays into the hands of big NSW irrigators who think the river tap should be turned off permanently for Adelaide, that the precious Lower Lakes are a waste of space and that the Murray Mouth simply irrigates the ocean.

Honestly, some of these clowns would be happy to see us all die of thirst.

Unless they’ve got rocks in their heads, neither side of federal politics will agree to a Speirs plan to compensate SA for the hideous cost of running our power-hungry desal plant for alleged environmental flows.

It’d be upstream political poison.

Besides, Speirs bagged the desal plant in 2017 as too big and too expensive to operate when the auditor-general found it cost $13.5 million to produce just 2 per cent of Adelaide’s water needs.

It’s taken us more than a century to wreck the Murray-Darling river system, but we’ve finally done it.

David Speirs - SA Minister for Environment and Water

Australian Agriculture Minister David Littleproud.

Fixing it can’t be “fast-tracked” – it’s going to take a determined federal government to crack down on big water crooks, spend more on irrigation water buy-backs, keep a sensible eye on harm to river communities, and stare down hysterical state interests, including ours.

As Conservation SA tweeted: “The desal plant is there to ensure water security for Adelaide. That’s different to improving the health of the #murraydarling”.

Look, it be great to actually use the desal plant for something, anything, wouldn’t it?

No, not for this.

It’s a good-idea-bad-idea, and we all know it.