The case revealed a structural problem: there is no government agency with direct legal responsibility for ensuring the safety and supply of drinking water in Laramba, or in other Indigenous communities in the Territory. While (predominantly non-Indigenous) cities like Darwin and Alice Springs have regulated water supplies, drinking water in Indigenous communities is neither licensed nor regulated. There is a legislative void, which somehow remained hidden until recently.

The racialised system of drinking water regulation in the Territory, one that privileges certain populations over others while maintaining the sheen of objective legality, underscores many key points Richard Beasley makes in his entertaining, profane, and frequently terrifying tirade, Dead in the Water, which explains just what has gone wrong with water management in the Murray–Darling Basin. Amid the complex mess of impenetrably dense legislation, water-modelling jargon, and bureaucratic obfuscation, there are clear winners and losers when it comes to the way the state manages our most precious resource. In the Murray– Darling Basin, it is Indigenous communities and landowners, family farmers, and the precious ecosystems of the Basin itself that have been sacrificed in favour of irrigators and those invested in facilitating their continued unobstructed access to water.

As Beasley so capably shows, it is precisely the complexity of the system that has obscured one of the great environmental scandals of the Australian nation’s short history. Designed to fix looming environmental disaster caused by over-extraction of water from the system, the Murray–Darling Basin Plan has in fact produced the opposite result. Piece by shocking piece, Beasley, who was counsel assisting South Australia’s Royal Commission into the Murray–Darling Basin, deftly picks apart the disastrous decisions, manoeuvres, and interventions that have led us here. His stories will be familiar to many, thanks to the regularity with which drought, fish deaths, illegal pumping, and alleged corruption in the Murray–Darling Basin have punctuated the media discourse in the past decade. Beasley’s skill is to tie all this together into a coherent whole, thereby revealing the true scale of the debacle.

John Howard emerges as an unlikely hero, enacting legislation, such as the Water Act 2007 (Cth), that actually managed to give primacy to the environment in the management of the Murray–Darling Basin. From there, it’s all downhill. To me, the pinnacle of the chicanery was the ‘postcode fix’. Here, the Murray– Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) arbitrarily determined that the annual volume of water (in gigalitres – GL – or billions of litres) needed to start with a ‘2’ (i.e., a NSW postcode). Thus, the figure of 2,750GL was settled upon, despite scientific evidence that a figure between 4,000 and 7,000GL was what was needed to safeguard the system. While I was at times overwhelmed by the granular detail of the atrocity conveyed by Beasley, the fact that the MDBA used Penrith’s postcode to land a figure for environmental flows, when they should have used one of Hobart’s, remains vivid.

If only, opines a frustrated Beasley, the MDBA had followed the law and the science. Professor Tess Lea, anthropologist of ‘wild policy’, would see familiar patterns amid the bureaucratic disorder evident in the administration of the Murray–Darling Basin Plan. Per Lea, the idea of the rational state is a myth. Indeed, bureaucracy is frequently anarchic and illogical, with interventions opportunistically grasped in service of the axiomatic logic of capitalist extraction. Often, the law matters little, nor does the science or policy.

Beasley’s revelation of the chaos of the state’s ‘management’ of water should be a clarion call for all Australians. The cotton and crop producers of the Murray–Darling Basin are looking north, seeking to exploit the relatively untouched rivers and aquifers of the Northern Territory and to clear tens of thousands of hectares of tropical savanna in the process. Beasley’s ‘hydro-denialism’ – the irrational belief that you have more water than you do – abounds in northern Australia. Yes, we have rivers that spectacularly flood each wet season, but for many months of the year they are dry. Climate change is expected to have a significant impact on our water systems, including saltwater incursion into freshwater wetlands and aquifers, increased droughts, more severe cyclones, and oppressive heat leading to increases in evapotranspiration. After two failed wet seasons in 2018 and 2019, trees and mangroves across the Northern Territory began to die. Some Indigenous communities almost ran out of water; as the temperature soared, people crammed into overcrowded houses without air conditioning. Climate change will exacerbate existing inequalities in health and infrastructure provision, as well as the lack of education and employment opportunities in northern Australia, raising political questions about the viability of human habitation in these places without radical changes.

Yet despite this slow-moving disaster, and all that is at stake, plans for large-scale agribusiness continue apace. Would-be irrigators have already found in the Northern Territory a pliable regulatory system with many of the core features that have led to the demise of the Murray–Darling, including poor compliance and monitoring, free water for irrigators, and the promise to authorise the environmentally disastrous practice of floodplain harvesting that has significantly damaged the Darling-Baaka River. While irrigators are granted high-security water licences by an enthusiastic Northern Territory government desperate to ‘develop the north’, Indigenous communities like Laramba have no entitlement to safe drinking water.

As Beasley suggests, the complexity of the system provides the perfect foil for this free-for-all. The real anarchists are the bureaucrats and politicians who opportunistically and selectively deploy policy, law, and science. Just when will we say ‘enough is enough’?