Why "Save the Murray"?

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Quadrant Magazine, December 2004 - Volume XLVIII Number 12

Abstract

I WAS SURPRISED when I learned that the Australian was running a "Saving the Murray" campaign. I realised that journalists often fail in their quest for the truth, but I assumed that they at least subscribed to the ideal. Campaigning - organised action to achieve a particular end - is the antithesis of honest reporting.

Environmentalism is now big business and big politics. It would therefore seem important that journalists at our national daily newspaper scrutinise the actions and the media releases from politicians, environmental activists and the growing industry and research lobby, particularly on an issue as important as the Murray River. Yet they were running a campaign.

In August, in advance of the federal election, Greenpeace, the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and the Wilderness Society announced their policy platform as saving the Murray River, ending logging of old-growth forests in Tasmania and "tackling" climate change. On September 6, the editorial in the Australian suggested "it would be hard to slide a cigarette paper between the environmental policies of the major parties" on these three issues. The editorial did not acknowledge the newspaper's particular interest in saving the Murray. And there were in fact significant differences between Labor and the government on the issues of climate change and old-growth logging - with the differences on old-growth logging emerging as a defining election issue. In contrast both Labor and the Coalition had committed to increasing environmental flows in the Murray, the only difference being the amount of water to be "saved".

Since the Australian launched its "Saving the Murray" campaign in February 2001, public and political support in metropolitan Australia has been effectively galvanised to lament the dying of the Murray River and support the need to return water as environmental flows. But along the Murray, communities see things quite differently.

If, as the Australian's editor Michael Stutchbury suggests, the newspaper is about Australia "having a conversation with itself", then the "Saving the Murray" campaign provides a depressing illustration of the extent to which metropolitan Australia is being swept along by environmental fundamentalism. The problem with fundamentalist creeds is that they are driven by adherence to predetermined agendas and are rarely tolerant of new information, irrespective of the weight of evidence.

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