The deal to crank up Adelaide’s desalination plant to make more water available to farmers in the drought-stricken Murray-Darling Basin makes no sense.

It involves the federal government paying the South Australian government up to A$100 million to produce more water for Adelaide using the little-used desalination plant.

The plant was commissioned in 2007 at the height of the millennium drought. It can produce up to 100 gigalitres of water a year – enough to fill 40,000 olympic sized swimming pools. But has been used sparingly, operating at its minimum mode of 8 gigalitres a year, because of the expense of turning seawater into freshwater.

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