IN the United States in earlier times, black slaves were sometimes issued rations of pork stored in large barrels of brine. Often their eagerness to grab the food would result in a mad rush upon the pork barrel. It is believed that this is the origin of the political term ''pork-barrelling'': American politicians who tried to grab as much public funding as possible for their own electorates were thought to exhibit the same grasping urgency. Pork-barrelling often involves assigning funding for government programs that benefit a particular area but whose costs are spread among all taxpayers. Its incidence rises in lockstep with the advance of an election date. Here in Victoria, as it happens, an election is due by the end of the year, and water has become the climate-change equivalent of pork in brine. The result appears to be a government that is leaning towards supplying city folk with more water at the expense of struggling farmers and parched river systems.

Several measures are under way to ease the water shortages that have followed 12 years of drought in south-eastern Australia. The $750 million north-south pipeline is designed to take water from the Goulburn River near Yea, over the Great Dividing Range and into Melbourne storages. The $2 billion Foodbowl Modernisation Project is lining and covering irrigation channels. Stage one was designed to save up to 225 gigalitres of water that would otherwise evaporate or seep back into the ground. This ''saved'' water was to be split between Melbourne, farmland and the Murray-Darling river system.

Now, new forecasts suggest that Melbourne will have enough water in its dams to get by without the pipeline until well after the desalination plant begins operations in December 2011. This presents a chance to offer more water to farmers and to rivers, but Water Minister Tim Holding is adamant that 75 billion litres will flow down the pipeline to Melbourne this year. This week, he said the desalination plant and the pipeline were Melbourne's ''path out of water restrictions''. He would not confirm restrictions would be eased but hinted it was likely: ''Just as we've seen water restrictions eased in 71 towns across Victoria … so, too, is it reasonable for the people of Melbourne, who are now on some of the most severe water restrictions anywhere in Victoria, to see the prospect of water restrictions being eased.''

There is nothing dire about water restrictions in Melbourne. Its citizens have accepted water conservation as a necessary part of a new way of life; a reasonable response to changed environmental circumstances. Now the Government risks undermining that. It is also short-sighted and politically ignoble to promise more water for city people and their lawns when farmers struggling to produce the nation's food are hanging on by their fingernails. In many areas, they have received only a fraction of their agricultural water entitlements. With so much of the Murray-Darling Basin desperate for water, that 75 billion litres would be put to better use close to its source, partly for irrigation and partly to improve the health of rivers and lakes to protect them from acidification, algal blooms and other disasters.

Mr Holding has argued that Melburnians deserve the water because they helped pay for irrigation upgrades. Melburnians do not need to see more water coming out of their own taps in order to get their money's worth. Helping our farmers hold on to the land and continue to produce locally grown food, and knowing that our rivers will survive for future generations, are goals that are important to everyone.

If this were not an election year, it is unlikely that the Government would be grandstanding over the pipeline in this way. Unfortunately for rural voters, polls suggest the Government's electoral position is strong, which seems to have made it careless about rural votes. There is a bitter paradox in this for country people, whose election of independents in three key seats in 1999 propelled the Labor Government to power. During the 2006 campaign, then premier Steve Bracks said his government would not take water over the Great Dividing Range to Melbourne, but Labor broke that pledge when it announced the pipeline. Admittedly, he made that promise before Victoria felt the full brunt of the drought, but reneging on it was a breach of faith. Now the Government seems poised to again turn its back on rural voters. It does so at Victoria's peril.