Laugh like a drain, seriously, reading Richard Beasley’s DEAD IN THE WATER, probably the most seriously funny or funnily serious book you’ll read this year.

DEAD IN THE WATER is a very angry book about our greatest environmental catastrophe – the death of the Murray Darling Basin – and the flow of disdain and outright outrage from Beasley is damning.

Beasley is a Senior Counsel at the New South Wales Bar and was Senior Counsel Assisting at the Murray-Darling Royal Commission, established by the South Australian Weatherill Government in 2018 conducted by Commissioner Bret Walker SC. He had a front row seat at his nomination for the low point of public administration and governance in Australia so far this century.

“The maladministration, negligence and illegality associated with the Basin Plan is not something Australia should be congratulated for. But nor are we to be condemned for it, if by ‘Australia’ the reference is to twenty-five million of us who don’t know how the Basin Plan was meant to be drafted or implemented.” DEAD IN THE WATER seeks to remedy that ignorance.

Beasley purports that contrary to its wreckers, saboteurs, and National Neanderthals, The Water Act of 2007 does not contemplate, even remotely, the end of irrigated agriculture in the Murray-Darling Basin, but to take a sustainable amount.

The maladministration Beasley bangs on about is the bastion of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, who had conducted ‘robust’ modelling for climate change impacts for the Basin to 2030, but ‘ had not used that information in the determination’ of the environmentally sustainable level of take or the sustainable diversion limit that reflects it.

WTF?

The law requires that science determines something to save the environment. That law was passed by our politicians. Those exact same politicians then decide they either don’t like the law, or don’t like science, or don’t like fighting for something that is lawful and science based that will save the environment.

As Beasley articulately argues, this is not Ivory Tower stuff. This is basic. This is the rule of law and its due administration. This is the awful truth of rampant unlawfulness.

The result is over allocation, damage to the environment to the point of destruction, to the edge of extinction.

The living things of wetlands range from microbes to mammals. Some wetlands purify the water that runs over and through them. Some act as carbon sinks. If you think development in the Murray-Darling Basin should continue or proceed at a level that degrades our wetlands and floodplains, then you simply don’t care about life on earth.

Hell hath no fury like a world scorned, scorched, dehydrated, and that fury is already being visited upon us.

Beasley’s plea is beyond reasonable doubt. Have as much irrigated agriculture as you can. Make as much money from this as you can. But make sure as you go about this, that you follow one simple rule: don’t take water beyond the point where you will degrade the most important parts of the environment.

DEAD IN THE WATER is about one of the most inspiring environmental statutes ever legislated, the Commonwealth Water Act 2007 and the consistently startling level of political negligence and maladministration associated with that law ever since.

It’s about the gross mismanagement of thirteen billion dollars of taxpayers money. It’s about fraud in our food bowl.

It’s about the fuck-knuckle idea of Federalism and the toothless tiger claws of Royal Commissions. Bret Walker’s royal commission report contains 117 key findings which led to 44 recommendations. None have been put in place.

DEAD IN THE WATER is a jaw dropping page turner illustrating how Australia suffers from parched political will, searing scientific censorship, and a dehydrated honesty that has shrivelled on the vine.

DEAD IN THE WATER by Richard Beasley is published Allen & Unwin