What's the obstacles and the opportunities to save the Murray ? How does legislation help with this process?

I'm wondering how we can save the Murray darling basin %26amp; what's the obstacle there %26amp; how legislation can sort out this obstacle.|||Of course, the basin will always be there, so don''t worry...





In all seriousness, however, saving the flow and usefulness of the Murray-Darling is going to be painful. Because of that basin's (along with many others in Australia) patterns of plenty and drought, it's been easy during plentiful years to increase utilization and dependence well beyond what the river can handle in average years. There is simply less water in the basin than people think they need to take from it.





The only solution is to reduce consumption. This is hard, because there's no painless way of doing this.





Voluntary conservation is easy, but won't ever amount to any significance (a farmer isn't going to 'voluntarily' reduce his crop, especially if other farmers gain the short term benefit of his action).





The real solution is to incorporate all stakeholders in redefining the costs of using the Darling's water. Because you don't really pay a direct fee for the water taken from the river, you take as much as you need/feel you can get away with. There's no incentive to be sparing or efficient.





Charging everybody the real costs will mean that uses for water that are better done elsewhere will and only the the most valuable uses will continue (probably municipal water in the greater Adelaide area, but not exclusively).





The sad part of this is that it will largely end farming in the basin (and thus many of the communities that are there). It will also make Adelaide more expensive to live in. It's sad, but quite frankly, those uses and communities were never tenable in the first place- Australia's a dry place, with occasional outliers of wet.