“Australia has signed the Ramsar Convention,” Adelaide University Professor of Law Andrew Stewart said yesterday. “This is an international treaty which imposes obligations on the Commonwealth to protect Ramsar-listed wetlands.” The Federal Government is therefore obliged to protect the ecological character of Lakes Albert and Alexandrina and the Coorong. Under the international agreement the Commonwealth must include wetland conservation in its national land-use planning.

Twenty-five years ago, after a landmark case in the High Court, the Commonwealth used its external affairs powers to protect the World Heritage-listed wilderness in Tasmania and stop the Franklin dam. “This case is more complex,” Prof Stewart said. “It doesn’t mean that the Federal Government can automatically use those powers over the Coorong.”

But lawyers are looking at different possibilities for a legal challenge. The professor of environmental law at Uni SA, Rob Fowler, met constitutional barristers in Adelaide yesterday, acting for the Lower Murray River, Lakes and Coorong action group. While Mr Rudd said he would accelerate buying up water licences for environmental flows yesterday, Prof Fowler attacked the issuing tradable water licences in the first place, calling them a private property right over a public resource. “It was a market economy solution that just hasn’t worked,” he said.

But the Federal Government or other parties could still go to the High Court. They may be able to mount a case against the state-federal agreement, applauded at the time by SA Premier Mike Rann, to cap tradable licences across river catchments.

Prof Fowler said the Commonwealth’s powers over trading corporations could be used to free up licences. Meanwhile, lawyers and pressure groups are still poring over the Development Act to see if it can be used to stop the Wellington Weir. The State Government is preparing to dam the Murray at Wellington, and then open the Goolwa barrages to flood the lower lakes with sea water up to the dam. This would turn the lower Murray and lakes into a tidal estuary.

Before the last federal election, the then Federal River Murray Minister Malcolm Turnbull ruled that the Commonwealth had the power to stop the Wellington Weir. The Independent Weekly has now learned that the State Government prepared an environmental impact statement into the effects of building the dam, that it has spent almost 12 months doing that study, and that information in that study has already been discussed at a state-federal level.

The Independent Weekly further understands that if SA decided to build the Wellington dam, the present federal Labor Government will not stand in its way: that is, Ms Wong will not invoke the same Commonwealth powers Mr Turnbull threatened he could use.

State Water Security Minister Karlene Maywald’s office said yesterday the EIS was two weeks from completion, and it would be up to Ms Wong to decide whether it would be released publicly.

SA and Victoria were keen to hand over control to a new Federal Government body at the time of federation, but were thwarted by NSW. In the 1890s the Bulletin magazine reported: “No one knows at present how far irrigation may yet go, but in all probability it will one day be conducted on so vast a scale that, in dry or even moderately dry years, practically all the waters of the Murray system will be used up, and, so far as navigation purposes are concerned, that group of rivers will cease to exist. SA would then be wholly at the mercy of the other provinces.”

With the Rudd Government now publicly saying the lower lakes are lost and apparently going to water over the weir, Lakes Alexandrina and Albert and the Coorong are almost certain to be sacrificed to irrigators in other states.