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CANBERRA - In the far north of Queensland, the city of Mackay is still counting the cost of the devastating floods that inundated hundreds of homes and businesses with a ferocity that shocked even a nation used to the brutality of natural disasters.
Further south, the rains have
been gentler, encouraging farmers across southern Queensland and northern New South Wales to plant heavily, with forecasters predicting a 40 per cent increase in summer crops after years of drought.
But even as northern floodwaters run down the Darling River, and NSW prepares to release water from its storages into the vast Murray River system, large tracts of Australia's most important food-producing areas remain parched.
And while rice, cotton and other irrigated crops continue to suffer, and tough water restrictions remain in force across much of the Murray Darling system, the bickering over its future continues.
Federal Climate Change Minister Penny Wong yesterday continued negotiations with Victorian Water Minister Tim Holding over the state's refusal to join Queensland, NSW and South Australia in an A$10 billion ($11.4 billion) plan to hand management of the massive river system to Canberra. The plan was announced last year by former Prime Minister John Howard to sweep existing state responsibilities into a single, unified scheme to rescue the ailing 2500km network of rivers, wetlands and storages.
Faced with its own, bitter, internal war over access to the system's water, and intense rivalry between farmers, industry and towns, and the huge thirst of Melbourne _ which over the past six years has received its lowest rainfall in 150 years _ Victoria has refused to sign up.
Premier John Brumby said ahead of yesterday's talks that any solution would be months away. "It's not a problem that happened in the last few weeks [and] it's not a problem that's going to be solved in the next few weeks," he said.
Further bad news came yesterday with a report by University of NSW researchers warning that decades of neglect by state governments had allowed the construction of thousands of kilometres of unregulated earthworks that were siphoning water from the already overstretched system.
Their report said satellite images had shown 2000km of dams, levees and channels diverting water to farmland, including 400km built around one of the basin's most important wetlands.
"We have no idea about what people are taking off these floodplains and governments for too long have really sat on their hands when trying to deal with this issue, and it is to the detriment of the environment," one of the report's authors, Professor Richard Kingsford, told ABC radio.
Meanwhile, Australia's eastern seaboard continues to endure mixed fortunes.
National Climate Centre climate meteorologist Lyn Bettio said the La Nina event that had started to dump rain across Queensland and northern NSW since November was expected to continue until the end of autumn, or early winter.
This had brought above-average rainfall to large areas of the two states, and had fed water into the northern reaches of the Murray-Darling basin.
But other regions, including northern Victoria, had largely missed out.
Murray Darling Basin Commission chief executive Wendy Craik said good rain had fallen across the northern part of the basin. "That's good news, because some of those areas haven't been wet since 1993."
But she said that water storages in the basin were at 20 per cent of capacity, compared with an average of about 65 per cent for this time of year.
"We need lots and lots more rain, preferably over the upper Murray area."
