Blindly forging ahead
WERE you impacted by the recent floods? Are you seeing food prices going up weekly? Well that’s what the Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) has in store for you by blindly forging ahead with the buybacks of a further 450 gigalitres of water.
The river community landholders and business owners are being ignored and fobbed off with a generic platitudes like “collaborative and cooperatively working together” and “community consultation”, when they have seen the damage that government buying water has done to small business owner-operators in the past.
Even more disturbing is the wilful destruction of the Barmah forest already evident without more water being squeezed down the river to satisfy development downstream and South Australian interests.
The MDBA presently holds over 30 per cent of the water in dam space already. They have not been able to use that volume in any one year in the past, and are storing unused water in the dams, adding to the risk of more frequent flooding in wet years.
Yet blindly want a further 30 per cent that is impossible to deliver due to the physical constraints and causing significantly more environmental damage.
This seems to be insane to me, or is there a bigger picture at play?
Has the bipartisan privatisation of water under the guise of “healthy rivers” yet completely ignoring the impact on food and fibre production and the environmental destruction caused by trying to deliver such volumes down the river.
Have we now got bipartisan corporatisation of water in Australia?
Where we can see water being sold to the highest bidders at opportune times to maximise the financial yield of their investment. Which they have done in the past adding to the cost of production and ignoring the environmental and social damage that are already evident.
Victoria should withdraw from MDBP before its too late. Say no to more water buy backs.
Doug Fehring
Leitchville
