Sold Down the River: How Robber Barons and Wall Street Traders Cornered Australia’s Water Market

The Murray–Darling Basin is Australia’s greatest environmental asset. The story of water in Australia is written into its ancient rivers, creeks and wetlands. It’s home to more than forty Indigenous nations, and it covers an area bigger than France. It is the beating heart of our regions and sustains 40 per cent of our food production.

In 2012 Australia signed up to the Murray–Darling Basin Plan, a scheme designed to create a market for the Basin’s water and to safeguard the environment.

But the Plan has gone horribly wrong. It has sold our farmers and rural communities down the river. It has contributed to appalling environmental damage on the planet’s driest inhabited continent. It has allowed a ruthless market to form, exploited by traders who buy and sell water as if it were a currency like Bitcoin.

Scott Hamilton and Stuart Kells, both experts in public policy, have interviewed irrigators, farmers, Traditional Custodians and water traders to tell this disastrous story. In doing so, they bring to light how we have failed to protect our most precious natural resource.

You can’t understand Australia without understanding water. Sold Down the River is compulsory reading for all of us.

Scott Hamilton is an expert in natural resource management and climate change. A member of the Energy Transition Hub at the University of Melbourne, he writes regularly for The Mandarin and other publications.

Author and historian Stuart Kells is adjunct professor at La Trobe Business School. He has twice won the prestigious Ashurst Business Literature Prize.

‘A vitally important book detailing how a policy meant to save Australia’s rivers became the means of their destruction.’ Tim Flannery