Dry Country: Australia’s Water Crisis
Written By: Occer Maloney
With an ever growing global population and an ever expanding global menace on our near horizon, we come closer and closer to the seemingly inevitable class conflict over our most precious resource: water. Corporate interests around the world consider this basic requirement for life as we know it their next lucrative commodity. They are making moves to secure vast quantities of water and rights to collect it, happily leaving the rest of the world nothing but scraps to fight over like the animals they believe us to be.
Companies like Nestlé even debate whether access to water should even be considered a human right. Not only is this a terrifying thought, it is damn near criminal to even consider for most individuals who are currently facing the sad reality of day 0, the day the water runs dry. Across the state of NSW, many regional communities are facing the same prospect. Many are already unable to maintain their communal parks and recreation areas, leading to a dismal and depressing yellow, browns and greys of a dying and drying land to plague much of our landscape west of the border ranges.
Other groups like farmers are also feeling the drought, unable to maintain their crops and livestock, each year having to decide which animals they will be able to keep for the next year and which crops they can afford to grow for each season. While not every town or region is facing the same level of desperation from this drought, it still affects 99% of NSW and three quarters of QLD.
These regional communities rely on these farmers and graziers to provide both employment for locals as well as stimulus for their local economies. So when the farmers have to go into survival mode, it means they cannot afford to provide that stimulus for their local economies and that causes a trickle-down effect where other businesses cannot keep their doors open. This leads to an exodus of families and young people as they have to travel to find work and results in permanent damage to these communities and further centralization of the population in cities, which only goes to serve the interests of the capitalist class in Australia.
“The response from both federal and state governments, like always, has been too little too late. This shouldn’t be a surprise to Communists; the capitalists that have these bourgeois governments’ backs are benefiting from the hardship and drought.”
The farmers who are unable to weather the drought are being bought out by large agribusiness or by mining companies. Like how Gina Rhinehart, who participates both in large agribusiness and mining, has now secured another large swathe of farmland in New England. Capitalist forces have always profited off the struggles of the working class and this drought is no different.
”Luckily, in some communities they’ve managed to rally together and form community solidarity networks”
Possibly the most dire aspect of this drought, and often the most misunderstood part, is the mental health aspect that not only faces farmers, but also faces entire regional communities. The uncertain future they face and economic hardships that are already upon them have created a widespread epidemic of depression and anxiety. This new phenomenon has led many farmers to take very destructive and some ultimately fatal actions. This is possibly the most underestimated aspect of this drought. Luckily, in some communities they’ve managed to rally together and form community solidarity networks. In a town in regional Australia, Trundle, people have rallied around their local principle of Trundle Central School, John Southon. He has pioneered a network of aid for his local community and families in the area. This includes providing uniforms for their kids, refurbished showers for families to use and supplied washing services for families who have no means to acquire water in their drought affected town. They’ve also supplied hampers with non-perishables and household items that are needed. This is the style of community solidarity and organising that Marxists and socialists should be pioneering in their local communities to help aid struggling families and individuals across the country.
Now the biggest question that faces us is the question of what is to be done, or better put, what can be done? The general consensus of liberals and some of the left is that these regional communities have ‘brought this upon themselves’. While these communities do happen to vote for more conservative and reactionary groups which have done nothing to aid them in these hard times, this does not make them undeserving of our aid or solidarity. It should be in the interests of Marxists and socialists to reach out to these communities and offer them aid in any way we possibly can. These regional communities are just as proletarian as the urban centres. Lenin united the forces of industrial labour and rural labour to bring about the socialist revolution in Russia, and if we have any hopes of doing so in Australia then we must do the same. Communists must always work in the benefit of the working class, even those parts that have come around to our politics, yet.