We Learn From Listening

Akasha Rose: Welcome everyone. My name is Akasha. I'm from Civic Ledger and we're hosting tonight Making Choices About Water, which we're hoping is going to bring a lot of discussion about really great things to the water space in Australia.

So we've got some wonderful people here tonight. We've got Wendy here to moderate it, and I'd like to begin by acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which we meet today. In my case, Wathaurung people of the Kulin nations. Also the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nations, the Djugun and Yawuru the traditional owners of Broome, the Turrbal Traditional owners of the Brisbane Meeanjin area and the Ngunnawal people the traditional owners of Canberra. So I'd like to pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging and I extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders peoples here today.

I'll just introduce Dr. Wendy Elford, who has kindly joined us as tonight's moderator. So Wendy has a doctorate in environmental design and is a freelance academic and expert in human centered design who focuses on coherence and strategy. She helps lead us to create adaptive systems, build communities and support people to get their best work done and to live well.

Wendy's at her best when working on messy and contentious issues, which of course water is here and where there's no one best solution and finding many perspectives is critical. So thank you so much, Wendy, for moderating and I'll hand it over to you.

2:30 Wendy Elford: We are so lucky this evening. We've got three fabulous speakers and I'd just like to introduce them one by one.

First up, we have Dr. Erin O'Donnell. She's a water law and policy expert from the University of Melbourne who focuses on water markets, environmental flows and water governance. So she's definitely got her hands full.

Her first dive into water management was in 2002 and she's been involved ever since, but more recently in international law as an international leader in the new field of legal rights for rivers and the challenges and options these new rights bring to the social cultural and natural values of rivers. So she's just finished a consultancy for no less than the World Bank on water markets in their role in water security and sustainable development. And more recently, she's been also working in partnership with the Traditional Owners across Victoria to identify law and policy pathways to increase Aboriginal access to water.

And then we have Katrina Donaghy as our second speaker and she's CEO of Civic Ledger, our host for today. She leads a team which uses blockchain technology solutions to build markets of tomorrow. So think water, carbon, nutrients and biodiversity. I'm sure we can add to that list. So Katrina's driving question might be how much do we have, how much have we shared, how much have we used? Before Civic Ledger she was a career bureaucrat spending two decades in both state and local governments. And she's worked in the area of strategy and program delivery for the longest time with a focus on citizen engagement.

So Katrina sees lots of opportunity in blockchain technology. And when she struck it in 2015, she just knew this was a place to be for government. She was involved in shaping the Australian government's national blockchain strategy. So a lot more to happen there.

And our third speaker is very special. Dr. Anne Poelina. I first met Anne's work at Ozwater in 2020 as a keynote speaker. Thank you very much for that Anne. She is a Nyikina Warrwa custodian from the Martuwarra (Mardoowarra) Lower Fitzroy River in Western Australia. She is Professor (Chair of Indigneous Studies) and senior research fellow at the Nulungu Research Institute at the University of Notre Dame.

Anne has worked on issues in environmental and cultural protection in the Kimberley of Western Australia. One of my favorite places and it’s a very beautiful area indeed. And she's Chair of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council, an organization which brings together the Traditional Owners of the river to advocate for the rights to life of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River.

She holds not only two doctorates, but three master's degrees. And I'd like you to welcome all three of our speakers.

Now, why now? I think this question just came up in between the speakers. Why now is water such a contentious issue? It's suddenly appeared on the scene. A lot of us have seen this coming, but how do we set a vision from now and how do we do planning so the role of traditional owners can play out and have a genuine impact in what we're doing? We've seen this pattern in fire. We had the fires in Australia and all of a sudden it was, oh, the people who've been managing the land for the longest time. What can we learn together? So I'm asking now, as Erin starts our conversation, how do we set a vision?

How do we do planning so that that perspective comes into play? And we can take that into 2022 in all of our work. Erin?

7:18 Erin O'Donnell: Thank you so much for having me here tonight, everyone. It's a real pleasure to be here and to join these speakers to talk about something that's really dear to my heart.

I've spent the last 20 years working on water issues. And I think it's, yeah, it's something that's never going away. So it's a really exciting space and I'm looking forward to a really great conversation. I'd like to begin by acknowledging that I'm coming to you from Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung country. I pay my respects to their elders past and present, and I acknowledge that they’ve never ceded their rights to lands and waters. And I think that is a good place to start.

And this question of why now and how do we make choices about water? I think there's a growing realisation in Australia that although we have got many, many things right in the water governance space. We have one of the most robust water governance frameworks in the world.

We have one of the most active water markets in the Southern Murray-Darling basin in the world. For a long time Australia was going out to the world and saying, look at us like we are doing it best. And that started to change in 2017. For those of you who remember the Four Corners episode about water theft in 2017, that was when I certainly, as a researcher in that space felt a wave of schadenfreude echo around the world.

And suddenly everybody else was like, ah, not quite so good. And in Australia, we haven't quite figured out all of the solutions to the problems. You've got a few things to fix in your own backyard. So I think for me, that was probably a really a salutary moment in Australian water policy, where we started to recognize that the wheels could come off quite quickly. That a lot of the policy development that we'd been investing in had come from a very technocratic perspective.

It hadn't necessarily engaged communities. So the community role in vision setting for water was often quite missing. Communities began to feel that decisions were being made about water in ways that felt very far away from the way that we experience water.

So there was a great little experiment that Moreland council ran a few years ago to try and get people to explain their place in the water cycle. And they'd get people to draw it. So they asked children to draw it and children would draw these imaginative understandings of the world around them and really interconnected. Not necessarily correct, but really wide-ranging interconnected understandings of the water cycle. Even if not necessarily correct. Adults would draw their house with a pipeline in and a pipe out. That was their connection to water.

So I think a lot of us don't understand where our water comes from. A lot of us don't necessarily think about how our water gets to us. What happens when it goes away, what happens to the water once we're done with it? So we are a bit disconnected.

And I think we're now also becoming aware of the cost of that disconnection and of the failure to acknowledge history, but also to acknowledge the present. So right now the impacts of climate change are being felt in the water sector. Climate change is fundamentally a water rights issue. That is where we are seeing the biggest impacts of climate change.

Right now it's driving water scarcity. It's also driving the increased intensity of floods and droughts. So the system is changing very rapidly around us. And what we can see is a governance system that is struggling to keep up. So again, for those of you who've been following the news in various ways, New South Wales at the moment is about to pass or is trying to pass a major new water law reform that will allow, or at least legalise, because of course they've been allowing it for some time, floodplain harvesting. And one of the things that comes out repeatedly from the New South Wales perspective is the lack of climate change modeling that is being used to underpin their assessments of water availability.

So we're just not paying enough attention to what is going on right now when we are making decisions about water. One of the studies that came out this year showed that the hydrology of catchments is changing dramatically. So after a severe drought like the 2007 to 2010 millennium drought, catchments take a long time to recover if at all.

And what that means is that they continue to behave as though they are still drought stricken. So instead of having rainfall that seeps into the soil, you have rainfall that continues to run off it. You don't get the land storage, you don't get that slow release of water back into rivers. You don't get groundwater recharge.

And so the systems, the hydrological systems that we rely on that we expect to see increased availability of water with increased rainfall are changing in ways that we don't understand. So one of the potential outcomes and I can't draw a direct line here, but one of the really interesting things that we've just seen in the news is that after the wettest November on record in Australia, Queensland's major dams are only 63% full. That's 3% above the level at which drought restrictions start to take effect at this time of year.

So the system is changing. The system is also foundationally unjust. So when I talk about water justice, it's really important to acknowledge the origins of that injustice. And for First Nations people that began at colonisation, it has been reflected at almost every step of the water governance process.

So every piece of legislation around Australia has a clause in it that says water vests in the Crown. That is aqua nullius. Many of you will have heard of terra nullius, which was when people arrived and assumed the land was empty, or at least tried to tell themselves that so that they could convince themselves that it was lawful to steal the land from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

We did the same thing with water, and we're doing it again. All the time because the statutes are in place. And that's what underpins a state minister's abilities to allocate water. So this injustice is ongoing and it is in fact getting worse. So recent work by Lana Hartwig and Sue Jackson have benchmarked Aboriginal ownership of water across the Murray-Darling basin. It is less than 0.2%. In the New South Wales portion of the Murray-Darling basin, for instance, Aboriginal population is nearly 10%. So even on a population parity level, it's an extraordinarily vanishingly, small amount of water ownership. That has gone backwards by nearly 20% in the past decade. So, vanishingly small and still declining.

So we're learning a lot about how we're not so great at managing water. We're starting to see an acknowledgement of this injustice at the heart of our water work frameworks. And that's raising really big questions about how do we go forward? What is legitimate water management, legitimate water governance?

How do we create that? How do we get there together? And I think one of the things which is starting to tip this balance into a genuine question of what can we do differently now and raising the profile of these issues is that we're recognising the power of participatory water management, the power of bringing communities together to have conversations about what it is that we collectively want for water.

And one of the really transformative ideas that people can use to come together around and to think about new ways of water management is this recognition of rivers as living beings. Because when you do that, you fundamentally change the relationship between people and rivers. And you start, instead of saying, what can we get from the river and continue to exploit the river you start to say, well, what do we want for them? How do we get there with the river when the river becomes a collaborator and a partner in that? And I can talk a lot about that and some really fantastic examples from around the world and right here in Australia.

But I think I'll wrap up my opening remarks with an idea that there is a genuine shift around the world to see rivers in new ways and to acknowledge that this has been led in many instances as it has here in Australia, by the tireless efforts of traditional owners and first nations People, because this is part of laws that have been in place for tens of thousands of years.

So with that, I'll hand back to Wendy and hear from somebody else.

15:58 Wendy Elford: Thank you very much, Erin. That was a great start and I picked the word disconnected and reconnect. I think that we use technology all the time now to reconnect. And if we've got to a sort of tipping point where we need to look at how we transform our systems so that we can be more realistic with the data that we can have to hand, because there is now a lot of opportunity to do what couldn't be done when the first river management systems were put into place and know that they've been trying to do something like this for the longest time.

I think the first goes at that might've been in the late 1700s. So, you know, 200 years and a bit and we’ve still got our trainer wheels on. But we've got now a lot of technology that can help us understand what the real state of a river is. And if we're trying to govern a river without data, I don't think that's going to work very well, especially when things are changing so quickly.

So I was wanting to ask Katrina to take us a little bit into another world where we can use data to understand how we can better manage our water systems with a view to allowing better participation from all people. And I wouldn't say cut out the middleman, I guess there's a little bit of that in it, but you know, best how we might use that technology.

And my hope is that we can start putting a little dash of Internet of Things in there too, but not your area. Maybe you could bring that in a little bit as well.

17:34 Katrina Donaghy: Thank you, Wendy. And I thank you, Erin, for a great opening setting the scene. I am in Brisbane, I'm in the beautiful country of the Turrbal people and Meeanjin which means Brisbane. I'm just north of Brisbane. It's interesting where I began my life is from the Wanganui River.

I'm a New Zealander and it is one of the first rivers, the Wanganui or Whanganui (pronounced “Fonganui”). So my bones and my heritage comes from the river system where I was born in New Zealand a long long time ago. And when I arrived in Australia I arrived during the flood event in Brisbane at the age of six years old. So I remember my whole life in the early days was surrounded by water. And then I was part of the Brisbane City Council flood management team that planned for the January 2011 flood event which broke the Millennial Drought.

And then I helped the city recover from that flood which caused $240 million worth of damage. And then I moved to Queensland Urban Utility’s Strategy and Growth Team under the leadership of Julie McLellan to look at how to build a utility of the future. We knew back in 2013 that our utility of the future would be decentralised and would deploy natural systems. However, the engineering teams still had a strong hold across the utility at the stage and the Team was disbanded.

When you have spent your most of your working life in bureaucracy, it was constantly frustrating - I was trying to find out why it was impossible to share data across government agencies and so much money was spent to recreate that same data in different systems. In late 2015, a technology called blockchain found me and shook me by the collar and said, you need to pay attention to this Katrina. I knew that this technology was special.

Interestingly Erin and I arrived at the very same point of time where everything changed for us which was on the eve of the Four Corner’s story that actually blew apart what was happening down in New South Wales’ water markets which was the eve that we delivered our Feasibility Study to the Australian government arguing for a water market that was built on blockchain technology and suffice to say it was bad timing.

The technology was, even though it was in its infancy, we argued very pragmatically in a very detailed report why we think that this technology was quite interesting. It involved two words, trust and transparency. Blockchain technology enables us to provide a mechanism where data and governance is transparent and trusted because the infrastructure is decentralised.

Not one person or organisation has a vested interest in the actual infrastructure, rather the participants in the market are the owners of that infrastructure. So when we talk about blockchain technology, there can be strong reactions because of the explosion of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) or the crypto, the Bitcoin.

But we need to look lower. We need to go under and deeper and deeper. And what the fundamentals of blockchain technology is ultimately a triple entry ledger system whereby it's secured with cryptography, but mostly the most powerful thing about the blockchain technology allows us to have peer to peer relationships.

And when we have peer to peer relationships, we're able to then exchange value with each other. And we revealed all of this to the Australian government way back in 2017, which feels like so long ago. And even though they applauded our innovation and they found our world was really quite interesting, we were too early and they believed that the regulatory environment would not be able to adapt quickly enough to take on this technology.

So we put the technology down and we worked with IP Australia and we did some other things that really, but what it was always there, that's what we would pick it up, play around with it, put it back down. Then in 2019, I had another experience, again, serendipitous, maybe making, meeting people at the right time.

So I met Allan Dale and he introduced me to Joe Moro. And I remember I had to go up to Cairns on the eve of Easter. I couldn't get any cars. I had to get an Uber. We had to wait there for hours. And then this, this mango farmer rocked into the pub. He looked at me and he said, how are you Katrina?

And I said, I'm fine, Joe. And I said, I've got something to show you. And I showed him our early part of our early iteration of Water Ledger. And he just looked at me and he said, that's what we need, Katrina. Let's do this. I did it. So what, that was a game changing moment for us, because from that moment, it meant everything to us because all of a sudden we had the person who had the problem look at us and say, we want to work together because we think we can actually make a difference.

And as a result, you know, there's a long story and it's all out there in the domain about what happened next. But I think what is so interesting and, and we started touching on this before the session. It's really interesting because we have been working with water for five to six years, but we've also been working with blockchain technology.

And for the last five to six years, we've been thrown out of rooms, rooms closing on us. People telling us we were crazy that we weren't, you know, that we were, you know, working with the dark web and nobody can do anything with water because it's so stifled with vested interests and the brokers. So we were told that we were crazy and what we just knew that if we actually worked with the right people, focusing on the right problem to solve, that we think that the time will come.

And now our industry, all of a sudden we’re no longer the little kids anymore. We're now allowed to be in rooms. We've got our treasurer talking about our technology. We've got the RBA talking about our technology. If you look at the modernisation of manufacturing in this country is now pushing blockchain to be the underlying infrastructure for supply chains of the future.

So all of a sudden, it's now right. So 24 hours ago, we signed a contract with the CRC for Developing Northern Australia, where they're backing us to look at the digital infrastructure to roll out across Northern Australia based on governance. Not governance from the top, but governance from the bottom and how we actually look at marketplaces from the bottom up whereby it is actually co-designed through a place-based economic model where water markets actually emerge through clear governance that's built from the bottom up. And to us, And I have my partner on the call today. I've got Cassian Drew from Inclusive Growth Partners, who actually, again, another person I met a couple of years ago found our way that we were actually going to work together. And now we are, and Cassian comes from enormous experience around policy place based economics, a world of experience working in the NGO space and especially with First Nations people around water.

And we've also got the NFQ Growers. So I'm really excited because tonight's discussion I’m hoping we'll tease all of this sort of stuff out and hopefully start more conversations.

25:29 Wendy Elford: Thank you very much Katrina. I think we've got quite a spread so far. So we started off with water and policy and law, and we came, had a hint of rivers as living beings, which I think is something that we really need to pull towards now in our conversation because technology certainly brings us a lot of opportunity.

And now that, you know, we know that blockchain is a now and happening thing, we know the water need is now and happening. So those two things are colliding, but we shouldn't really forget that the country has been managed for a very long time in a way that's kept it intact over many changes. And Anne Poelina is someone who has enormous knowledge here.

Not only in her position as an elder, but because she's a keeper of knowledge in a community that knows a lot about how water has been managed as a source and not just as a resource, which I fear we're sort of shifting towards thinking of it as. So, Anne, can you share some of your knowledge now that you've heard two other spectrums of knowledge?

You've got a lot to share and we're really interested in hearing from you.

26:46 Anne Poelina: Thank you for the opportunity. Maboo Bara, Ngajanoo Nilawal Anne Poelina, ngayoo yimardoowarra marnin nganoo nangka Dugun and Yawuru Country, ngayoo Broome nganyoo home.

Good day, my name is Anne Poelina, I am a woman who belongs to the Martuwarra (Mardoowarra, Fitzroy River), I am speaking on Duguan and Yawuru Country, Broome which my home. In my language, I said, good day. How are you all? When I introduce myself, I say, I am a woman who belongs to the Fitzroy River. So that's not a property, right? That is a law of obligation that I am bonded to protect this river for the rest of its life and my life.

So it's an interesting concept that we do this. I also want to acknowledge in you know I sort of don't go with all of the qualifications. I actually have two PhDs. But the point I'm making is that this is about we're dealing with complexity and we need collective wisdom at this table. Now, one of the things in my journey as a water leader has been the wonderful opportunity to be a Peter Cullen Fellow.

I never knew Peter Cullen. What he stands for and what I have learned about one of the questions of why now, why not now is the question we have as Indigenous people today in terms of, you know, what Peter has taught me and what I, you know, I never met the man, but I had this image of advocacy and brokerage and being brave and challenging systems so that we can look at this because it's difficult to have peer to peer review when there is not. And so these are one of the things that we need to look about, look at.

So for me, today's not really a question of water rights, but rather a question of water wrongs. And this means that we need to, as a society, as a nation, as a collective of these questions of what is water, justice, what is perceived as justice?

This is the point that we're taking as Indigenous people is that there was, and remains, an original water industry on this land that belongs to sovereign nations of the country.

We have, as Erin has said, been managing the system from the beginning of time. We look at this and we say, you know, this is ancient wisdom. This is from antiquity. We are the best water leaders. We are the ones who've held water governance. We continue to have these values and these ethics that guide our behavior in terms of an ethics of care and love for these systems, because we see rivers as living systems.

The work Whanganui River, you know, once I heard of the work, I came back and I said to my elders, this river in New Zealand, it's got personhood. And they said to me, "E no human being!" And so the work that I've done with Erin and Alessandro and all these beautiful human beings who are wanting to push the boundary, we have committed and written a paper called the emergence of ancestral personhood, because we see and know the River is alive.

We feel it. We hear it, we communicate with it. We sing with it, we dance with it. We cry with it. We celebrate with it. So these are the things that we say as Indigenous people is we do not separate land water and people. They are intrinsically entwined because we need to see the world in which we live from a holistic perspective where all of those things come into the frame.

The most important thing in all of this is the truth telling. And the reconciliation that we must have as a nation to be brave. And to understand that Indigenous people are the guardians from the beginning of time. And that what the knowledge we have is not something that we want to squirrel away and go, oh, this is just for us, you mob go away. We see ourselves as planetary citizens. We see ourselves with a duty of care to say we must coalesce and meet with those people who are like-minded, who are looking at complexity, who are looking at bringing collective wisdom in, who are looking at how do we frame justice and equity, particularly for water around a different way.

So the Martuwarra, the Fitzroy River, we call it in our language, the River of Life. It is a living spirit. It has agency. It is a life force, which connects all other life to it. From the top of the catchment to the bottom of the sea and everything in between. We have a law for the river, a law of obligation that teaches us as Indigenous people these values, these ethics, these codes of conduct of how we need to live with these living water systems, because they are our life. It is so totally interdependent on that. We also, as Indigenous people, when we are born, we are given a totem or a ngayoo jadiny, a creature that we are bonded to for life. We learn as Indigenous people that a non-human creature can teach us to be fully human.

So rivers as ancestral living beings are so, so important. I've got a colleague who works in Montpellier in France, and you know, when he came out, he was so proud. He said, we were sitting on the river bank with my old people and he said to us, oh, did you know, La Meuse is the oldest river in the world? And the old people sat quietly, and they listened to his story and he wondered why they didn't get excited.

So that night I went back to the camp fire and I, you know, gave them their meal and I was sitting with them. I said, do you understand what that scientist was saying? That La Meuse is the oldest river in the world. And this is something that what he wants to know, what do you think about it? And they looked at me and they said, oh, you're going back to France next week.

I said, yes. They said, well, if that's the wisest river in the world, will you go and take some of the Martuwarra, and will you take that to La Meuse and when you find the headwater of La Meuse and can you share and put in there and kneel and say to the La Meuse, we are sending the memories of the Martuwarra to you because if you are the wisest river in the world, you will know what the humans have done. So through that process, we had an exchange of two rivers talking. I wrote a beautiful play where we show that art and culture is a great way of having magic to tell the stories of our rivers across the globe.

So I have since found that the oldest river in the world is actually in our country called the Finke. And so I'm now on a journey where I've got to go and meet the Finke.

But rivers are living beings. They have their own energy system. They have their own story, they hold memory. And so what we're saying as Indigenous people is that if we are delving deep into complexity, particularly around water, if you are missing the oldest ancient wisdom on the land that has looked after the systems first on our Nation, but across the globe, the Indigenous people have the same story,

You are missing something critical in terms of unpacking that complexity. So what we're saying is that, as I said earlier, we have had and we still have the original water industry. It belongs to sovereign nations of this country, but we are not saying, oh, this is all for us, but we really need to redefine what those principles that I talked about, what is water justice? What is procedural justice? What does distributive justice look like?

Because in a lot of the stories that we have in this country, when making choices about this, we need to understand that these are living systems with their own set of laws, with their own values, with their own ethics, with their own way of sustaining and holding balance, harmony, peace. So we look at all of these things and we say that, you know, we've traded this. We were the first traders. We were the first scientists from every description you can imagine. So with First Law comes trade, comes ceremony, comes coexistence. But most importantly, a concept that in my language we call Bookarrarra which means learning from the past to centre the present, always thinking about the future. So these are really amazing concepts. These are ancient wisdom from antiquity, and we need to be factoring in this knowledge to understand one how these living systems operate. My elders can sing the song and tell you how water travels underground and where it comes up and where it does all of these things.

This is an ancient wisdom embedded in this landscape. It's so, so important. So first law principles are there to teach us the rules of water governance. That we don't just govern for human beings, but we must also govern for our non-human family that the birds, the trees, the fish, not only does the river have a right to life, but they have a right to life as well.

They have families and they co-exist in the world that we know. So when we're looking at all of these things, we need to understand that everything is place-based. It is a law of the land that must show man how we are to sustain our own planetary wellbeing and survival. So it's very, very important. And it's all about story for us.

So, you know, you’ve heard the story Tidilik. And how he swallowed up all the water. And then the creatures came along and thought, how are we going to get regulation happening? We're going to spear Tidilik and let some of that water flow. So, you know, these are stories from ancient times that have so much relevance in modernity.

We need to be working together as fellow Australians and indeed as global citizens to look at care for our most precious resource which is water. So I'll leave it at that, but without it, they will be no peace and we'll just continuously be weaponising water. So what we need to find a way, a unity pathway, where we can have justice and equity, where we can all put, sit at the table and go, okay, what's missing from the scenario planning.

And the blockchain movement is very, very interesting because you can only have the true story when all of the data is inputted into those places of interest. So you know, that we can bring to this table, but we need to be thinking about if not now when, because I think the moment is right that we need to do it right now.

So from that perspective, the rivers are talking, the rivers globally are communicating. And so thing is that rivers are alive. They're sentient beings and they are making their own way through the world, our world.

37:28 Wendy Elford: Thank you. Thank you very much. And so now we've got First Nations’ law and we've got modern law, and then we've got two rivers talking in the middle and they're very much starting to sound like people.

I think Erin can share a little bit of her experience around granting personhood to rivers. I think that might be instructive. And then if we can come back to what that might mean in terms of how rivers are cared for and how water bodies are cared for and how blockchain might help us connect to the pieces.

So we can see where we are on the map of water in Australia and our possibilities together.

38:11 Erin O'Donnell: Following Anne is always a challenge. And so trying to bring that back then into the very legal context, as Anne said, there are a number of rivers around the world now that are being recognised in this way. And in white fella law, in settler state law, the driver for recognising rivers as legal persons is fundamentally to require the law to see damage done to rivers to actually see that damage in its own right. So rather than damage to the river having to cause damage to human beings, the law can actually say, well, damage to the river is enough. And that is enough for me to hold someone to account that is enough for the river to stand up in court and say, you've done this damage you need to make it right. So this kind of thinking came through very strongly in the 1970s, when environmental law was just getting going, when the idea of legal standing for the environment was seen as really crucial, that's the ability to go to court and have those interests and that damage taken very seriously.

Now, over the last 50 years, we've seen some shifts in the way that the standing law has worked. It's much easier to get the interest of the environment into a court these days. But the big shift, when we think about personhood, it's not just about the ability to go to court, although that is really important, but it's also about saying, how does the river have a voice in policy debates, how does it actually make itself heard in all of the other conversations? It doesn't necessarily have to be about going to court. It can be the ability to own property. It can be the ability to enter into and enforce contracts. So all of those things that actually bind the way that settler state human societies interact. The rivers can now start participating in that process as well.

But to do that, they also need to have a voice. So there needs to be a human face or a human voice of the rivers to facilitate that communication between the rivers and the rest of the world.

I think one of the challenges that has emerged in this space goes back to that question of standing and the idea of needing to get a river into court. And if you think about that, it's a very adversarial beginning. So people were saying the river’s interests are not being protected. We need to be able to fight back. We need to be able to fight on a level playing field. The river needs to be able to fight. That can be really, really important and really necessary, but it also entrenches those adversarial relationships and makes it very difficult for people to then come together.

And there's a really great example of this in the US. In 2019, a local government law was passed a local ordinance by the citizens of Toledo in Ohio on the Great Lakes and this recognised Lake Erie as a legal person. And one of the reasons it did that was because there had been such terrible water pollution that a couple of summers before you couldn't drink the water. So all of Toledo had basically had their water supplies shut off for days. So industry was affected. Businesses were affected. Homes were affected. Schools were affected, farms were affected. Everyone was in this together and suddenly realizing for the first time how dependent so much of their daily life was on this source of water from the lake.

Now, one of the things that environmental advocates decided to do was to obviously recognise the link as a legal person to try and prevent that from happening again. The very first thing that was the result of that was that farmers who felt like they were in the firing line because they were contributing some pollution to the lake it was certainly not solely their fault. But that was, you know, they could see that they were going to be in the firing line should the river choose to take them to court. They immediately hit back and challenged the constitutionality of that provision. The way the law works, just as a very quick overview: if you make a local law and it's inconsistent with a state law or a federal rule, then that local law is invalid to the extent of that inconsistency. And that's very much what happened. So they rejected the idea of coming together. They rejected the idea of working together because the farmers felt like this was weaponised and pointed at them.

So recognising rivers as legal persons can definitely be a two-edged sword and it can result in entrenching unhelpful relationships. And I think to take this back into the data conversation, which I'm really interested in exploring and seeing, where the blockchain connection can come in.

One of the challenges that we see universally across the world, where the rivers are recognised as legal persons or the subject of legal rights, or as living entities all of which are slightly different. None of them, none of them have any legal rights to water. So there is an enormous and profound disconnection between the law that recognises the rivers as living beings and the laws that we use to manage water. And so the rivers, although they have these voices that are louder and are being heard in more and more ways, have very little ability to actually influence the very thing that makes them a river, which is the water flowing between their banks. And so when we think about things like water theft, I think one of the really interesting things that comes out in that context is that people very rarely frame it in terms of who you're stealing from.

If you're taking, what doesn't belong to you, you're generally not stealing from your fellow irrigators because they'll still take what they need. You're actually stealing from the river and the river doesn't have those rights actually recognised in law so that it can protect them. So I think for me, that opens up really interesting possibilities.

I'd love to hear Katrina kind of expand on that and the possible role of blockchain in that context.

44:26 Wendy Elford: I'd like to just start with the concept, perhaps that the river was already fully allocated before we started taking water rights and trading with them, because I think that's an important concept that Anne can bring to the conversation that we aren't necessarily trading with something that actually exists. There's such a thing as water bankruptcy and trading while insolvent and water theft and a few accounting ideas. That mean it's just creative accounting perhaps, but there's a trick to say that we haven't actually got the use of all the water we think we have. And the data really needs to be there to help us to understand what we really do have and how well it can be used.

The science is important here.

45:11 Katrina Donaghy: So, yes, accounting. For anyone who has an accounting background, all of a sudden accounting is now at the centre of, well, it's always been at the centre of everything to actually making sure that we can account for what we have, what we're using, what we're sharing. So that’s where actually are now in terms of Water Ledger.

What we've, what we're actually doing now is sort of laying accounting into three areas. We do acknowledge that the regulation that's in place, the Water Act, is what we have to actually adhere to because of compliance and the licensing and the laws and things like that.

But what we actually fundamentally look at is understanding how much water we have in the system, how much is being used and how much has been shared. And it brings into this concept called, and I just bear with me. I'm just about to say the T word, but bear with me. I'm not going to create a non fungible token art piece that I'm going to raise $6 million on, but we've been using NFTs or tokenization for many, many years.

We started using it for water rights. We were looking at water as a token. We were looking at intellectual property as a token. Why tokens are really interesting is because when you actually mint, say a mega liter of water in the concept of a token, it is actually ledgered to say that this has now been minted.

So it can't be double spent. And it can't turn up in somebody else's water stream or water account without actually being transferred through a ledgering technology. So it allows us to agree on how much water is in the system, how much has been shared and how much has been used. And we'll when we look at the fundamental problem, when we go right back to 2016, when we started working on this problem with the Australian government, it was perceived that the reason why we didn't have confidence in the Australian water markets was because there was lack of information.

And when we actually really looked at the problem and looked at the different areas, apart from the complexity that we're talking about today, which talking about the behavior of the market, we found that the markets weren't operating effectively. And the reason why is because the markets were missing key information. For a start, you actually didn't know how much you should be buying water for.

Or, how much you should be selling water for. You couldn't actually be guaranteed that the person that you were trading water with had the underlying property rights to that asset link to the license. So there was a lot of complexity that was missing out of the market.

And when we talked about a rational market, there were five pieces of information that the market needed. And we were able to reveal that through a pilot in the Mareeba-Dimbulah water supply scheme, but now we've extended it. And one of the lessons that we learned when we did the pilot up in Mareeba-Dimbulah where we adapted Water Ledger to the business rules up in Mareeba-Dimbulah is that we proved that we could actually automate those rules, those complex rules, and make the market compliant-by-design.

And then we actually mapped the workflows to the Scheme Operator, the ROL (Resource Operations License) that they were working with. But when the pilot finished, we realised that we hadn't really changed anything. What we had done was that we actually automated some rules to make the ROL’s job a lot easier. But we didn't actually change the relationship between the irrigators and the water.

We didn't actually give them the empowerment for them to assert their relationship with water. And that's when everything changed. That's when we find we actually had an aha moment. Thank you to Dr. Fraser McLeod who's on the call today. All the way from France has been working with Civic Ledger has been part of Civic Ledger's team for the last five years. Fraser gave me an aha moment. Katrina, he said, we must empower people with water rights to assert their allocation to their own ledger. And we're able to then socialise that ledger or that water wallet into the market. So we can start to create community chain exchanging rooms whereby we enter, introduce the second layer of governance, whereby water sharing becomes a place-based governance arrangement.

We're enabling the market still to be compliant to the regulation and the legislation. And we remove all that complexity. But what we're introducing is self-determination in place on how water is to be shared. And I was having a conversation with Joe Moro, Joe, because Joe, Joe and I, and Cassian are just about to start the Northern Australia project, once again. And I had a chat with Joe and I said to him, Joe, you know, we actually fully deploy Water Ledger next year. And he said, yes. And I said, You're going to have a 100% water in your, in your system because of La Nina and so there's not going to be much trading activity. And he went oh yeah, there's probably some trading activity. And I said, well, what are you going to do with water? If it's just sitting around, you know, how are you going to govern that? And he said, I don't know.

And I said, well, you know, there's different ways of optimising water for good. If you all come together with some consensus and we can help you get that governance right. Where everybody agrees. So it's introducing a second layer of governance. And I guess that's what we're going to be exploring over the next 12 months with Cassian's expertise and the irrigators and the collective will of everybody that’s working with us to say, how can we introduce a second layer of governance?

How can we account for the water that's in the resource, the water resource system, how can we account it in the wallets? And then how can we account for it in the exchange? And it's got to be balanced.

51:06 Wendy Elford: I think we've got to an interesting question and we have got some questions here from our audience and there's one from Turkey, which is from Talat and he has raised the question of trust.

And I know blockchain has got a bad reputation to a certain extent, you know with cryptocurrencies and their fluctuations. And everyone finds that just a little bit difficult. It's a bit of a dark art. And there is already a certain, perhaps lack, of trust in true consultation, too, between Indigenous Australians and government.

I mean, there is always the asking, but is the listening, the deep listening and is that put into planning? And so now we've got this trust challenge and Talat has raised this. He said what's the Australian experience in using blockchain with water when people are already a bit just distrustful of blockchain in general?

And then we have this engagement problem where there's a group of people, First Australians, have got a lot of knowledge and also need to participate actively in the planning. It just seems that we haven't, we need the pieces connecting up and we're doing this very fast and the connections are not strong.

52:13 Katrina Donaghy: Yes. So one of the, one of the first questions that we're asking ourselves under the next piece of work we're doing, asking the question what do participants and investors require in terms of confidence around this technology and what we're bringing to the table to rethink governance and water sharing?

(Ammended) I will correct you there, that cryptocurrency is not what we work with, although both cryptocurrency and our Water Ledger are both applications run in the blockchain.

Blockchain is decentralised. It's not owned by anybody. It's owned by everybody. So it's decentralised and it is governed by everybody that participates in that blockchain.

I want to be respectful to the way our water markets are working at the moment, but we only have about five exchanges in this country and they're all owned by individuals. And those individuals have privileged information about price, frequency of trades, who's trading with who, and that information is not available to the public.

So none of this information is presented in real time. Nobody can look at an audit log and say whether the market is balanced or whether the license or the liquidity or the history of what's going on with water trading. Blockchain provides us the public window into a market that is opaque. Hidden, disparate databases don't join up with each other. This is why we have the problems that we have right now with water markets in this country.

Blockchain technology is a decentralised ledger. It is an independent system of record that holds the state of the market based on the smart contracts that we execute based on the rules. So it's ‘supposed’ to be about being trustless (see additional materials page for notes).

55:07 Wendy Elford: So I do think that it will be a very long conversation if we try to explain what blockchain is and how it works in this space.

And I do think that's a follow on conversation. I'd like to bring the conversation back towards Anne and Erin, because you can provide a deeper view about what engagement means and the technology and outputs are ones that need to be understood and accessible and such to people who are hopefully with these new systems, going to have the opportunity to have a say.

So if you're say in an Aboriginal community out in a wild area, and we know that that's not connected fully, if you're someone who is a bit disconnected politically, what sort of questions would you have of someone like Katrina about how you could be engaged in decision-making and real-time data and understanding exactly what's happening in the river system so that you can manage it better?

You can decide between the two of you who would best be placed to answer that question.

56:18 Anne Poelina: I think this is a real critical moment in terms of the panel and where we're going as a Nation, because you know, all of this in a way is a bit about like, like a code I'm trying to understand and then explain and interpret.

It's not just about accounting. It's also what counts. And so this is a really interesting conversation, but one of the things, when I heard about blockchain and the initial conversation I had with you, Wendy, is the elders said to me, well, have we got the principles of engagement right? What is the philosophical framework in which we're going to collaborate and develop a cooperative way to look at how do we create this unity pathway?

How do we share information? So we're all informed in terms of making the best decisions going forward. So it's really interesting because everything, as I said is place-based. And one of the interesting things I see at a federal level, which I don't really see playing out in water, land or any other resource planning is this concept around bioregional frameworks.

So at a Commonwealth level, we have a policy till 2030 about bioregional frameworks. Within those frameworks, every part of Australia is mapped out into bioregions, which include watersheds and catchment areas and interface. The fresh water, salt water, and all of the humans who live in between. So I think one of the things for me is what are the principles of engagement?

How are we going to determine what are the rules of engagement, the principles, the values, the ethics. One of the things I see is that there's a real need to look at how do we take some of these systems change into local government because where I live in the Kimberley, particularly with the Martuwarra and the Fitzroy river, we've got the Shire of Derby 96,000 square kilometres of catchment, but also connected to the saltwater communities.

Why can't we be brave and go, okay, how do we look at place-based governance around water leadership, around water trading, around water markets? Cause none of these things seem to be sorted out. It seems to be chaos as usual. And so what we are saying as Indigenous people, particularly from our plan is we believe the system is fully allocated.

It's allocated to us as human beings. It's allocated to the river in terms of its need to flow and move to keep all of the other systems living. So if that's our basis for engagement, then how do we work with other people to help us to become better informed? Because seriously, I don't believe there's a scientist alive who can tell me how much water we've got in the catchment.

Everything is speculation, everything is modelling. And so what we're saying is that you are creating more uncertainty by coming into a region, with like this, if we're not sitting down and as Erin and everybody else is saying, when we're factoring water planning in, we have to factor in climate. Because climate change is really impacting.

On one hand, you've got a system like the bureau of meteorology saying, we are just heating up and we as Australians need to learn to live with less water, but that doesn't seem to be the way the market is playing out. It's almost like, okay, we've stuffed up the MDB. Where's the next water source? Oh, it's the Fitzroy.

The greedy frogs are here right now and they're swallowing up the water and they've got plans to do this. And what we're saying is that we see the illusion of probity in this. In terms of where can we start from a framework of, you know, either a bioregional framework or a catchment authority or some way to give us confidence in the system that we can all sit at the table and look at how do we do these things?

Understanding cumulative impacts of development. On one hand, we're talking about water trading, water markets. On the other hand, we're saying we're going to frack the Canning Basin and potentially create the largest man made disaster in the world. We're talking about basin 500,000 square kilometers on shore and another a hundred thousand off.

Like we need to see reason logic, intent, good science values, ethics, the way that we frame First Law within this construct so that we can live together within the regions and work out what's good for the greater good of us, rather than the greater good of a few greedy frogs who are sucking up the system, swallowing up the water and going, well, we want to do this.

The big issue is how do we learn from the case scenario of the Murray-Darling basin? How do we not repeat those mistakes up here? So, you know, all of these things need to come in, because as I said earlier, we're talking about complexity. We need collective wisdom. We need to have the knowledge of Indigenous people who have and continue to be the guardians of our living water systems right now, let alone from the beginning of time.

So I think there's a spirit of Goodwill from Indigenous leaders like myself saying, how do we get the mix, right? How do we know the mistakes or, you know, allowing our rivers to die, because this is a very sad story, not just only in our country, but for rivers globally, you know, some crazy figures that how many of the world's rivers no longer flow.

You know, healthy and in a state that can sustain human interaction. I've traveled through France. I've seen these beautiful rivers. They are amazing, but you can't drink the water. You can't eat the food. You know what I mean? So what are we doing to these living systems? Because our wellbeing is totally reliant on water, which is such a precious commodity that balances all of the other indicators, water is such a critical element for sustaining our lives.

So we need to think about this. We need to think about it slowly. We need to make sure we get the rules of the principles of engagement right? So what we're saying is Indigenous leaders leading these water spaces, we want to be able to look at how do we have procedural justice? What does distributive water justice look like?

But at the end of the day, we need to start to reframe back to the question. Why not now? In terms of Indigenous rights, because as I said, it's not a question of water rights. It's a question of water wrongs. So yeah, very important dialogue.

1:02:14 Wendy Elford: Absolutely. And I think the conversation is just about to heat up a little bit more.

So we're going to Central Australia now because there are changes in allowances for water to be drawn from the aquifers in the Northern Territory. And this, this is a place that I've loved and I've been to Alice Springs even this year. A fabulous environment, very, very special. And these aquifers are very old.

And I know there's a drive to turn the Northern part of Australia into a more productive place for food and to develop the Northern part of Australia. That's part of the CRCNA's mandate, but there's some recent changes to legislation. There's recent action. This is a really contended area, as far as law goes.

I know I'm fairly sure that Erin and Anne would help us understand what's going on there. Can you comment on that? I don't want to take a particular direction. I want to leave it open and it is a hot topic. I know it is. And it's just a signal of how much difficulty we have in making sure that there is procedural justice and where is this transparency of what's going on?

Erin you can start us. I think Anne will soon be joining this conversation.

1:03:30 Erin O'Donnell: Sure. So the Northern Territory has been in the news quite a bit lately for its water decision-making. One of the things that's emerged really clearly over the past little while is that they have some good bones of their water governance structure, but the implementation of it is where things are really falling down and that's falling down at both the planning level at the data collection level and at the decision-making level.

So it's really compounding really bad water decision-making. So they've been kind pulled over the coals for it a number of times we've seen most recently in the news the ongoing saga of the Singleton station water license which is the largest water license that the Northern Territory has ever issued.

I think it's around 40 megalitres of groundwater extraction that based on the proponents’ own modeling would see the groundwater levels decline by 50 meters over the life of the business proposal. Fifty meters is massive. There are many sacred sites in the region that depend on groundwater levels.

And we've seen in the news this week, that one of the Aboriginal planning authorities has come out and said, we had no idea that they were changing the rules to enable certain amounts of impact to occur. And we didn't know what we'd actually agreed to until we saw it in the media. So there's some real informational challenges that are playing out in the Northern Territory right now.

I think when I look at what's happening in the Northern Territory with, in respect to water, what leaps out at me straight away is the lack of water planning, the lack of investment in water planning and the lack of data to underpin really good, robust water planning. So you have communities that aren't talking to each other about how they want to manage water in their local regions.

So again, we've got that isolated far from us decision-making process. Water allocation plans in the Northern territory only cover 5% of the Northern Territory. So it's a tiny, tiny fraction of an enormous area. The other thing about the water allocation planning issue is that the Northern territory is one of the few jurisdictions across Australia that does actually recognize an obligation to provide water to Aboriginal people.

And it's a very complicated process, but the way it essentially pays out is that when you create a water allocation plan, if there's a certain percentage of the land which is owned by Aboriginal people or Aboriginal organisations, then you have to set aside a certain volume of the water for their economic development use.

So again, they're the only jurisdiction, I think, in Australia that actually requires this to happen, but it's critically dependent on water allocation plans actually happening. But water allocation plans only happen when there is competition for water. So you're already talking about a system which is under stress.

By the time you get to that point, you are quite likely to end up in a situation where there's simply not enough water left to hand water to actually allocate water into that strategic Aboriginal water reserve. So most of the Strategic Aboriginal Water Reserves in those water allocation plans are empty right now.

So you've got this significant disconnect between the way water is managed before the plan happens and the quality of the data that you use to make those decisions. A real kind of failure, I think, to really deliver local place-based planning arrangements that provide a robust system for water governance and a way for communities to participate in water management and a lack of data that informs the adaptive management of that process.

So I think there's real opportunities to improve the quality of water decision making the quality of planning, the robustness of water allocation planning in Northern Australia generally. And it feels like we're picking on Northern Territory right now. It's not a lot better if you go to the left or to the right to WA or Queensland.

1:07:32 Wendy Elford: Anne, do you have something more to add there?

1:07:35 Anne Poelina: I was just listening to Katrina's comment of meeting Allan Dale. He's an amazing man. He wrote a book a couple of years ago that says do not repeat the mistakes of the south in the north. We've ignored all that. And I mean, this is a different cultural landscape.

This is a different environment. What we're saying is that there's a real opportunity to grow the new economies, but it's not in this industry the way that we are developing the north. So, you know, what I'm saying is that we've got information that says, look, we're in a total different system up here.

Why are we trying to grow crops and whatever, when we're not looking after the Hunter or the New England and there's places that are known to be the precious food bowls of our Nation. Why are we trying to do that up here? And what we're saying that we're not anti-development we see that there's great opportunities in these environmental and cultural assets, global geo-park, biosphere reserves.

You know what I mean? There's real opportunity bioprospecting with native foods that are not water-intensive or fertilizer dependent. And so what we're saying is that seriously, we need a way to look at how do we start to develop these projects? How do we start to look at what are the new economies? How do we start to look at wiser water management land, natural resources?

And for me, you know, having the opportunity to set this up from a bioregional framework, put everybody at the table, let local government be a lead in this and little sit around the table. Put your projects up, show us your science, make it available to peer review. Let us make a determination whether something's on or off the table. But we can't do that when we have politics interfering with science and better practice and the ability to have Indigenous wisdom and knowledge guiding this. So we need to rethink all of this in terms of saying, you know, like what does justice and equity look like? Let's not go into a place and go, okay, how do we, we create an opportunity by trying to create a different way to tell a story, to give somebody a water right, when we are distracted from the Fitzroy catchment, and we're looking somewhere left. And the point that I'm making, these are real scenarios on the table right now, the draft Derby water allocation plan for Derby. You know what I mean? 1992, we were already getting saltwater intrusion into that system.

When you look at the climate science, we're seeing sea level rise. What happens when we get saltwater intrusion into freshwater lenses? And you know, this is what we're saying is that we care as Indigenous people. We care about our fellow Australians. We want to also shift from poverty to wealth creation, but it's not in the industries that are going to create a demise and in 25, 30 years and then what next, when the country and the land and the rivers are totally toxic. But we can't even survive as a human being. So I guess what I'm saying is that there needs to be a spirit of Goodwill. We need to sit around the table and go, okay, we're going here or there, or some other place based area.

How do we sit around the table as decent human beings and go, okay, what are the principles of engagement? If this is on Aboriginal land and in the Fitzroy catchment, we actually have 98% native title. So why don't we own 98% of the water that's going to be allocated? So this is a way that we say. You know, we look at the productivity commission and we see Water Allocation and closing the gap initiative that we're trying to say to Aboriginal people, oh, there's a real opportunity for you here, but we're forgetting to tell us that in order to develop up your strategic reserve, you need at least three to $5 million so you can get your business plan ready, blah, blah, blah, and all of these sorts of things.

So what I'm saying is that let's forget the, I nearly said bullshit. Let's forget the illusion of probity. Let's sit around like decent human beings. And go ahead how do we get the mix? Right? How do we sit at the table and say, okay, if we're going to create water markets or water trading in the Kimberley, then who are the original water holders that need to be leading this rather than being thought?

You know, being an anarchical, we see ourselves as shareholders, not stakeholders. And so it's time to go, okay, how do we do this in a cooperative way? So we're not in a conflict paradigm so we can create win-win. And seriously, there is a spirit of Goodwill coming from us to say, how do we do water planning, water governance, and look at all of this differently?

You know what I mean? I mean, it seems to me that, you know, we've got Kununurra, the Ord River's there. We couldn't give it away a couple of years ago, we sold it dirt cheap to the Chinese, and now we're saying, okay, water has a true value. Um, you know, it's not like not in my backyard, but the Ord River was set up for cotton and all of these other industries.

So we need a bit of sense in here, not just dollars, but we need a bit of sense in here as well, in terms of how do we get the fit, right? Because there's seriously, climate change is impacting. We are seeing food insecurity. We are seeing water scarcity. We are seeing our temperatures rise and seriously, as I said, um, we need these living water systems for our sustenance, just to stay alive because many people live in abject poverty.

We need these food bowls too, so that we can continue to hunt and be replenished. And I have all of the other things, but there's seriously new ways to do business in the north. And I'd like to go back to Allan's book about let's do things differently, but we seem to be repeating the same old mistakes spending billions of dollars into it.

And we expecting that we're going to get a return. And I think, you know, I'm not an economist, but when you're pouring this much money in how much do you expect to get out? What does equity look like? How do all of these forms of capital come together so that we can all have a good life? So, you know, it's about getting the rules, right?

Being, coming in with a spirit of goodwill, having a look at how do we do this work differently? Because seriously, you know, when we're talking about agriculture, you want to have a good go at trying to grow something in a Savanna system where the soil type is not conducive to growing avocados or any of those other sorts of products.

So we're here, we're at the table, don't forget Indigenous leaders. We are doing this and we want to do it in a co-operative way, but seriously, we're a little bit tired of the same old, same old, and we need a new way. And I think what I, what challenges me right now at this point in time is with the intellectual capacity that we have across our Nation if we can't, right-size our Nation, what chances the planet. So these are all really critical things. And I think we, as human beings need to look at how do we come together? How do we use the oldest knowledge system in the world to help right-size the systems that we're trying to deal with?

1:14:08 Wendy Elford: I think you've raised so many issues there and I think the science and I'm just going to draw people's attention to that quote I put in the chat from Peter Gleick; in that comment he's talking about the idea of virtual water. And if overseas countries are not able to get enough water, they can effectively buy products from Australia that use our water. There's a water shift and migration between countries, not even pipes, but in goods.

And I think there's something there about the expectations people have of the types of products that need and want, and we're not in a, we're not perceiving the stress, perhaps acutely enough to really start shifting our thinking about whether we really do need some of these products. And whether we should be starting to think more cleverly and use the science to say, well, maybe this product isn't the best one for the future.

So as we sort of move towards our close, cause I'd like to give you a good two to three minutes each, maybe just a quick thought about what we need from our scientists, because for example, you know, the riverbeds the geology of the places that water flows through the sand, the soils, all these, all these features of water systems need to be really well understood to know what we're trading with.

And the science I think is quite important here. Is anyone willing to stand up and just say a word or two about where they understand that is there enough known? Are we just not listening to the scientists? Is there something more that we can do to join up the conversation between the communities, the scientists and the water management systems and policies.

1:16:16 Anne Poelina: One of the things is this ancient wisdom. This traditional ecological knowledge is Indigenous science, thousands of years of observation, and living with our lands, our waters and our multi-species. And so what we need to do is stop othering us and bring us into the dialogue because this ancient wisdom is what you need.

So let's frame that this traditional ecological knowledge is Indigenous science. So we need to factor that into the equation. So from that I'll let Erin talk, but I just wanted to frame that because there needs to be a point where we stop being othered, and we start having our voices valued and brought into the modeling that needs to, you know, right-size our Nation.

Wendy Elford: And it's already happened with fire management. So why not water. Erin? You had a comment?

Erin O'Donnell: I think Katrina was going to leap in there.

1:16:57 Katrina Donaghy: No, I was going to do a really boring response. It's just saying that because we've been working with the CRC for a little while now with, with Allan Dale and Sheridan and the team up there is that the put some really great, well, I guess science knowledge from the CSIRO that is, is very much key to our next sort of step forward but that's from our science agency, they've been doing a lot of work around the real mapping of the catchments and things like that.

Wendy Elford: So technology may yet help us out and sensors in water systems, hopefully robust enough.

1:17:33 Katrina Donaghy: Well, I think we need a good internet first, Wendy. It's all lovely, so great to have all of this amazing technology, but we have a thing called you know the technology divide that we still don't have fixed up as a country.

Wendy Elford: There are some new technologies there, but too big for this conversation. Yes, anything to add there?

1:18:56 Erin O'Donnell: Look, I think I'll probably build a little bit on what Anne was saying. I think the science is, is often really good and a lot of scientists are working really hard to give us the best available information.

But what is often missing from the conversation is a discussion about what kinds of questions scientists are actually trying to answer in the first place. And so when you come together with communities to have these kinds of conversations, you often end up in a very different place than when you start just from the science.

So my colleague Avril Horne at the University of Melbourne and one of her PhD students have been working on participatory models for environmental flows.

So how do you know how much water a river needs? You get the community together to talk about what is the history of the river. Well, First Nations peoples bring a much longer historical lens and together the community working together can help put together the values which then hydrologists can help understand, well, this is the kind of flow that we actually need to meet these values that are set by the community.

The people who find that process, when it's community led, the most challenging have been the environmental flows scientists. I think there's a two way learning that needs to happen here. We need to pay a lot more attention to the framing the conversation that begins these discussions about water and how we measure it and what we measure and why we are measuring particular things.

I think if we start from the perspective that all rivers are fully allocated, for instance, and in fact, we're now talking about reallocation of water, that's an extraordinarily different beginning to the question of how much can we extract from the river before it completely carks it, which has really been the approach that we've used historically.

So I think we need to reframe it. One of the articles that came out this week on a slightly tangential note was around the biodiversity stewardship idea that the federal government is investing in. And, you know, this sounds like a really great idea. You get farmers to invest in increasing biodiversity on their properties. You can link it into things like carbon offsets and various other things as well, but what was interesting to me was the pushback in the article and the concern that somehow increasing biodiversity in landscapes and farming landscapes was going to see a decline in farming communities. And I think that kind of misunderstanding links into what Anne was saying before around what does a sustainable economy look like?

How do we do things differently? And how do we recognize that actually people and place are connected and that Country needs people. And so the idea that increasing biodiversity on farming lands should see a decline in rural communities, I'm flabbergasted that there are people that can draw that kind of conclusion.

And I think we need to have these kinds of conversations at the very beginning, around how we frame the problems, which then we get data to support management solutions.

Wendy Elford: Good point and we're just drawing to a close, I just wanted to note a couple of the questions in the chat. I don't think we're going to be able to address decentralised autonomous organizations or DAOs this evening, but I do think that they hold some real promise for helping micro businesses scale over time. And so that could be a further conversation. So thanks very much.

1:21:27 Katrina Donaghy: We have to get rid of Excel spreadsheets first, I'm sorry.

Wendy Elford: There's a time and a place for everything, but that was Brett Miller, and yes, I'd like to extend that conversation, but not this instance. And I think right now we need to draw things to a close.

So if I can ask each of you in turn, we'll start with Erin and then Katrina and Anne, just 90 seconds. If you can, what are your closing thoughts? For where we can take today's conversation into the future, because it would seem that the rivers are telling us something. We can't even get the water to go sometimes where the water rights have has told us that it should.

So this - nature is sending us a message and tech is responding. And Erin and then Katrina then Anne, thank you.

1:22:18 Erin O'Donnell: So in 90 seconds I think what we're seeing is a genuine shift. I think we're starting to see a much more nuanced conversation about the role of tech in supporting river management and the rights of rivers and the role of rivers, that we all have a relationship with rivers and the role that tech can play in delivering and supporting that.

But again, I think we need to keep our eyes on the authorising environment for that tech. And by that, I mean, the community relationships, the community participation as well as the regulatory frameworks. So we need to think about how we're framing the question. We need to think about what our values are and how we're coming together as a community to define those, to articulate those values and to say, this is our common vision. And then how do we bring tech in to help us achieve that?

1:23:09 Katrina Donaghy: Well said. As a sociologist in a technology company - how did that work - I don't know….. Look, the interesting thing is technology is an enabler and if anyone puts technology first before humans shouldn't be in the business because you are actually doing it the wrong way around. I've got most of my team on tonight on today's call and we spend much of our time on philosophy and ethics and principles.

When we actually think about the problem, we're asking a lot of ourselves. And then we ask the question, how does technology act as an enabler, help us solve these problems? And that's always been who we are. We are not called Civic Ledger just because we strangely enough called ourselves ledger all those years ago because we thought it was really cool back in 2016. That civic is at the heart of civil society and it's the heart of people and connections and how we are able to create a method whereby we can smooth out those relationships where we can actually look at each other and actually agree on what we value as humans. Then how do we actually find ways of technology to enable those to thrive and get to value?

So the next 12 months are going to be quite interesting. We don't know, but what we actually are leaning in with is philosophy and principles because that's what we actually do need. And it's very much aligned to what you just said, Erin. So thank you.

Wendy Elford: And Anne.

1:24:45 Anne Poelina: It's been a great opportunity to share the floor with Erin and Katrina. And, you know, it's opened my mind up to the potentiality of bringing into the technology and the fusion with ancient wisdom. So I think there's a real opportunity to see how this might come together.

I'm being brave. I'm learning about blockchain. So if I can do it, some of my other mob can, but there is a spirit of goodwill from Indigenous leadership. And what we're saying, we really need to redefine what all this means, because it's time to redefine what does justice, justice and equity look like for our people, because this dream that we have in terms of where and how we can, you know, create these new economies, what does sustainable, not just sustainable development, but sustainable life ways look like for our people on, on the land.

And that we must stop the illusion of probity and get to the real honest truth of what do we want to do? How do we want to do it? How are we going to invest? What makes sure that we don't leave any vulnerable people behind? And that every voice is important and should be heard. So I think, you know, it's given me faith that, yeah we can do this.

We must do it. You know, the wellbeing of our planet and our nation is reliant on this type of water leadership and water governance. So for me, it's always place-based. I think it really needs to be looked at from a regional perspective in terms of this idea that we have bioregions mapped out, which do include watersheds and catchments.

I think we need to be brave and sit at the table and go, okay, what does closing the gap mean for Indigenous people? How can they come into this space? Knowing that they've come with considerable sunk cost investment as carers of this land and these living water systems. We have a law for these living water systems.

They are still valid today. And Indigenous leaders will keep doing what we do because as I said, we have to learn from the past and situate it in the present because we are always about the future. So thank you very much. It's been a wonderful opportunity. I was getting a little bit nervous thinking I was a Neanderthal coming in here with blockchain and all of this, but I think we all have a voice and a way to contribute and I think the first point is starting from a platform of Goodwill. Thank you.

1:27:01 Wendy Elford: And when all of that water is just such an important resource for all of us, but it's not a resource, it's the source. And it's just been such an honour to hear all of you and your very fine, finely thought through viewpoints.

And I think the audience has really appreciated that. And we'll take that into 2022 as we start sorting our years and see the rollout of blockchain in different parts of Australia and start working on policies and more, but we're all humans and we all need the water. So we should all honour it and seek to work better together.

So thank you very much to all of you. Thank you very much to Civic Ledger for hosting our evening. Watch out for some of the information that we'll send to you afterwards, because I think that we should continue the conversation and see what we can achieve together next year.