What's New
Professor Donna Craig speaks on Property Rights to Water: Environmental Flows, Cultural Values and Traditional Property Rights at Charles Darwin University Public Lecture Series in Darwin (10 May 2005).
Donna Craig, Professor of Desert Knowledge, Charles Darwin University, and Associate Director of Macquarie University's Centre for Environmental Law, delivered a keynote lecture in the Charles Darwin University Public Lecture Series (2005) in Darwin on 10 May.
Her lecture focussed on "who owns the water?".
Water shortages are inevitable in Australia's near future and some eyes are looking to the north. But whose water is it? The international community has yet to claim water as a global resource. Within Australia we have never really come to terms with fundamental legal and regulatory issues related to the ownership and use of water. What of local users who need water to meet basic needs? What of Indigenous people whose very belief system is inextricably bound up with water? Who will get the benefit and what social and economic obligations will follow, from the new requirements for "environmental flows" and the new property rights created by water trading, Professor Craig wades into this legal swamp.
Her paper will appear shortly on the MU-CEL website under Publications.