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

by Scott Hamilton, Stuart Kells

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 its 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 was 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. Their compelling exposé brings 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.

Genres: Nonfiction

Kindle Edition

Published August 31, 2021

Reviews

[Nicholas De · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have a few gripes with this book and it pains me to mention them as I do agree with with the authors contention of issues faced in the Murray Darling basin.

Firstly, this book has no bibliography in it and the notes only relate to direct quotes. It makes multiple, sometimes spurious claims without proving any citations. This makes the entire book wholly unscholarly and condemns it to being a maybe factual gossip compendium.

Secondly, the second half of the book is numbingly repetitive with the authors just drilling their thesis with a variation on a little anecdote. This is not the succinct analysis of a complex issue promised by the blurb. Lazy writing that a good publisher/editor could have fixed.

Thirdly, the book falls down horribly with its appeal to indigenous water management as if it is a magic solution. Indigenous water management is never clearly defined. It is also not clear how this will help solve the issue by creating another stakeholder group and multiplying complexity.

I would have liked to read more about boys Australia’s water management compares to other countries and for there to be more in depth analysis of the Murray darling basin plan with its failings outlined.

I have a feeling that the authors built the book around their thesis and found anecdotal supporting evidence to support the thesis. An exercise in confirmation bias rather than an analysis of a key issue in contemporary Australia.

Overall a lazy book with many failings and little successes. Not quite thick enough to serve as kindling unlike the the MDBA plan.

[Text Publishing]

The following reviews have been shared by Text Publishing - publisher of Sold Down the River

'A compelling exposé of how market forces are destroying the Murray–Darling Basin. The tragedy is we let it happen.'
Michael Cathcart

‘A complex subject made enjoyably readable. Sold Down the River shows how water has become commodified in the tentacles of mercenary traders—and at a time when climate change is making water more important and more scarce.’
Cheryl Kernot

‘It takes writers with excellent knowledge, uncommon flair and impressive skills, to get to the dark truth of Australia’s epic water failure. Read this book and weep—better still, read it and demand change.’
Rosemary Sorensen

'With its mixture of anger and urgency, this book is essential reading on an arcane subject Australians should know more about.'
Books+Publishing

‘The forensic detail that the authors go into…is quite incredible. A really, really great book.’
Virginia Trioli, ABC Melbourne

‘Sold Down the River is an enlightening if often sobering read about a key Australian natural asset. It’s a robust book anchored by the authors's reliable expertise in financial markets and complemented by their empathetic ear as they talk to all who rely [on] or benefit from this network of rivers and trading in it…This book offers an alarming and urgent call for reform.’
Australian

'If you're a fan of US author Michael Lewis...you will devour this magnificent book. Hamilton and Kells have the same ability to critique a complex issue by grounding the story in the voices of ordinary participants or victims.’
Peter Donoughue

'In a series of interviews with farmers, irrigators, water traders, brokers, market operators and investors, authors Scott Hamilton and Stuart Kells discovered a series of scandals associated with how water is regulated and manipulated by the top end of town.’
Stefano de Pieri, Sunraysia Daily

'The reasons why so many of us thought we smelt a rat in the water markets are now revealed.’
Country News

'Sold Down the River may have been written by a pair of policy wonks, but they put together a book that smoulders with indignation. They also call the fudges where they see them. Their solution too, which demands Indigenous participation and neutralises asymmetry between trader and farmer, is credible. Who knows if it’ll happen.’
SMH/Age

'Explosive…A disastrous story of high speed traders and boiler rooms with no connection to the land playing with Australia’s most precious resource.’
Koondrook and Barham Bridge

‘This is a worrying book, which should be read by anyone with an interest in Australia’s future food, water, or economic policy.’
Monaro Post

‘Excellent, timely and well-written...The book is very easy to read despite the many facts and technical aspects of water trading which are discussed. Complex issues are presented in a well-written enticing style.’
Australian Rural and Regional News

'Hamilton and Kells do not hold back. Their writing is engaging, as they weave extensive interviews with farmers, lawyers, politicians and traders with contextual information. The interviews add richness, offering different voices that reveal the complexities of water policies and personalise a crisis that is being played out in overseas boardrooms by unidentified traders or by computer bots…[A] must-read for academic and general audiences with an interest in Australia’s future.’
Australian Historical Studies

‘A very sobering read...Hamilton and Kells describe a complex geographical, hydrological and human system.’
Kate Auty, Alternative Law Journal

[Suzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books that every Australian should read. It's very well researched and would be a great book to include in the curriculum for students from a variety of subjects (commerce, agriculture, environmental sciences, business, political science etc).

I'd love to watch a movie about this as a sort of follow up to The Great Short movie, seeing as it gives a picture into the next markets those terrible people went and ruined after the US housing.

I learnt a great deal reading this book and feel its best read as an accompaniment to 'Dead in the Water' by Richard Beasley.

[Tess · Rating 3 out of 5]

First half was excellent but second became quite repetitive without diving deeper or more broadly into the issues, why they’re problematic, broader impacts etc. Also I know the book takes a farming lens but environmental impacts are barely discussed past the first 100 pages; disappointing example of climate being seen as external to economics again.

[Geoffrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall disappointing as went over the same anecdotal evidence without fleshing out the actual mechanics & who did what exactly
But interesting book that adds to my knowledge of the problem we have with water in Australia

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best explanation of Australia's weird and wonderful water system. Hard to follow the details sometimes but that is unavoidable because Australia has gotten itself into a mess with its extremely complicated and often counter-productive water systems.

[Spero · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scary!

[Bec · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you haven't read this, go read it. If you have, read it again. This is what we should all be talking about.

[Eli · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author keeps repeating the same point over and over again for 100 pages.

[Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

What happens when you separate water from land holdings and instead create a money-making-mechanism for people with absolutely no interest in primary production.

Policy failure. Market failure.

If I were commissioning programs at the ABC, I'd be adapting this to a doco... a story that needs to be told to a wider audience.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a hilarious book on many levels.

First it implies that ”need” implies ownership. So if you build a guest house in your yard, next to your home, if someone ”need” that, somehow they should not only be able to move in, but also dictate the terms. Which is hilarious given the very long list of racism, and xenophobia, when the Australian society decides it has to ”protect” itself from non-whites.

Second, the fallacious mind can have the Government simultaneous as benevolent moron and competent manager. And here lays the main issue with this sort of musings: it had to be a State to do all this. In a world without a State this wouldn't have been the case. Yet, somehow the blame should lay with the barons and traders inspired by the devil.

And yes, this is in sync with the xenophobia and totalitarian outbursts of the Australian administration. Sure, the discourse is whitewashed carefully, but beneath it one will find the same discourse a Lenin or a Mussolini would have given a century ago: the evil Jews / Masons / Class exploiters. Labels change. The ideas seem to stay the same.