Canada and Australia - Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries - page 157

scientists are loath to blame any single occurrence on climate change, the
connection here seemed obvious to ordinary Australians.
Air pollution is less of a problem for Australia than for most countries.
It has fewer sources of pollution, a smaller population, and winds from the
oceans and the interior blow it away. Nevertheless, the problem exists in
Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and other large cities during the summer
and fall, which on average have 20 days of smog exceeding 10 particles per
hundred million. Automobile exhaust is the chief culprit. Since 1986 new
autos have been required to have catalytic converters, and lead has been
banned in the gasoline. Most cities have outlawed incinerators. Industrial
pollution has been a problem. For example, the government determined
that the lead smelter in Port Pirie was damaging the brains of the children,
so required drastic cuts in emissions. The Commonwealth passed the Air
Quality Monitoring Act in 1976 under the provisions of Section 96 of the
Constitution regarding financial assistance to the states, not its trade and
commerce authority in Section 51.
The availability of water is of great concern. In 2004 the governmental
leaders from the national, state, and local levels signed the National Water
Initiative that expanded a system of buying and selling water, strengthened
planning and addressed over-allocated systems. Like the Intergovernmental
Agreement of 1992, this was not done by legislation, but by a compact
among the three levels under the auspices of the Council of Australian
Governments. The council consists of the national prime minister, the
six state premiers, and the president of the Local Government Association.
Previously, it has addressed issues of environmental regulation, human
embryos in medical research, counter-terrorism arrangements and restric-
tions on handguns. Its stance on the environment was to call for better
delineation of responsibility between the national and state governments.
In the 1980s cotton farming expanded. One new region was along the
Macquarie Marshes, a beautiful wetland in the Darling River in New
South Wales, with a greater bird diversity even than Kakadu National
Park. Many of the planters were Americans from California and Arizona.
Except for the marshes, the region is quite arid. The cotton farmers soon
came into conflict with the graziers who needed the water. Moreover, the
fickle weather also threatened floods some years, so the dams needed to
remain partially empty to fill up with the rare heavy rains. In the vicinity of
the Namoi River, but away from irrigated land, the planters installed large,
powerful pumps to draw up groundwater. The graziers could not com-
pete using their old-fashioned windmills. The cotton growers organized