News media framing of the Murray–Darling Basin ‘water theft’ controversy
| Author | Katrina Clifford,Rob White |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00048658211000094 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
News media framing of
the Murray–Darling Basin
‘water theft’ controversy
Katrina Clifford
Deakin University, Australia
Rob White
University of Tasmania, Australia
Abstract
An Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Four Corners investigation, screened on free-
to-air television on 24 July 2017, revealed a series of improper conducts pertaining to the
Murray–Darling Basin river system. The journalistic expos
e included allegations of water
theft, questionable compliance decisions and collusion between water regulators and irriga-
tion lobbyists. This interdisciplinary study explores the revelations and their framing in a
sample of state and national media reports about the ‘water theft’ controversy and its fallout.
It compares these with the normative frames adopted by critical green criminology, which
views the allegations at the heart of the Murray–Darling Basin controversy in terms of state-
corporate interests, industry capture of regulators and the notion that water ‘theft’ con-
stitutes a ‘crime’ because of the environmental harm that results from excessive water
extraction. This article presents the findings of the study, which elaborate on the impacts
of media framing of crimes of the powerful (such as large agricultural companies and
state government agencies), including the shaping of public understandings of environmental
matters.
Keywords
Environmental harm, Four Corners, media criminology, Murray–Darling Basin, news framing,
water governance, water theft
Date received: 27 August 2020; accepted: 15 February 2021
Corresponding author:
Katrina Clifford, School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University,221 Burwood Highway, Burwood,
Victoria 3125, Australia.
Email: katrina.clifford@deakin.edu.au
Journal of Criminology
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DOI: 10.1177/00048658211000094
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2021, Vol. 54(3) 365–382
Introduction
In July 2017, an investigation by Four Corners, a national current affairs television
programme produced by the public service broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation (ABC), revealed a series of improper conducts pertaining to alleged water
theft from the Murray–Darling Basin. The Basin is the catchment for Australia’s largest
river system and one of the nation’s most significant agricultural areas (Murray–Darling
Basin Authority, 2018). Managed across five jurisdictions – running from Queensland in
the north of the country down through New South Wales (NSW), the Australian
Capital Territory and Victoria to South Australia – the Murray–Darling Basin is the
nation’s food bowl, producing one-third of Australia’s food supply. Over 2.6 million
Australians call the Basin home, while over 3 million people access drinking water
from it (Murray–Darling Basin Authority, 2018).
Water access and use in the Basin is arranged through the provision of water allo-
cations, which stipulate ‘the share of the available water the licence holder is entitled to
(and from which an allocation is calculated) and the “part” of the water source from
which water can be extracted’ (Bricknell, 2010, p. 104). While there are different rules
from state to state and valley to valley, generally, the plan stipulates that it is an offence
for anyone to take water from the Basin in excess of the water allocation specified as
part of their water access licence and use provisions (NSW DPI, 2017). A complex
system of water markets allows users to buy and sell water entitlements, with water
trading in the Basin reported to be worth A$2 billion each year (Hasham, 2019).
The ABC’s Four Corners episode, ‘Pumped’, alleged that billions of litres of taxpayer-
bought water had been pumped out of the Barwon–Darling, mostly for cotton growing,
while the NSW Government had turned a blind eye. Much of the water appeared to
have been ‘taken unlawfully when the river was too low’ or during times when pumping
had been banned in order to protect the drinking water of nearby communities (Slezak,
2017). Claims have been made that the Murray–Darling Basin Authority knew of the
water theft allegations as early as July 2016 but took no action until the Four Corners
programme. After it aired, the then-top water bureaucrat in NSW, Gavin Hanlon,
resigned over corruption allegations involving the sharing of confidential government
documents with irrigation lobbyists. The NSW Government also moved to create a
specialised agency – the Natural Resources Access Regulator – to help improve water
monitoring and compliance in the state. In March 2018, the state’s water regulator,
WaterNSW, commenced prosecutions against the irrigators named in the Four Corners
broadcast for breaches of the NSW Water Management Act.
Much has been written about the Murray–Darling Basin and the ineffectiveness of its
governance regimes and the plan which has sought to sustain its health (Baird et al.,
2020; White, 2019). Less attention has been paid to mainstream media’s coverage of
water resource management in the Basin, and the implications of journalistic investiga-
tions, such as the one by Four Corners. In this article, we add to this existing body of
work through the findings of an interdisciplinary study conducted into the framing of
the water use debate, and its controversies, in the immediate aftermath of the Four
Corners water theft allegations. The study embraces our philosophy of what it means
to do media criminology, which we define as the fusion of journalism and media studies
with that of criminology, around the key themes of crime, justice and transgression.
366 Journal of Criminology 54(3)
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