note: since the 1970s, forcing an increased reliance on groundwater. Australia’s aquifers are being drained at unsustainable rates, but Perth is now actively replenishing them by pumping 10% of its treated wastewater into shallow aquifers that naturally filter and store the water until it is needed again. This process of augmenting freshwater supplies with treated wastewater, called Indirect Potable Reuse. could be crucial to futureproofing urban water supplies. In 2018 recycled water use increased in most urban centers and although no city directly uses treated wastewater as tap water, Perth has considered it.
I’m an Australian farmer who uses this system. Overall this video does a pretty good job but it does conflate a couple of issues. The main one is that over extraction is not related to the water market as the government decides each year what percentage of entitlements are received each year based on how much rainfall there has been. The other is that floodplain harvesting is regulated in most of Aus and is in the process of being regulated in the remaining areas. Also water that is harvested from flood plains is not able to be sold in the water market as you are not allowed to let water that has been collected for irrigation back into the river due to contamination concerns.
Yeah uh corruption. You're obviously a good ethical farmer, you're awesome farmers are beyond under appreciated, thankyou. However not every farmer is like you and it is beyond easy to game this system.
Also fails to address the concern that you can’t just let people take as much water as they want from a river that runs through their property in Australia. There would be nothing left in the river for the farmers further downstream. Our land to water ratio is just not like other countries/continents
do you buy the entitlement once and then get to sit on it forever or does the entitlement only last for a certain amount of time after which you have to re-buy it?
@@charleslambert3368 you can buy water on either a temporary or permanent basis. If you own permeant water each year the water authority will tell you what % of your allocation you are allowed to extract. This allocation may go up through the year if there is enough rainfall in the catchments. You are allowed to carry 20-30% of your allocation through to the next year if you don't use it otherwise you forfeit any amount you don't use. If you own permeant water you can sell your allocation to other users on the temporary market. In this case the water must be used by the end of the year. The price of permeant water is fairly consistent as it has a long term return where as temporary water fluctuates wildly depending on rainfall each year.
Australia seems like the country of "what could possibly go wrong" I feel like every time i hear about them its because the government did something without fully considering the longterm consequences or safeguarding against bad actors.
It really shocked me when I went to Bourke NSW as a teenager. The sheer size of the water storage reservoirs used to grow cotton out there (basically the edge of the desert) is insane.
That sounds reasonable if they can't count on getting water from anywhere else. Their best bet may be to figure out how much water they have at the start of the growing season and plant accordingly.
@@WyvernYT the unreasonable part is growing a crop like cotton that uses massive amounts of water right next to the desert in a country that regularly has serious droughts that will only get worse due to climate change.
@@Caxacate Cotton is actually the best crop to grow if you have irrigation water in these regions. It suits the boom and bust cycles, it is the highest return for a short season crop. Many of these irrigators grow a crop for 2 years and then sit and wait for the next flood in 5 years time. Other crops like oranges, almonds have a HIGHER water use than cotton and need to be irrigated every season
Dear HAI editors, the repeats of stock footage clips are amazing and I look forward to them tremendously. I, too, find the man throwing his laptop into the sea hilarious and more than worthy of a rewatch. Also that clip of a man with blue eyes and curly hair looking extremely unimpressed and making dubiousness gestures, I always get a kick when I spot that one. Sincerely, a loving fan.
There's this one popular stock footage clip, although I've never seen it on this channel, it's an open file cabinet with manila folders, and one of them is labeled in handwritten ink "miscellaneous". And I swear to God, the handwriting is identical to my own. It's creepy as Heck.
And I thought this video was going to be about the overuse of the Murray River for irrigation and other industry which has led to the mouth of the river sometimes closing up entirely due to lack of water and the area around the mouth and for MANY miles back upstream becoming a toxic unusable disaster area.
I was looking at satellite imagery on Google Maps of Australian cities and every time I’d see a river or pond I’d be confused and concerned about why it’s the colour that it was (I am from the PNW of Canada so it’s a pretty big difference from what I’m used to)
@@salamander405 Australian rivers tend to be brown, but that's perfectly healthy. Its partly the soil, partly the light. There's a pretty good line about it in All The Rivers Run.
@@salamander405we don’t normally get huge water flows, and I think our dirt and vegetation affects the colour, many rivers and creeks are very polluted though, especially if they run through urban areas, by farmland, or old mines. Our drinking water is absolutely amazing though, I live in Melbourne and we have some of the best water in the world, we’re super careful to make sure it doesn’t get polluted. Drinking water is usually collected into reservoirs and then piped to our homes, so it doesn’t travel through the river
to solve that, said upstream waters are just saying remove the barrier at the mouth of the Murray and just, let the sea flow back in there... which, i dunno
Just need to point out: this is only valid for the Murray-Darling Basin, /not/ the whole country. There are smaller but much less significant water marketrs in other parts of the country.
Ah, that makes sense. Naturally, it's a good old case of the westernmost state (or, two-thirds, or more in this case) of the country being ignored when talking about the entirety of the country. ...which, admittedly, in a brief semi-educational UA-cam video, is fair enough and certainly a better explanation than me not knowing about something so important that directly impacts me.
Australian here, who grew up on a farm. You buy entitlements but then regulators set allocation % each year, based on dam levels. There are also different types of allocations, such as normal and high security. During drought, water allocation can be set to 0% for normal security and some other % for high security. The government can do buy backs, but that’s usually for other uses that aren’t allowed for legislatively. As an example, some rivers have “environmental flow” to ensure ecological outcomes (which rarely works). Also, generally, depending on the state, things like captured water from rainfall can actually be regulated and licensed once the capture amount exceeds a certain amount. An interesting reference point is the NSW Government Natural Resources Access Regulator (NRAR) which is the primary regulator for things like this in NSW, however other systems have other regulators, both in NSW and in other states, like with the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, which is a multi governmental statutory authority which regulates the Murray and Darling basin water system across NSW, SA and Victoria. Anyways, just some fun facts. And yes, Kangaroos are CrossFit rats.
Prior usage water rights function similarly to an open water market, in practice. Large landowners may derive the entire value of their property from their prior usage rights, which they will auction off year-to-year. The problem with this system is that it encourages wasteful use of water if you already have the rights and aren't planning on auctioning the water off. It also means that agricultural users pay several orders of magnitude less for water than most municipal utilities, so the water needed for sustaining human life (i.e. drinking and hygiene) subsidizes growing exportable cash crops like almonds and alfalfa. The other massive problem is that priority rights-holders have rights to the same volume of water even in dry years, so lower-priority rights-holders are required to eliminate their water use entirely before the priority rights-holders have to limit their use by a single drop. This often leads to over-allocation as individual rights-holders attempt to use more water than was actually delivered by storms that year based on their existing rights.
Yep, which is why the concept of private ownership of water is really fucking stupid. Ironically, this is how water rights function in the east of the US, but out west its all about water rights.
What you're describing as "floodplain harvesting" sounds a hell of a lot like what people in India and elsewhere are promoting as "Floodplain/groundwater restoration" - using a bunch of small dams to slow water down. Water that doesn't reach the sea frequently ends up seeping back into the soil and into groundwater aquifers that we have otherwise been rapidly depleting. Water rights are complicated and often dystopian; Western Water Rights in the US are basically designed to guarantee maximum exploitation, and in arid regions that brings eventual environmental devastation.
@@curiosity780I mean, you can always open the sluice gates and let some water through. It happens all the time in hydropolitical situations, where upstream dam owners are required to allow some water to go downstream. It's why Lake Mead has been depleting. They could easily fill that back up by not letting any water out through the Hoover Dam, but then everyone downstream would be screwed (and the dam wouldn't be generating any power either)
Floodplains aren't always a bad thing. When properly managed that can make it better for everyone, but a market is obviously not the way to manage that.
I thought the same, they really produce a lot of biodiveristy, but maybe they seal with some types of sands like bentonite and deny the aquifer replenishment.
May I recommend looking at two charts: Aquifer locations and depths Soil location and depths. One of the unique problems within Australia comes from how old the country is itself, one of the more stable regions considering. This doesn't just give us tiny mountains in comparison, but it means a lot of the 'good soil' had millions of years to be washed out to sea*. It also means the rocks underneath might not be as good at producing Aquifer as well. *As an Australian living in another country and gardening, the fact you have feet of soil before you hit clay is.... just, yeah, so much easier to dig over here!
There are limits to overland water harvesting in most parts of Australia, limits on size of dams, % of flow harvested, flood water level triggers on pumping etc. Those rules don't apply to a house roof though where you can do what you want in most areas.
@@GeeROOin most areas, it’s a legislated requirement that all new builds have rainwater tanks, with the tank size requirement increasing significantly once you leave the suburbs
Couple of corrections, firstly there are many parts of the country without water markets, riparian rights still apply. Secondly, the water market isnt a failure, it achieved exactly what was intended, rich people made more money.
On the flip side (as an Aussie), it seems crazy to me that Americans can't collect rain water that's fallen on their land. The floodplain example is obviously a bad extreme, but a lot of Australia isn't anywhere near a major river - without rainwater tanks a lot of rural communities wouldn't be able to survive, as most people have their own in dry areas that they can collect & use for free. Edit: I got schooled 😂 Didn't realise only Colorado & Utah had those types of rainwater restrictions - touché!
I'm not sure for industrial farming, but for individuals, it often depends on each municipality of harvesting rainwater legality. So even in the same state, a neighbor down the street technically in a different city or town may have different legal ability to harvest rainwater
I keep seeing this persistent myth and it is simply not true. Is it the case that there are some municipalities in the US where rainwater collection is banned during drought periods? Sure. But by and large across many states residents have the freedom to collect rainwater on their property. I’m tired of seeing this misinformation keep being repeated.
Water rights in the US West are more complicated than that. There are a variety of restrictions over how you can collect water and what you can do with it, and a lot of the rights to water from rivers are indeed owned by corporations or individuals, and some of it is owned downstream of you, so you don't really have collection rights. If a significant stream runs through your property, and you live in a Western state, you probably aren't allowed to take most of that water for yourself. In Utah and Colorado, you don't even have the right to collect rainwater (though in Utah, you can collect up to 2500 gal, so it's not much of a restriction).
they could have gotten jobs as agricultural consultants nut they did some other things and all members of the civil service of executive rank and the 87% of the sitting members of the bill that voted for it have mining consultancy jobs because it pays better :(
Here's a most cited paper on the subject if your genuinely interested ewater.org.au/archive/crcch/archive/pubs/pdfs/technical200205.pdf oh and the federal government did nothing as a political reward for the Victorian labour party backing during fraises coup en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional_crisis
The Australian constitution said no one could have control or ownership of any waterways, unabridged......but our gruberment over road / ignore it and sold us out ......again.
There are literally towns on the Murray river that have to get water shipped in because cotton farms upstream siphon off the water that would flow to them.
What’s even worse, is that the rivers that make up the Murray-Darling Basin flow through indigenous land, yet they aren’t entitled to that water. Despite water being a crucial component of their beliefs, and a violation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Short-sighted government policies are what allow this sort of thing to happen; it's not an inherent feature of FMC. Put more sensible rules in place and FMC will balance accordingly.
@@Effisso Rules make the market not free, though. Hoarding and inflicting arbitrary amounts of societal harm for marginal personal gain are core tenets of the free market.
@@EffissoIf You have to add rules to it then it's no longer a "free market" isn't it? Every single economy is planned even the top companies in the world plan deeply their economies, why don't just plan it all to benefit the people instead of just a few millionaires, the evidence is clear, the disparity between de richest and the poorest increase all over the world.
My favorite thing about Australia as an Australian is how you can't do anything without first acknowledging and respecting the traditional owners. Imagine if someone stole your land and killed most of your family. Then years later every time a game of football starts, a politician gives a speech or your middle school teacher is starting the day. Then those same people who've stolen and murdered now say WE WOULD LIKE TO PAY OUR RESPECTS TO THE TRADITIONAL OWNERS PAST PRESENT AND FUTURE. So the same people who stole not only everything you had but also your future are now standing on what was once yours they verbally say they respect you but you won't be getting that land back. Imagine that happened to you, how do you think you would feel about it.
Hi, very rarely comment on you tube videos but this one whilst making some extremely valid points to Australia's MDB water market, has some misleading and inaccurate statements that should be further researched especially when considering the allowance of dams on properties and the ability to capture water on your property as you please. It also is incorrect wrt to how the US (Colorado River catchment at least) operates as they too have a water market but is based of first come first served (law of the land). It is definitely not as simple as your 5 minute video claims to be, and should be corrected if true and correct edutainment is what you are trying to achieve.
Environmental studies minor here: the US has 2 systems of water rights. Riparian rights are in the east where water is more plentiful. But out west they use prior appropriation and the rights can be bought and sold eg colorado and California.
In the us, western states don't even let you own the rain. If you have more than two barrels (55 gallons x2) to catch rainwater off your roof you get in trouble.
I would not necessarily say that this is an example of a "free market," but rather a system whereby the Australian state is granting monopoly rights over natural resources. In general, classical economists believe that man should rightfully own that which he produces himself, but natural resources (or at least the **rent** of natural resources) rightfully belong to all of society. Free market advocates do not advocate for the monopolization of natural resources.
monopolies are an intended effect of the free market and a man owning what he produces is literally a fundamental building block of workplace communism
It's a market in the sense that those rights are traded. And while I agree with you in principle, I think the idea that "free markets are the only way to make things work" is fairly pervasive, as is the idea that anything anyone finds a way to own, however it was obtained, is theirs by right.
@@cooperised The question of who should rightfully "own" natural resources has always been fraught with controversy among classical economists, both because these resources are vital and scare, and because they are not produced by man's labor. I just think the video does a disservice by casting Australia's misguided, monopolistic water policies as an example of the "free market," which it most certainly is not.
I have been trying to discuss this Issue with other Australian's for the last 6 years, yet everyone either thinks it's a 'baseless' conspiracy theory, assume I'm stupid, or just....plain don't listen. Very few people thoroughly investigate the issue most, just, do not seem to listen or care.
It would be interesting to hear this compared to the system used in parts of the US with water shortages, because from what I've heard it doesn't seem any better
Victoria almost sold their water supply after the 1980s recession. They sold their energy grid and their public transport system, corporotised the warter system like they did initially with the public transport system, restructured remnents of the works department into Melbourne Water and Parks Victoria, spent money massively valcanising the water supply to prepare for privatisation, but never sold it off. They can due to enabling legislation, but they haven't. But they were able to build the CityLink, a tollway which links the southeastern, southwestern and northern suburbs, which was previously a discontinuous set of bottlenecks stuffed up by the bankrupt previous government. (The public transport system collapsed again in 2002 and 2009 but in 2002 it was saved by renationalising most of the state carrier (who was owned by National Express who fled the country in debt), merging a bunch of franchises together, and creating a master franchise to bring all the ticketing stuff together into one colour-coded system, then by 2009 by firing (retendering and losing) the train operator (Transdev who also used to own the trams under a co-predecessor) again, building some extra railways, creating an e-ticketing system, and reforming the department in 2012. Transdev was almost nationalised in 2008 but the government was told they didn't have to.)
Boy I sure wish we'd re-nationalised rail that early in the UK. The Railtrack debacle could've been a great time. We're only really just starting to repair some of that damage, for both trains and buses, across the island. With ScotRail nationalisation and TfW for trains, and Manchester and Liverpool taking over their buses.
@@kaitlyn__L The Victorian public transport is still private including the suburban carrier, just the train arm of the state carrier V/Line isn't and there is now a big franchise managing it all as one unit. (except both authorities have recently been abolished behind the scenes and merged with the rebooted transport authority as part of infrastructure reform and booming)
The US system of water rights isn't actually good. In drought-prone CA you have people and farms and cities who have no incentive to conserve water because they have senior rights and can just suck water dry, while other people and farms and cities just get boned. It's based on nothing other than "who was lucky 100 years ago" and it means that some very major cities get screwed because they happened to come later than some tinier city that happened to get founded much earlier. Rationalizing this kind of system with price signals (yes, introducing water markets) would be massively important to making things fairer and encouraging water conservation. Obviously you don't want speculative rent-seeking or hoarding behavior like what's mentioned here, but treating the US system as somehow better than what Australia is not accurate. (Pop quiz: almonds are notoriously water intensive to grow and yet are one of the main crops in drought-prone CA. Why is that? hint: has something to do with riparian water rights. Large farms with senior rights can suck all the water dry and screw everyone else and nobody can do anything about it because they have water rights that are more senior than actual cities where people live.)
Did you not read the asterisk in the video where the dry western half of the US uses a different system than the wet eastern half of the us? The US is not a monolith as pertaining to water rights.
@@darkfool2000 it's an irrelevant point because the things this video is so easily dumping on is actually a necessary reform to the mess of water rights. just bc australia effed it up doesn't mean market-signals on water use isn't very important.
Hey Sam, good job on this!! Even if a few details were a bit off, you clearly put in a lot of effort to understand a complicated topic, and I appreciate you.
You didn't really mention the reason Australia adopted this system: legacy property rights. Property owners would be pretty mad if Australia expropriated their water rights without just compensation and that would also harm future investment. They instead divied up water rights to existing landowners and made them tradeable so that downstream users could simply buy the rights to the amount of water they needed. It's probably not a perfect system, but the critics are just complaining without proposing any new system. Nobody actually has a better idea for how to handle water rights, they just complain.
So what? People should complain, it's not their responsibility to figure out solutions. In this case, it's the government's responsibility to figure out a better solution that satisfies more people.
Is this actually such a bad scheme though? It seems better than the American one with less wastage at least. I feel need to talk to some of the individual concerns that actually use water to have an opinion on it.
Our politicians in Australia lost the capacity for critical thinking. They also wrecked the public service which used to give good advice on important matters - largely due to lobbying from big accounting firms. The Australian public knew this whole thing was stupid but both sides of politics ran with it. Neoliberal economics is ruining the whole place.
Brought to you by the amazing South Australian gov. With such policies as: Closing regional hospitals Privatising Etsa Selling all the pine trees to the Chinese Only spending money in Adelaide And ripping up all the railway tracks, I mean why use 1 train where you could put 10 trucks on the road right, right?
Australians do not like funding investment projects. This is why the big Australian mining companies are listed abroad. The Aussies lose out when the dividends are repatriated abroad.
Rubbish. Most Australian mining companies are listed on the local stock exchange. In fact Australian companies own far more mines abroad than foreign companies own in Australia. Perhaps you should check things rather than just posting what you emotionally feel?
@@Dave_Sisson Come on mate, don't be so emotional. Who owns key Australian infrastructure? Darwin Harbour, for example, is Australia's only deep water harbour up north. But who owns it? The Chinese not Australia.
You would have thought the government would have learned their lesson, but they made the same mistake with Natural Gas. We are the largest exporters of Natural Gas but there is a shortage in the eastern states of Australia.
Australia as a nation is more than the state of New South Wales. There are multiple states. The Commonwealth Government’s own documents note - ‘Australia’s most active water markets are in the MDB, accounting for 97 per cent of all allocation trade… and 77 per cent of all entitlement trade… ‘ so commentary in this video that the entire country has sold its water rights are not nuanced enough to properly explain the situation across the 6 states and two territories.
The government controls how much water is able to be sold or bought. Arguably the government could stop the entire system next year if it wanted. however a minority of large farming organizations (ie. business people sitting in tall buildings in central Sydney) actively lobby the government not to change the system.
That proves what we have in Australia is NOT the free market. Under a free market, the big corps would lack the power to influence the politicians with bribes.
Sam, seeing what some people are buying on eBay and Only Fans, you are missing an opportunity to sell your bath tub water. I am not one of those people.
Doesn't the government have any way to come in and say "Oh, yeah, this was stupid, we're rolling back these changes" or smth? Surely there must be a way..
I literally guessed before the video even started that, when it comes to the concept of water as a commodity, there would be at least one jab against Nestle. lmaoooo glad I wasn't wrong
There is a lot in this that is misrepresenting the real history. We did not have "ownership"of water. We did not have "prior right" or "inferior/superior" land. When the irrigation industry was created different states used different policies. If you consider the interstate agreements Queensland did not become involved but NSW Victoria and SA agreed with each other on the overall entitlements. Within Victoria that was divided into water rights. With a right you contributed to the construction and maintenance of dams and channels and had a right to use a certain amount of water. This security lead to investment in high value crops that would die without water certainty. The rights were tied to the property. They couldn't be traded. Then the government realised that there was water that was not used each year so it figured it could get paid for that water TWICE. Once by the entitlement holder and then they could sell water if it wasn't actually used. Then came a drought. There wasn't enough water to supply all that had been sold AND meet the needs of the entitlement holders AND meet the needs of cities and towns. LET ALONE supply extra water for "the environment". So they came up with the idea of permitting landholders to sell their entitlements to someone else that needed water but did not have land. Such as cities and towns. Or "the environment". The problem then was "who pays for the channels and delivery that is now not being fully used any more". A second problem was people who owned the entitlement but didn't use it. However that was something that had already been addressed. Sell that water a second time and make money. The longer term consequences were ignored. One day those "owners" are going to want the water they have paid for. And then the bovine excrement will hit the rotating air moving blades. ( The sh*t will hit the fan). I could continue. But so much of what is in this video has been created within the last 20 years. It had been warned against. But in practical terms no one had the ability to physically harvest flood waters. No one was able to sell their entitlements. It isn't part of our tradition. We were socialist. The government owned the resources and could grant rights to use them. That has been true for ALL resources including gold and minerals, forestry or roads, railways, ports and airports. Privatisation is a recent phenomena and has a big downside but it was NOT the way things have been done for most of our history.
Trivia note: The U.S. game show The Amazing Race has been on for 35 Seasons, & they have traveled to Australia for 4 of them; 2, 4, 9, & 18 (which aired back in 2011).
Funny story - In India we dont have Kangaroos (duh!) and so the word isn't used much in day to day life. We generally pronounce the word as Kun-gaa-roo not Kangaroo. While speaking amongst Indians it is easily understood. But a funny thing happened when an Australian colleague of ours came to India and someone asked him "Are there any Kun-gaa-roos in Sydney?" the guy was blank faced and didn't know what we were talking about. Then someone showed him a photo on the phone and he realised we were talking about Kangaroos
In certain country, as far as possible from Australia as can be, there is a dam that's actually two dams, but to simplify we'll say it's just one because reasons. And some farmers own shares of this dam. One share means one hour of water suply. Not one hour a day, nor a week. One hour a year. And not the whole year, just the specific months the water is running from the dam. But no need to worry, the dam is now dry, so there's no need to worry about the dangers of privatization of vital resources.
Well you can thank John Howard for the destruction by removing water entitlements from the title of the land but he allways was a sneaky little bastard
The system isn't as simple and "ridiculously stupid" as this video would like to make out (there's a bunch of regulation + safeguards), and importantly it comes from a place of conservation, as freshwater in Australia is incredibly important resource for the farming industry.
Depending on the local water board, our rain water or flood water is owned by them too. Some areas don't let you catch the water off your roof. In others you have to pay for water you have in your own dam. We're one step away from being Dune over here
As someone who lives in a state near Arizona and keeps an occasional eye on the ongoing nightmare that's resulted in them effectively draining their aquifer and selling it off, I was already like "Oh no..." when I read the title. After watching the video, it's somehow even worse than I was expecting
If you look online, there are many economic research articles that refute these claims. It appears you are blaming the negative consequences from naturally increasing water scarcity on the water market. With increasing demand for water and less supply, you are going to have a lot of upset people no matter which system you choose. However, a market system achieves an optimal result, in terms of using the water for the most demanded goods, given the heavy constraints. You also overestimate the amount of water being stored for future sale, but that has a legitimate purpose anyway. As with any commodity market, a certain amount of supply is held in long term storage if supply is predicted to decrease in the future. That's a good thing, it saves resources for when they'll be needed even more. If the on the contrary, a market system never conserved resources and immediately used every resource for the present with no long-term mindset, you'd be outraged and demand a government program to conserve resources for tougher times. The market allocates resources based on supply and demand, so if in the future it is anticipated that there will be less supply and the same demand, then water will be allocated from the present to the future by means of storage.
Lmao you wrote a lot but said very little. Free markets conserve resources, lmfao where's your proof? Wouldn't it be best to capitalize on opportunities before the trend ends? Is that a behavior pattern of conservation?
@@Pistolita221 During the global food shortages in 2007-2008, there was a good risk that food would get even more scarce, and thus more expensive, in the next few years. In response, investors started holding agricultural commodities longer, leading to more food in long-term storage. Thus food was being conserved for the future despite current prices rising. That was a good outcome as it would lead to less scarcity in next years in the event of widespread low crop yields. People on the left completely flipped out and demanded that no food be "hoarded", and for storehouses to be emptied and everything to be sold NOW. Keep in mind that food rots after a few years, so everything was going to be sold at some point anyway. Markets collectively take into account long-term outcomes. It's the emotional public and the governments they elect that have a tendency to be shortsighted. Plus you have evidence with this very river, some water is being stored by the market in anticipation of future droughts.
@@electricpaper269 ok, that's an example, where they were encouraged by the government to help manage food stores and worked in conjunction with the governments to address the crisis. Or did you conveniently not find any of the policies that addressed the issue? And what of US timber? US farming practices generally? Housing developments, generally? They didn't conserve forests, they poison and erode farmland, they waste space and resources making sprawling suburbs. There's nothing efficient about it. And all too often they're pound foolish and ruin or end lives. While the government isn't perfect, it is the only way the average person can influence the system.
@@Pistolita221 US timber is not sustainably harvested only on public lands. A prerequisite for a functioning market system is private property. With public land you get destruction of the commons. On private forestland it is in the owner's best interest to replant trees in order to maintain their investment. The inefficient use of city land with sprawling single story homes is caused by zoning laws. The government mandates it to be that way. If developers could build as high as they wanted you'd get a more efficient use of land since land costs money to buy. You'd have more compact cities with very high density in the middle and a gradual decrease outward. And if the population is increasing, you'd constantly see old buildings being replaced with taller ones. That would also solve the scarcity of housing and lead to lower rents and prices. One example of a city with developer freedom is Tokyo. Private developers want to build up, it's just that it's illegal for them to do so now in the US.
@@electricpaper269 weird how quickly you dropped that 07 food shortage argument. Do you think the government harvests the lumber on federal land, or do you think they give grants to log it? Private industry has externalized the cost of owning forests for logging to the government, and therefore taxpayer. Do you think IDK what I'm talking about? 🧐 Do you not know what happened to American transportation during the first half of the 20th century? This zoning and hollowing out of city centers was caused by market manipulation of the big 3 who lost a court case on it. So sure, the developers didn't come up with the idea, but the private market is still to blame, according to the COURT CASE. Look, we're never getting rid of greed, but we can't let it ruin society the way it is. No man is an island.
This is the exact way that the US handles water out west. In Colorado, the water is owned before it even hits the ground as rain. It’s literally illegal to collect rain water. People also buy and sell water rights all the time.
That case about rainwater collection isn’t what you think it is. The guy wasn’t just collecting rainwater to water his plants. 1. He was using gigantic cisterns and 2. He diverted a river for it, damaging neighbors’ properties, which is a big nono.
Australia could also juat anounce that they will not honor or enforce this any more and that farmers and land owners may use or harvest water on their land freely and this will just disolve overnight.
This isn’t correct, “water rights” definitely is not always owned by the land owner. I know someone who owns waters rights in boulder co and rural Utah. You can definitely own water rights without owning all the land on the water
The problem is that the water rights are not taxed. If the water rights were taxed at near 100%, then it would be impossible to make money speculating on it. Rights holders would only use as much water as they need and sell the rest, then there would be more available for everyone else. The problem isn't free market capitalism. The problem is private ownership of land, because land is not capital and shouldn't be privately owned. (Economically speaking, water is a type of land.) For more information, look up the ideas of Henry George and Georgism.
Capitalism is meant to harness the nature of animals which is to resource hoard (greed) and use it to convince them to compete against each other from a value added perspective, this is more and more difficult to have happen as jobs get more specified creating natural monopolies (port of Long Beach, ASML, DTCC, etc.) as well as utilities that we need to survive, when the profit motive is applied to utilities it is just extortion. Capitalism has its place, it just needs to stay there
@@RK-cj4oc sadly that's generally not the case. Even the USA, bastion of private ownership, you don't really own land. Don't pay the taxes on that land and you'll quickly learn who owns it. So really you rent exclusive (mostly) use rights through the tax system.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, since it's been a while since I've seen it, but isn't this whole buy up water rights idea pretty much the bad guy's (a literal Bond villain) plan in Quantum of Solace?
"Man I hate when the value of my portfolio starts to shrink"
Inflation?
"No, evaporation"
Funny 👍
"Kangaroos, which are basically just rats that do crossfit" is my new favorite HAI quote
I'm an Aussie. He is 100% right
Sam’s just jealous a kangaroo is more swole than him
note: since the 1970s, forcing an increased reliance on groundwater. Australia’s aquifers are being drained at unsustainable rates, but Perth is now actively replenishing them by pumping 10% of its treated wastewater into shallow aquifers that naturally filter and store the water until it is needed again. This process of augmenting freshwater supplies with treated wastewater, called Indirect Potable Reuse.
could be crucial to futureproofing urban water supplies. In 2018 recycled water use increased in most urban centers and although no city directly uses treated wastewater as tap water, Perth has considered it.
Please finish your comment
mf got shot mid typing💀
Bro got us hyped up for nothing
@@ГлебКоротков-ш4гHe came back to life to finish this comment
I think we should start a religion around him
Australia: today's beer is tomorrow's beer
I’m an Australian farmer who uses this system.
Overall this video does a pretty good job but it does conflate a couple of issues. The main one is that over extraction is not related to the water market as the government decides each year what percentage of entitlements are received each year based on how much rainfall there has been.
The other is that floodplain harvesting is regulated in most of Aus and is in the process of being regulated in the remaining areas.
Also water that is harvested from flood plains is not able to be sold in the water market as you are not allowed to let water that has been collected for irrigation back into the river due to contamination concerns.
Yeah uh corruption. You're obviously a good ethical farmer, you're awesome farmers are beyond under appreciated, thankyou. However not every farmer is like you and it is beyond easy to game this system.
...but the Shiny New Moose line did make me giggle.
Also fails to address the concern that you can’t just let people take as much water as they want from a river that runs through their property in Australia. There would be nothing left in the river for the farmers further downstream. Our land to water ratio is just not like other countries/continents
do you buy the entitlement once and then get to sit on it forever or does the entitlement only last for a certain amount of time after which you have to re-buy it?
@@charleslambert3368
you can buy water on either a temporary or permanent basis.
If you own permeant water each year the water authority will tell you what % of your allocation you are allowed to extract. This allocation may go up through the year if there is enough rainfall in the catchments. You are allowed to carry 20-30% of your allocation through to the next year if you don't use it otherwise you forfeit any amount you don't use.
If you own permeant water you can sell your allocation to other users on the temporary market. In this case the water must be used by the end of the year.
The price of permeant water is fairly consistent as it has a long term return where as temporary water fluctuates wildly depending on rainfall each year.
Australia seems like the country of "what could possibly go wrong" I feel like every time i hear about them its because the government did something without fully considering the longterm consequences or safeguarding against bad actors.
yeah unless something is actively killing us (like bad food) people don't really seem to care
@@eris9062I heard mining companies keep releasing dangerous chemicals into the drinking water but lobby the government to keep the status quo
Hey, leave Kristen Stewart out of this!
One of the bad actors being the emus?
Australia is captured by natural resource exploitation corporations just like Canada.
As the owner of 782 silver moose, Australia definitely didn´t make a mistake in selling the water.
Moose*
@@wilh3lmmusic they're their meese and they may call them what they wish
@@wilh3lmmusic Thanks, learned something new today. 😉
I own some moose and some cougars! Canadian Wildlife Series FTW! :)
No "liquidity" joke? smh
"I used to own some water rights, but i was concerned about the investment's lack of liquidity "?
Jewish dad joke
@castorchua, why does it have to be a Jewish dad ? I'm not with any following, it's just a dad joke .👍🇦🇺🦘
@@Fwdking I better agree
It really shocked me when I went to Bourke NSW as a teenager. The sheer size of the water storage reservoirs used to grow cotton out there (basically the edge of the desert) is insane.
That sounds reasonable if they can't count on getting water from anywhere else. Their best bet may be to figure out how much water they have at the start of the growing season and plant accordingly.
@@WyvernYT the unreasonable part is growing a crop like cotton that uses massive amounts of water right next to the desert in a country that regularly has serious droughts that will only get worse due to climate change.
@@nunwrestling I don't know enough about the Australian agriculture markets to know what crops might be wise or foolish.
@@WyvernYTcotton in a desert is foolish
@@Caxacate Cotton is actually the best crop to grow if you have irrigation water in these regions. It suits the boom and bust cycles, it is the highest return for a short season crop. Many of these irrigators grow a crop for 2 years and then sit and wait for the next flood in 5 years time. Other crops like oranges, almonds have a HIGHER water use than cotton and need to be irrigated every season
Dear HAI editors, the repeats of stock footage clips are amazing and I look forward to them tremendously. I, too, find the man throwing his laptop into the sea hilarious and more than worthy of a rewatch. Also that clip of a man with blue eyes and curly hair looking extremely unimpressed and making dubiousness gestures, I always get a kick when I spot that one. Sincerely, a loving fan.
My personal favorite is the black man with the beard looking astonished.
There's this one popular stock footage clip, although I've never seen it on this channel, it's an open file cabinet with manila folders, and one of them is labeled in handwritten ink "miscellaneous". And I swear to God, the handwriting is identical to my own. It's creepy as Heck.
And I thought this video was going to be about the overuse of the Murray River for irrigation and other industry which has led to the mouth of the river sometimes closing up entirely due to lack of water and the area around the mouth and for MANY miles back upstream becoming a toxic unusable disaster area.
I was looking at satellite imagery on Google Maps of Australian cities and every time I’d see a river or pond I’d be confused and concerned about why it’s the colour that it was (I am from the PNW of Canada so it’s a pretty big difference from what I’m used to)
Hey now, one unmitigated water-based disaster caused by capitalism in Australia at a time.
@@salamander405 Australian rivers tend to be brown, but that's perfectly healthy.
Its partly the soil, partly the light.
There's a pretty good line about it in All The Rivers Run.
@@salamander405we don’t normally get huge water flows, and I think our dirt and vegetation affects the colour, many rivers and creeks are very polluted though, especially if they run through urban areas, by farmland, or old mines.
Our drinking water is absolutely amazing though, I live in Melbourne and we have some of the best water in the world, we’re super careful to make sure it doesn’t get polluted. Drinking water is usually collected into reservoirs and then piped to our homes, so it doesn’t travel through the river
to solve that, said upstream waters are just saying remove the barrier at the mouth of the Murray and just, let the sea flow back in there... which, i dunno
Just need to point out: this is only valid for the Murray-Darling Basin, /not/ the whole country. There are smaller but much less significant water marketrs in other parts of the country.
Ah, that makes sense. Naturally, it's a good old case of the westernmost state (or, two-thirds, or more in this case) of the country being ignored when talking about the entirety of the country.
...which, admittedly, in a brief semi-educational UA-cam video, is fair enough and certainly a better explanation than me not knowing about something so important that directly impacts me.
@@lucasriddle3431there is so much wrong in this video it isn't funny. And it has a lot of great jokes...
Australian here, who grew up on a farm. You buy entitlements but then regulators set allocation % each year, based on dam levels. There are also different types of allocations, such as normal and high security. During drought, water allocation can be set to 0% for normal security and some other % for high security. The government can do buy backs, but that’s usually for other uses that aren’t allowed for legislatively. As an example, some rivers have “environmental flow” to ensure ecological outcomes (which rarely works). Also, generally, depending on the state, things like captured water from rainfall can actually be regulated and licensed once the capture amount exceeds a certain amount. An interesting reference point is the NSW Government Natural Resources Access Regulator (NRAR) which is the primary regulator for things like this in NSW, however other systems have other regulators, both in NSW and in other states, like with the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, which is a multi governmental statutory authority which regulates the Murray and Darling basin water system across NSW, SA and Victoria. Anyways, just some fun facts. And yes, Kangaroos are CrossFit rats.
Prior usage water rights function similarly to an open water market, in practice. Large landowners may derive the entire value of their property from their prior usage rights, which they will auction off year-to-year. The problem with this system is that it encourages wasteful use of water if you already have the rights and aren't planning on auctioning the water off. It also means that agricultural users pay several orders of magnitude less for water than most municipal utilities, so the water needed for sustaining human life (i.e. drinking and hygiene) subsidizes growing exportable cash crops like almonds and alfalfa. The other massive problem is that priority rights-holders have rights to the same volume of water even in dry years, so lower-priority rights-holders are required to eliminate their water use entirely before the priority rights-holders have to limit their use by a single drop. This often leads to over-allocation as individual rights-holders attempt to use more water than was actually delivered by storms that year based on their existing rights.
Tell me you live in California without telling me you live in California
Yep, which is why the concept of private ownership of water is really fucking stupid. Ironically, this is how water rights function in the east of the US, but out west its all about water rights.
The term "water market" is easily one of the most repulsive terms I've heard this week
Straight out of Mad Max.
Wait until you hear about Nestle’s CEO
Yeah, I mean, what else are they going to make into a market? Food? Electricity? Housing? Medical care? Oh wait, all of those are already markets
Even worse than the term "wet market"
@@EustatheWait until you learn that there's even a market for house pet's parasites ......
What you're describing as "floodplain harvesting" sounds a hell of a lot like what people in India and elsewhere are promoting as "Floodplain/groundwater restoration" - using a bunch of small dams to slow water down. Water that doesn't reach the sea frequently ends up seeping back into the soil and into groundwater aquifers that we have otherwise been rapidly depleting.
Water rights are complicated and often dystopian; Western Water Rights in the US are basically designed to guarantee maximum exploitation, and in arid regions that brings eventual environmental devastation.
The problem with flood farming is that people downstream rely on that water to not die
@@curiosity780I mean, you can always open the sluice gates and let some water through. It happens all the time in hydropolitical situations, where upstream dam owners are required to allow some water to go downstream. It's why Lake Mead has been depleting. They could easily fill that back up by not letting any water out through the Hoover Dam, but then everyone downstream would be screwed (and the dam wouldn't be generating any power either)
Floodplains aren't always a bad thing. When properly managed that can make it better for everyone, but a market is obviously not the way to manage that.
I thought the same, they really produce a lot of biodiveristy, but maybe they seal with some types of sands like bentonite and deny the aquifer replenishment.
May I recommend looking at two charts:
Aquifer locations and depths
Soil location and depths.
One of the unique problems within Australia comes from how old the country is itself, one of the more stable regions considering. This doesn't just give us tiny mountains in comparison, but it means a lot of the 'good soil' had millions of years to be washed out to sea*. It also means the rocks underneath might not be as good at producing Aquifer as well.
*As an Australian living in another country and gardening, the fact you have feet of soil before you hit clay is.... just, yeah, so much easier to dig over here!
So basically farmers have resorted to moisture farming like on Tatooine
i think that's still the coolest piece of worldbuilding in star wars
In some US states it's illegal to collect rainwater *because* that prevents it from replenishing the rivers and reservoirs that cities depend on.
Australia here. Yeah I've heard that. Sounds insane.
@@johnkauppi7078 they don't usually care about a cistern in the backyard. usually. but if you go beyond that it becomes a problem.
There are limits to overland water harvesting in most parts of Australia, limits on size of dams, % of flow harvested, flood water level triggers on pumping etc. Those rules don't apply to a house roof though where you can do what you want in most areas.
@@GeeROOin most areas, it’s a legislated requirement that all new builds have rainwater tanks, with the tank size requirement increasing significantly once you leave the suburbs
Australia could just remove the law that makes this possible, and then buyout the people that bought water..
Or tax held water to curb speculation.
Guess who gets to vote on the laws and who bribes them?
That’s not going to happen these companies love their money
Funnily enough, this could be said about any market.
They could, but they won't. They're a slave to their lobbyists.
Shout-out to Argentina where the guy leading the polls for this year's presidential elections wants to privatize rivers too.
Massive W for Spain TBH they're semi-arid and wealthy
That guy is just older Jschlatt
Couple of corrections, firstly there are many parts of the country without water markets, riparian rights still apply. Secondly, the water market isnt a failure, it achieved exactly what was intended, rich people made more money.
In Romania we pay tax on Rain water which falls over your land. So they calculate the amount of water on your land
THAT sucks.
So if you get a massive downpour on your property, you have a flood, a cleanup operation and a huge tax bill to pay… 😢
@@michaelwisniewski6047 No matter who the IRS sends, I am not paying federal taxes
On the flip side (as an Aussie), it seems crazy to me that Americans can't collect rain water that's fallen on their land. The floodplain example is obviously a bad extreme, but a lot of Australia isn't anywhere near a major river - without rainwater tanks a lot of rural communities wouldn't be able to survive, as most people have their own in dry areas that they can collect & use for free.
Edit: I got schooled 😂 Didn't realise only Colorado & Utah had those types of rainwater restrictions - touché!
I'm not sure for industrial farming, but for individuals, it often depends on each municipality of harvesting rainwater legality. So even in the same state, a neighbor down the street technically in a different city or town may have different legal ability to harvest rainwater
I keep seeing this persistent myth and it is simply not true. Is it the case that there are some municipalities in the US where rainwater collection is banned during drought periods? Sure. But by and large across many states residents have the freedom to collect rainwater on their property. I’m tired of seeing this misinformation keep being repeated.
When Americans refer to the Murray as "precious drinking water" 😂😂😂 not sure I'd wanna drink any of it downstream from Hume or Eildon...
C'mon it just likes like a flat white most of the time that must be yummy :D
0:49 love how nestle gets their own *
I'm Australian. It's a nice country to live in, but our politicians keep implementing schemes and laws causing horrible unintended consequences.
Water rights in the US West are more complicated than that. There are a variety of restrictions over how you can collect water and what you can do with it, and a lot of the rights to water from rivers are indeed owned by corporations or individuals, and some of it is owned downstream of you, so you don't really have collection rights. If a significant stream runs through your property, and you live in a Western state, you probably aren't allowed to take most of that water for yourself. In Utah and Colorado, you don't even have the right to collect rainwater (though in Utah, you can collect up to 2500 gal, so it's not much of a restriction).
"We must nationalize...our water."
"You must nationalize...your water? Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds?"
Just wondering here, but.... The guys who came up with and implemented this scheme... What is their net worth and occupation today...?
they could have gotten jobs as agricultural consultants nut they did some other things and all members of the civil service of executive rank and the 87% of the sitting members of the bill that voted for it have mining consultancy jobs because it pays better :(
Here's a most cited paper on the subject if your genuinely interested ewater.org.au/archive/crcch/archive/pubs/pdfs/technical200205.pdf oh and the federal government did nothing as a political reward for the Victorian labour party backing during fraises coup en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional_crisis
Yeah, there has been plenty of corruption around this... and there still is.
The Australian Government. but the individual States own the water
The Australian constitution said no one could have control or ownership of any waterways, unabridged......but our gruberment over road / ignore it and sold us out ......again.
Incentives to store emergency water stocks in drought prone areas does not sound like a problem.
"Whiskey's fer drinkin, water's fer fightin" Mark Twain
HAI writers apparently haven't heard of western water rights.
There are literally towns on the Murray river that have to get water shipped in because cotton farms upstream siphon off the water that would flow to them.
What’s even worse, is that the rivers that make up the Murray-Darling Basin flow through indigenous land, yet they aren’t entitled to that water. Despite water being a crucial component of their beliefs, and a violation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
I vaguely heard about this from Friendlyjordies. Now aboriginal tribes are completely out of water.
I like how this is the first sentence on the official website: "Australia’s water markets are recognised globally as a water reform success story."
ive never heard someone describe a kangaroo as a "rat that does crossfit" before but im not mad at it
Another win for the perfect flawlessness that is free market capitalism
shut up socialist
Short-sighted government policies are what allow this sort of thing to happen; it's not an inherent feature of FMC. Put more sensible rules in place and FMC will balance accordingly.
@@Effisso short sighted governments are a consequence of liberalism lol, capitalism breeds short sightedness
@@Effisso Rules make the market not free, though. Hoarding and inflicting arbitrary amounts of societal harm for marginal personal gain are core tenets of the free market.
@@EffissoIf You have to add rules to it then it's no longer a "free market" isn't it? Every single economy is planned even the top companies in the world plan deeply their economies, why don't just plan it all to benefit the people instead of just a few millionaires, the evidence is clear, the disparity between de richest and the poorest increase all over the world.
My favorite thing about Australia as an Australian is how you can't do anything without first acknowledging and respecting the traditional owners. Imagine if someone stole your land and killed most of your family. Then years later every time a game of football starts, a politician gives a speech or your middle school teacher is starting the day. Then those same people who've stolen and murdered now say WE WOULD LIKE TO PAY OUR RESPECTS TO THE TRADITIONAL OWNERS PAST PRESENT AND FUTURE. So the same people who stole not only everything you had but also your future are now standing on what was once yours they verbally say they respect you but you won't be getting that land back. Imagine that happened to you, how do you think you would feel about it.
Hi, very rarely comment on you tube videos but this one whilst making some extremely valid points to Australia's MDB water market, has some misleading and inaccurate statements that should be further researched especially when considering the allowance of dams on properties and the ability to capture water on your property as you please. It also is incorrect wrt to how the US (Colorado River catchment at least) operates as they too have a water market but is based of first come first served (law of the land). It is definitely not as simple as your 5 minute video claims to be, and should be corrected if true and correct edutainment is what you are trying to achieve.
Environmental studies minor here: the US has 2 systems of water rights. Riparian rights are in the east where water is more plentiful. But out west they use prior appropriation and the rights can be bought and sold eg colorado and California.
Calling kangaroos rats that do crossfit is hilarious
0:47 Asterix = cartoon character, asterisk = *
2:36 "Kangaroos, which are basically rats that do Crossfit..." 😂 You'd have to go a long way to find a more true, funnier gag than this...😂👍🇦🇺
In the us, western states don't even let you own the rain. If you have more than two barrels (55 gallons x2) to catch rainwater off your roof you get in trouble.
I would not necessarily say that this is an example of a "free market," but rather a system whereby the Australian state is granting monopoly rights over natural resources. In general, classical economists believe that man should rightfully own that which he produces himself, but natural resources (or at least the **rent** of natural resources) rightfully belong to all of society. Free market advocates do not advocate for the monopolization of natural resources.
I think Nestle disagrees with you.
monopolies are an intended effect of the free market and a man owning what he produces is literally a fundamental building block of workplace communism
It's a market in the sense that those rights are traded. And while I agree with you in principle, I think the idea that "free markets are the only way to make things work" is fairly pervasive, as is the idea that anything anyone finds a way to own, however it was obtained, is theirs by right.
@@cooperised The question of who should rightfully "own" natural resources has always been fraught with controversy among classical economists, both because these resources are vital and scare, and because they are not produced by man's labor. I just think the video does a disservice by casting Australia's misguided, monopolistic water policies as an example of the "free market," which it most certainly is not.
@@ryuuguu01 What do you mean?
I have been trying to discuss this Issue with other Australian's for the last 6 years, yet everyone either thinks it's a 'baseless' conspiracy theory, assume I'm stupid, or just....plain don't listen.
Very few people thoroughly investigate the issue most, just, do not seem to listen or care.
HAI: The most entertaining way to get depressed!
honestly this just sounds like anormal water company in the US but with a lot of extra steps xD
Don't worry HAI Video Editor- Fish Stick sandwiches are, in fact, alright.
It would be interesting to hear this compared to the system used in parts of the US with water shortages, because from what I've heard it doesn't seem any better
If they ever try to privatize the water where you are, riot.
If they ever try to privatize anything, riot.
Victoria almost sold their water supply after the 1980s recession. They sold their energy grid and their public transport system, corporotised the warter system like they did initially with the public transport system, restructured remnents of the works department into Melbourne Water and Parks Victoria, spent money massively valcanising the water supply to prepare for privatisation, but never sold it off. They can due to enabling legislation, but they haven't.
But they were able to build the CityLink, a tollway which links the southeastern, southwestern and northern suburbs, which was previously a discontinuous set of bottlenecks stuffed up by the bankrupt previous government.
(The public transport system collapsed again in 2002 and 2009 but in 2002 it was saved by renationalising most of the state carrier (who was owned by National Express who fled the country in debt), merging a bunch of franchises together, and creating a master franchise to bring all the ticketing stuff together into one colour-coded system, then by 2009 by firing (retendering and losing) the train operator (Transdev who also used to own the trams under a co-predecessor) again, building some extra railways, creating an e-ticketing system, and reforming the department in 2012. Transdev was almost nationalised in 2008 but the government was told they didn't have to.)
Boy I sure wish we'd re-nationalised rail that early in the UK. The Railtrack debacle could've been a great time. We're only really just starting to repair some of that damage, for both trains and buses, across the island. With ScotRail nationalisation and TfW for trains, and Manchester and Liverpool taking over their buses.
@@kaitlyn__L The Victorian public transport is still private including the suburban carrier, just the train arm of the state carrier V/Line isn't and there is now a big franchise managing it all as one unit.
(except both authorities have recently been abolished behind the scenes and merged with the rebooted transport authority as part of infrastructure reform and booming)
The US system of water rights isn't actually good. In drought-prone CA you have people and farms and cities who have no incentive to conserve water because they have senior rights and can just suck water dry, while other people and farms and cities just get boned. It's based on nothing other than "who was lucky 100 years ago" and it means that some very major cities get screwed because they happened to come later than some tinier city that happened to get founded much earlier.
Rationalizing this kind of system with price signals (yes, introducing water markets) would be massively important to making things fairer and encouraging water conservation. Obviously you don't want speculative rent-seeking or hoarding behavior like what's mentioned here, but treating the US system as somehow better than what Australia is not accurate. (Pop quiz: almonds are notoriously water intensive to grow and yet are one of the main crops in drought-prone CA. Why is that? hint: has something to do with riparian water rights. Large farms with senior rights can suck all the water dry and screw everyone else and nobody can do anything about it because they have water rights that are more senior than actual cities where people live.)
Did you not read the asterisk in the video where the dry western half of the US uses a different system than the wet eastern half of the us? The US is not a monolith as pertaining to water rights.
Neither Kalifornia nor other western states represent all of the US. Water rights east of the Mississippi are very different.
@@darkfool2000 it's an irrelevant point because the things this video is so easily dumping on is actually a necessary reform to the mess of water rights. just bc australia effed it up doesn't mean market-signals on water use isn't very important.
5:32 this has to be the most emotional Sam has ever sounded in one of these videos
Hilarious and informative. Nicely done Ben!
“My lawyers will be in touch.” -Probably Brian from Real Engineering, again
Any time someone talking about an anglo country gets to "so in the 1980s" you know it's about to go wrong and you know why
Hey Sam, good job on this!! Even if a few details were a bit off, you clearly put in a lot of effort to understand a complicated topic, and I appreciate you.
Many important details are wrong
You didn't really mention the reason Australia adopted this system: legacy property rights. Property owners would be pretty mad if Australia expropriated their water rights without just compensation and that would also harm future investment. They instead divied up water rights to existing landowners and made them tradeable so that downstream users could simply buy the rights to the amount of water they needed. It's probably not a perfect system, but the critics are just complaining without proposing any new system. Nobody actually has a better idea for how to handle water rights, they just complain.
I don’t think you even believe the sentence “nobody has a better idea.”
So what? People should complain, it's not their responsibility to figure out solutions. In this case, it's the government's responsibility to figure out a better solution that satisfies more people.
while a reasonable compromise to begin with its hopelessly out of date
Is this actually such a bad scheme though? It seems better than the American one with less wastage at least. I feel need to talk to some of the individual concerns that actually use water to have an opinion on it.
As someone who who grew up on dairy farms in the middle of that water map, its crazy to hear it talked about on here! Awesome as usual guys!
Our politicians in Australia lost the capacity for critical thinking. They also wrecked the public service which used to give good advice on important matters - largely due to lobbying from big accounting firms. The Australian public knew this whole thing was stupid but both sides of politics ran with it. Neoliberal economics is ruining the whole place.
Jokes on them; the small amount of the Murray river that still exists is only made up of around 20% water. The rest is 30% salt and 50% feral carp.
00:07 fish stick (called fish fingers in the uk) sandwiches are amazing! One of my favourites to have
For what it's worth, I would like to share that I bought that opossum pillow thanks to this video.
Isn't it illegal to collect or retain water in Arizona? I know rainwater collection is illegal.
"Market" and "water" never go well together
Brought to you by the amazing South Australian gov. With such policies as:
Closing regional hospitals
Privatising Etsa
Selling all the pine trees to the Chinese
Only spending money in Adelaide
And ripping up all the railway tracks, I mean why use 1 train where you could put 10 trucks on the road right, right?
Australians do not like funding investment projects. This is why the big Australian mining companies are listed abroad. The Aussies lose out when the dividends are repatriated abroad.
Rubbish. Most Australian mining companies are listed on the local stock exchange. In fact Australian companies own far more mines abroad than foreign companies own in Australia. Perhaps you should check things rather than just posting what you emotionally feel?
@@Dave_Sisson Come on mate, don't be so emotional. Who owns key Australian infrastructure? Darwin Harbour, for example, is Australia's only deep water harbour up north. But who owns it? The Chinese not Australia.
@@andrewestbrook4473 They don't own it, they lease it.
You would have thought the government would have learned their lesson, but they made the same mistake with Natural Gas. We are the largest exporters of Natural Gas but there is a shortage in the eastern states of Australia.
Australia as a nation is more than the state of New South Wales. There are multiple states. The Commonwealth Government’s own documents note - ‘Australia’s most active water markets are in the MDB, accounting for 97 per cent of all allocation trade… and 77 per cent of all entitlement trade… ‘ so commentary in this video that the entire country has sold its water rights are not nuanced enough to properly explain the situation across the 6 states and two territories.
yes but for a 7 minute video covering 97/77 percent of a trade is a job well done but yeah maybe "A Australian state " would have been an easy fix
The government controls how much water is able to be sold or bought. Arguably the government could stop the entire system next year if it wanted. however a minority of large farming organizations (ie. business people sitting in tall buildings in central Sydney) actively lobby the government not to change the system.
That proves what we have in Australia is NOT the free market. Under a free market, the big corps would lack the power to influence the politicians with bribes.
You oughta link friendliejordies hour long doc on this
Sam, seeing what some people are buying on eBay and Only Fans, you are missing an opportunity to sell your bath tub water. I am not one of those people.
I'm pretty sure water is traded as a martket commodity in dozens of countries, not just Australia
Wow they're so lucky, I wish I could drink green slime that would leave me permanently disabled 😌
Doesn't the government have any way to come in and say "Oh, yeah, this was stupid, we're rolling back these changes" or smth? Surely there must be a way..
But you have to consider their donors
@@Pistolita221 sounds more like don'trs to me..
Too corrupt.
I literally guessed before the video even started that, when it comes to the concept of water as a commodity, there would be at least one jab against Nestle. lmaoooo glad I wasn't wrong
There is a lot in this that is misrepresenting the real history. We did not have "ownership"of water. We did not have "prior right" or "inferior/superior" land. When the irrigation industry was created different states used different policies. If you consider the interstate agreements Queensland did not become involved but NSW Victoria and SA agreed with each other on the overall entitlements. Within Victoria that was divided into water rights. With a right you contributed to the construction and maintenance of dams and channels and had a right to use a certain amount of water. This security lead to investment in high value crops that would die without water certainty. The rights were tied to the property. They couldn't be traded. Then the government realised that there was water that was not used each year so it figured it could get paid for that water TWICE. Once by the entitlement holder and then they could sell water if it wasn't actually used.
Then came a drought. There wasn't enough water to supply all that had been sold AND meet the needs of the entitlement holders AND meet the needs of cities and towns. LET ALONE supply extra water for "the environment".
So they came up with the idea of permitting landholders to sell their entitlements to someone else that needed water but did not have land. Such as cities and towns. Or "the environment".
The problem then was "who pays for the channels and delivery that is now not being fully used any more".
A second problem was people who owned the entitlement but didn't use it. However that was something that had already been addressed. Sell that water a second time and make money. The longer term consequences were ignored. One day those "owners" are going to want the water they have paid for. And then the bovine excrement will hit the rotating air moving blades. ( The sh*t will hit the fan).
I could continue. But so much of what is in this video has been created within the last 20 years. It had been warned against. But in practical terms no one had the ability to physically harvest flood waters. No one was able to sell their entitlements. It isn't part of our tradition. We were socialist. The government owned the resources and could grant rights to use them. That has been true for ALL resources including gold and minerals, forestry or roads, railways, ports and airports.
Privatisation is a recent phenomena and has a big downside but it was NOT the way things have been done for most of our history.
Trivia note: The U.S. game show The Amazing Race has been on for 35 Seasons, & they have traveled to Australia for 4 of them; 2, 4, 9, & 18 (which aired back in 2011).
This sounds so dystopian
Funny story - In India we dont have Kangaroos (duh!) and so the word isn't used much in day to day life. We generally pronounce the word as Kun-gaa-roo not Kangaroo. While speaking amongst Indians it is easily understood. But a funny thing happened when an Australian colleague of ours came to India and someone asked him "Are there any Kun-gaa-roos in Sydney?" the guy was blank faced and didn't know what we were talking about. Then someone showed him a photo on the phone and he realised we were talking about Kangaroos
In certain country, as far as possible from Australia as can be, there is a dam that's actually two dams, but to simplify we'll say it's just one because reasons. And some farmers own shares of this dam. One share means one hour of water suply. Not one hour a day, nor a week. One hour a year. And not the whole year, just the specific months the water is running from the dam.
But no need to worry, the dam is now dry, so there's no need to worry about the dangers of privatization of vital resources.
Friendly jordies has some good videos about Australia's water crisis, especially its effects on aboriginal peoples.
Well you can thank John Howard for the destruction by removing water entitlements from the title of the land but he allways was a sneaky little bastard
The system isn't as simple and "ridiculously stupid" as this video would like to make out (there's a bunch of regulation + safeguards), and importantly it comes from a place of conservation, as freshwater in Australia is incredibly important resource for the farming industry.
I worked in water resources in NSW when Wran sold off the state's water to fund Labor Party projects. Rural water was one his hollow logs
ngl want that opossum pillow
Depending on the local water board, our rain water or flood water is owned by them too. Some areas don't let you catch the water off your roof. In others you have to pay for water you have in your own dam. We're one step away from being Dune over here
I kinda want a fish stick sandwich now...
They're somewhat common here in the UK
@@superzigzagoon Of course you bastards would eat those.
As someone who lives in a state near Arizona and keeps an occasional eye on the ongoing nightmare that's resulted in them effectively draining their aquifer and selling it off, I was already like "Oh no..." when I read the title. After watching the video, it's somehow even worse than I was expecting
If you look online, there are many economic research articles that refute these claims. It appears you are blaming the negative consequences from naturally increasing water scarcity on the water market.
With increasing demand for water and less supply, you are going to have a lot of upset people no matter which system you choose. However, a market system achieves an optimal result, in terms of using the water for the most demanded goods, given the heavy constraints.
You also overestimate the amount of water being stored for future sale, but that has a legitimate purpose anyway. As with any commodity market, a certain amount of supply is held in long term storage if supply is predicted to decrease in the future. That's a good thing, it saves resources for when they'll be needed even more.
If the on the contrary, a market system never conserved resources and immediately used every resource for the present with no long-term mindset, you'd be outraged and demand a government program to conserve resources for tougher times. The market allocates resources based on supply and demand, so if in the future it is anticipated that there will be less supply and the same demand, then water will be allocated from the present to the future by means of storage.
Lmao you wrote a lot but said very little. Free markets conserve resources, lmfao where's your proof? Wouldn't it be best to capitalize on opportunities before the trend ends? Is that a behavior pattern of conservation?
@@Pistolita221 During the global food shortages in 2007-2008, there was a good risk that food would get even more scarce, and thus more expensive, in the next few years. In response, investors started holding agricultural commodities longer, leading to more food in long-term storage. Thus food was being conserved for the future despite current prices rising. That was a good outcome as it would lead to less scarcity in next years in the event of widespread low crop yields.
People on the left completely flipped out and demanded that no food be "hoarded", and for storehouses to be emptied and everything to be sold NOW. Keep in mind that food rots after a few years, so everything was going to be sold at some point anyway.
Markets collectively take into account long-term outcomes. It's the emotional public and the governments they elect that have a tendency to be shortsighted.
Plus you have evidence with this very river, some water is being stored by the market in anticipation of future droughts.
@@electricpaper269 ok, that's an example, where they were encouraged by the government to help manage food stores and worked in conjunction with the governments to address the crisis. Or did you conveniently not find any of the policies that addressed the issue?
And what of US timber? US farming practices generally? Housing developments, generally? They didn't conserve forests, they poison and erode farmland, they waste space and resources making sprawling suburbs. There's nothing efficient about it. And all too often they're pound foolish and ruin or end lives. While the government isn't perfect, it is the only way the average person can influence the system.
@@Pistolita221 US timber is not sustainably harvested only on public lands. A prerequisite for a functioning market system is private property. With public land you get destruction of the commons. On private forestland it is in the owner's best interest to replant trees in order to maintain their investment.
The inefficient use of city land with sprawling single story homes is caused by zoning laws. The government mandates it to be that way. If developers could build as high as they wanted you'd get a more efficient use of land since land costs money to buy. You'd have more compact cities with very high density in the middle and a gradual decrease outward. And if the population is increasing, you'd constantly see old buildings being replaced with taller ones. That would also solve the scarcity of housing and lead to lower rents and prices.
One example of a city with developer freedom is Tokyo. Private developers want to build up, it's just that it's illegal for them to do so now in the US.
@@electricpaper269 weird how quickly you dropped that 07 food shortage argument.
Do you think the government harvests the lumber on federal land, or do you think they give grants to log it? Private industry has externalized the cost of owning forests for logging to the government, and therefore taxpayer. Do you think IDK what I'm talking about? 🧐
Do you not know what happened to American transportation during the first half of the 20th century? This zoning and hollowing out of city centers was caused by market manipulation of the big 3 who lost a court case on it. So sure, the developers didn't come up with the idea, but the private market is still to blame, according to the COURT CASE.
Look, we're never getting rid of greed, but we can't let it ruin society the way it is. No man is an island.
Wow you're giving the JuiceMedia a run for their money here with this Honest Government Ad
As soon as I saw the title I thought Juice Media
This is the exact way that the US handles water out west. In Colorado, the water is owned before it even hits the ground as rain. It’s literally illegal to collect rain water. People also buy and sell water rights all the time.
That case about rainwater collection isn’t what you think it is. The guy wasn’t just collecting rainwater to water his plants. 1. He was using gigantic cisterns and 2. He diverted a river for it, damaging neighbors’ properties, which is a big nono.
It's restricted, not illegal in Colorado and California. Same with most things.
Australia could also juat anounce that they will not honor or enforce this any more and that farmers and land owners may use or harvest water on their land freely and this will just disolve overnight.
“Probably in Canada” 😂
This isn’t correct, “water rights” definitely is not always owned by the land owner. I know someone who owns waters rights in boulder co and rural Utah. You can definitely own water rights without owning all the land on the water
The problem is that the water rights are not taxed. If the water rights were taxed at near 100%, then it would be impossible to make money speculating on it. Rights holders would only use as much water as they need and sell the rest, then there would be more available for everyone else. The problem isn't free market capitalism. The problem is private ownership of land, because land is not capital and shouldn't be privately owned. (Economically speaking, water is a type of land.) For more information, look up the ideas of Henry George and Georgism.
Land should 100% be able to be privatly owned. If i live in a country i should be able to live on a plot of land that nobody can take away from me.
Capitalism is meant to harness the nature of animals which is to resource hoard (greed) and use it to convince them to compete against each other from a value added perspective, this is more and more difficult to have happen as jobs get more specified creating natural monopolies (port of Long Beach, ASML, DTCC, etc.) as well as utilities that we need to survive, when the profit motive is applied to utilities it is just extortion. Capitalism has its place, it just needs to stay there
@@RK-cj4oc sadly that's generally not the case. Even the USA, bastion of private ownership, you don't really own land. Don't pay the taxes on that land and you'll quickly learn who owns it. So really you rent exclusive (mostly) use rights through the tax system.
@@RK-cj4oc Sure, as long as you compensate everyone else for the privilege.
What's LESS efficient than free market capitalism? Government monopoly. Socialism.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, since it's been a while since I've seen it, but isn't this whole buy up water rights idea pretty much the bad guy's (a literal Bond villain) plan in Quantum of Solace?
When he said, I am paying for an over priced screaming service that doesn’t even improve my mind. I thought he was talking about nebula 💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀