One of the wonders of the natural world, Australia's Great Artesian Basin, is running out of water.

The basin covers an area even bigger than the Murray-Darling system. The water it contains is under so much geological pressure that once a hole is drilled into it the water simply gushes to the surface from deep below ground.

Since its discovery, the Great Artesian Basin has earned billions of dollars to those who've tapped the resource.

First came sheep and cattle farmers. They drilled, then watered stock. Without the great artesian basin, pastoralism in some parts of Australia is impossible. There's nothing else to drink.

Next came the miners, like BHP Billiton. BHP sucks 35 megalitres of ancient water from the Great Artesian Basin every day. On Greens MP Mark Parnell's calculations, based on up-to-the-minute SA water figures, this is more than an average Adelaide household uses in 66-thousand, 885 years. But for BHP, even that's not enough. It plans to increase this extraction to 42 megalitres every day.

And it's absolutely free. The world's largest company pays the taxpayer nothing to drain the basin drier.

So it's no wonder that the basin is suffering, just like the Murray. And it's over-allocated, just like the Murray. And state governments are robbing its riches, just as they are the Murray. Last week the NSW government announced it would go ahead with a controversial water auction to allow further exploitation.

Of course the basin doesn't get the publicity that the Murray does. It's a question of out of sight, out of minds.

Author, Hendrlk Gout (article courtesy "The Independent Weekly": http://www.independentweekly.com.au/)