Water used to be simple: a refreshing drink for people and plants that was largely free or cheap despite being essential to life. Population growth, pollution, climate change and the threat of scarcity have turned water into something far more complex: a wicked policy problem.

Ideally water is clear, pure and fresh. A wicked problem, by contrast is murky, complex and protracted. The causes and consequences are so socially complicated and so interconnected with other issues that solutions necessarily involve co-ordination among many groups and individuals who disagree about its causes, effects and what should be done. There may be no definitive "fix". There may be only the least-worst way of managing a problem so it doesn't get worse.

A decade ago one of Australia's most pressing wicked problems was the impending death of the mighty Murray-Darling river system, due partly to the profligate over-allocation of its waters for agricultural irrigation.

But after many years of negotiations between all the interested parties – governments, irrigators, environmental groups, tourism operators, towns dependent on the river – there was a solution. The federal government took control through a new Water Act in 2007, then in 2012 Julia Gillard's government adopted the $13 billion Murray-Darling Basin Plan. Much of the money was to be spent on returning saved water from agriculture to the environment, through irrigation efficiency improvements and buying back water allocations from farmers.

One of the wickedest parts of a wicked problem is figuring out who bears the costs of fixing it. The Murray-Darling solution demanded compromise and sacrifice on all sides. On the evidence recently revealed by the ABC's Four Corners, big irrigators in the Barwon-Darling region of northern NSW have been stealing billions of litres to water their cotton farms at the expense of other users down river who have faced shortages.

The program also revealed a seemingly cosy relationship between irrigators and the NSW government. The head of the Department of Primary Industry's water division Gavin Hanlon is accused of offering irrigation lobbyists privileged access to government documents and information on the government's negotiating strategy in relation to the plan, including a threat to walk away from it. It is also alarming that enforcement of water licences in NSW seems to have been perfunctory at best, with failure to proceed on cases ready for prosecution and the dismantling of expert investigation teams.

We trust it all comes out in the wash of independent reviews commissioned by both the NSW and federal governments and investigations by ICAC and the Australian National Audit Office. In the meantime it is fair to ask whether the politicians charged with overseeing the plan's implementation have done so impartially and in good faith. It does not inspire confidence that the Nationals leader and Water Minister Barnaby Joyce was recorded telling people in a pub at Shepparton that the controversy was, "all about ... them trying to take water off you ... paint a calamity ... for which the solution is that they're going to take more water off you, and shut more of your towns down".

If non-compliance became an excuse to brand the plan a failure and prematurely abandon it, a straight-forward scandal would be converted to disaster. Renewed commitment on all sides is needed. The plan remains the best chance of achieving it for the Murray-Darling ecosystem.

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