Millennium drought lessons

"The governor's senior officials California were really after our analysis and intellect on how we managed the Murray Darling system and our urban systems during the millennium drought," he said.

"Our experience is very similar to the circumstances in California now - whether it's climate change or a natural process, we found ourselves devoid of water in both our agricultural zone and in our cities simultaneously."

Mr Dooley said California's huge agricultural economy relied on melting snow from the mountains flowing into one big north-south valley system the middle of the state - the Sacremento River.

"But California has a very rigid and antiquated set of water entitlements and allocations," he said.

Australia normalised its historic system in its 145 major rivers and groundwater bodies in the 1994-2004 period of water reform.

"One of the things Australia did well during the drought was measure and record everything - something California hasn't done quite so well.

"In California, universal metering, particularly in agricultural areas, is not widely applied, it's on a utility basis, and a number of the water supply systems are not metered at all."

Mr Dooley said because Australia measured everything, it was frightening to see how close Australia was to having non-viable cities in 2006-07.

"Cities were facing the real possibility that they would run out of water, if nothing had been done to contain demand and boost supply," he said.

"This accelerated the construction of large desalination and recycling plants in major cities."

Given the good record keeping and measuring, Australian cities were able to lower their consumption, through mandatory measures and voluntary action to extend the timeframe, Mr Dooley said.

"That's the thing with drought, customers have to change their water use, utilities have to plug up leaks and manage the customers, and the government need to spend money on capital," he said.

"In Brisbane, by voluntary marketing, the government got people to reduce their water consumption to 125L/person/day."

In agriculture, Mr Dooley said the water market assisted farmers in their decision to grow or not to grow.

"In Australia, we normally grow about 1 million tonnes a year of rice per year, but at the height of the drought we grew 10,000t," he said.

"The rice farmers basically went on holiday - they sold what limited water they were allocated into the recently-established water markets to the vegetable growers.

"It meant the supermarkets were kept full of vegetables during the drought.

"Unfortunately this isn't a possibility in California because of their inflexible water trading system that is not market based."

But Mr Dooley said he did advise his Californian counterparts that rule number one for dealing with farmers when water resources were scarce during a drought was "no grower should lose".

"Taking a water market reform plan of this to a strong, vocal grower community is not for the politically faint-hearted," he said.

"But if there is a problem and farmers feel like they are going to lose at the expense of urban water users, the government always need to come back to making sure of rule number one - no grower loses.

"In Australia, it did take a long-term process to sort out all of the issues, basically from 1994, which we shared with the Californians.

"But it was a wake-up call when we saw what was happening in California - they have a massive issue and there is unfortunately not a single magic bullet answer.

"They need to undertake structural reform of their water systems as well as urgent drought management measures. The Governor is doing just that, which is pleasing to see."