Link here: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/water-issues/basin-plan-gets-bogged-down-in-legal-wrangling-20101026-172eq.html
Federal Water Minister, Tony Burke, wants to reassure angry farmers he can give social and economic factors equal weighting with environmental imperatives when formulating a new water plan for the Murray-Darling Basin.
However constitutional lawyer and University of NSW law professor George Williams said the advice, released by the minister yesterday, actually confirms that the water plan has to ''faithfully implement'' the international environmental conventions upon which the 2007 Water Act is based.
''It says they have to give primacy to the environment and then they can give consideration to social and environmental effects,'' Professor Williams said.
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''If the plan does anything else, if it is incompatible with the environmental conventions, then it will be unconstitutional, because it is the conventions that the Howard government relied upon to get constitutional power for the Water Act.''
The The Water Act is based on the convention on biological diversity. It is an international legally binding treaty that entered into force on 29 December 1993. Here's the wiki link:
The precautionary Principle is mentioned in the Preamble to the Convention on Biological Diversity. link: http://www.cbd.int/convention/articles.shtml?a=cbd-00 , but not by name (cunning little principle)
It seems Mr Burke intends to use a weak version of the principle, and Professor Williams the strong version (see my previous post about the differences). The weak version allows other factors outside of the purely environmental, while Mr Williams Wants the environment to be the overriding concern.
The pity is that the time and cost spent in legal wrangling and spin doctoring could pay for some serious scientific horsepower to really investigate the Murray-Darling basin problems.
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