Imagine what would happen if we valued ecosystems as if they mattered. Imagine what would happen if good environmental managers had the advantage and bad environmental managers got penalised. All we need to do is reverse the onus of responsibility and create opportunity.

At a roundtable, participants are encouraged to go for the bottom line and assume that people have comprehensive knowledge of the issues. The focus of this paper is on opportunities to improve Australia's environment.

This paper outlines how an area-based water allocation system for irrigating crops could be converted to a system of shares, structured so as to allow the development of a low cost trading market for water and salinity shares. It stresses the need for separation of entitlements of water from...