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New thinking on water policy

By Victoria Kearney - posted Tuesday, 14 February 2006


When I was a child I remember enjoying playing with “dot to dot” drawing books. It fascinated me that you had to follow a set of progressions in mathematics before you could see the big picture on the page. If you failed to follow the correct path of numbers the picture never looked quite right.

Today, I am reminded of this exercise while reviewing and analysing our different positions and progress to effective management of national water policy in Australia.

Why is it that we persist in doing things one way, when it seems simple to do it another?

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In this article, I offer a reason for this inappropriate and outdated approach to policy management of issues critical to our human health and survival.

We continue to operate while ignoring the interdependence of natural resources and the ongoing health of our human environment. It is this lack of understanding and awareness of this interdependence that remains our barrier to progress. It is not about building mega departments or having cross political boundary “round table” agreements.

This approach only adds pressure to an already failing way of achieving positive outcomes. This approach just increases the workload of bureaucrats. It does not improve the overall management across different policy areas which may require us to work with many different stakeholders: particularly those who have very different ideologies or political positions to ourselves.

Water policy requires us to move across boundaries, across borders and across disciplines in a way that we have never worked before. This way of functioning requires a cultural and attitudinal change.

We need to view others not as competitors but as co-operative connections in improving the outcome of a resource which is essential for all.

Water is a shared resource. It is a natural resource, which has a role in the health and well-being of all in sustainable communities. It is also an economic commodity for some, and is essential for the production of our food. Water is viewed differently depending where you sit on the page of life in this country.

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Water management crosses over many disciplines including the social, physical, business, philosophical and political arenas. It also crosses over the borders of our states and flows to the sea. However we still manage it in compartments separated by man-made cultural and political boundaries.

Water is essential for all life. Water is not separate from the:

  • capitalist shareholders in corporate agricultural companies;
  • banking business managers for family farmers; or
  • physical environmental outcomes of environmentalists protecting river flows.

Water is an essential overlay for all these policy areas. So how do we move forward and make decisions that account for and act with understanding for this interdependent relationship?

We need to include a fourth leg on to our triple bottom line planning. Why? When we lean on one leg, be it social, economic, or environmental we are leaning on one leg of a three-legged stool. We now need to add a fourth leg to our stool which provides a mechanism for balance. This fourth leg on our stool of our operation and business management is a spiritual perspective. There is a need to include a spiritual perspective, a moral and ethical new world view, to our way of working.

There needs to be a growth in our a spiritual capital which will enable us to blend positions and accept a mix of solutions which protect the natural resource of water equally and justly for all inhabitants of this country and the globe.

Our Indigenous peoples have been telling us this for a long time. These ideas are now being included in philosophical documents such as the Earth Charter, the Australia Institute’s Manifesto for Wellbeing and the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion.

We now need to incorporate not only emotional intelligence as a way of working, but work in a way that enables us to blend our divergent positions with an underpinning of a spiritual perspective that sees us as only part of the whole, not power over the whole. It requires organisational, cultural, and personal psychological change.

This change will only occur through consciousness raising and social and political change.

Organisational and individual education for change needs to be supported for this to occur. There is a need for legislation which requires all organisations to develop organisational change programs which supports the development of this spiritual capital around water, humans and the environment. It cannot be taught in the traditional sense, it is a shift from what is in our mind and our work to what is in our heart that says “we care and have an interest in preserving our environment”. This is a shift from our mind to our hearts and this needs to be experienced not instructed.

How does this need to happen? Well social change needs a population approach to have a shift in consciousness.

Experts in early childhood education have a strategy for children to build a balance between their left brain-right brain thinking which is called “baby brain gym”. It is a tool that childhood educators use to assist children to develop a balanced approach between their motor and creative skills.

We now need to develop and perhaps even legislate for sustainability education programs in all organisations which assist us as decision makers, students and academics to grasp this interdependence and spiritual perspective. This needs to be achieved through a program of education that provides us with experiences which supports us to go back to our childhood days and re-educate our minds to think and act differently. This technique is called “lateral midline training”.

In order to develop a spiritual perspective in organisations and in our own personal behaviour, we need to work together more closely for the “common good”.

This can be done at the same time as achieving our own business objectives if we have a firm understanding and conviction to the whole. We need to be taught how to see the connection between the perspectives of the social, business and political and physical scientist.

Some may say this will never happen. But if we reflect on social change in the last century, change has a way of evolving before our very eyes and attitudes to industry, community development and human rights have certainly changed.

It is huge task to gain a balanced position between:

  • the demands of agriculture, the price of water trading and the management of environmental flows of rivers;
  • the desalinisation of water and improved management and re-use of our stormwater; and
  • the effective cross border management of water between all stakeholders including local councils, international lawyers, trade agreements, and global companies.

I am advocating a change which may be perceived by many as impossible. However sometimes it takes strong leadership and even political solutions and action for us to be open to, or at least thinking about a path forward that no other has trod before.

So lets all go back to baby brain gym and give it a try, so that we can get the picture together as a whole, both the maths and the creative. This is an issue of understanding interdependence and it is stalling many other critical social and environmental policy issues beyond water policy, including health, regional development, and so on. 

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Article edited by Peter Coates.
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About the Author

Victoria Kearney is currently completing a Doctorate of Philosophy in Human Geography at Macquarie University. She has previously spent several years teaching and working in public health promotion and local government livability planning.

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