Murray-Darling Basin Fiasco

As the bureaucrats who head up the Murray-Darling Basin authority have been travelling around selling their "guide to a draft to a plan" as it is now being touted, they have been surprised to find that people actually don't like government bodies ripping their livelihoods and communities apart.

To put some perspective on this, what is being proposed is like saying that Sydney's CBD is going to be shut down and turned into parkland and nobody is ever going to be able to build office space anywhere in the city to replace it. Imagine the dislocation, the job losses, the uproar. Well, that's the equivalent economic upheaval that this government is going to bring to the entire western region of Queensland, NSW and the northern part of Victoria.

Nobody minds though because we are invisible, hidden behind that huge sandstone curtain called the Great Dividing Range, and we always vote Nationals except for those pesky Independents who are spoiling everybody's party.

Now, confronted with the real outrage that this is generating in the bush, the Government has backed off from its pre-election promise/threat to implement the MDBA plan to now saying that it is a guide to a draft to a plan which the Government will then consider in consultation. The threat to food security (or more importantly food prices) is also making city politicians consider the real cost of this plan/guide/thing.

The MDBA has belatedly realised that many more than 800 jobs (what a joke that figure is!) will disappear and is now planning its own study into the community impact of its plan/draft/guide whatever.

The basic problem with the whole deal is that it seeks to solve a non-existent problem. There was a big drought that lasted 7 to 10 years in which time the Global Warming myth got established and some people pointed that the drought was a permanent sign of climate change. The CSIRO recently debunked that myth, but the media, politicians and environmentalists ignored that inconvenient truth. Now the drought has ended in typical Aussie fashion with widespread flooding and the likelihood is that we will have a few wet years followed by some more dry ones.

Even if there were no dams, no farmers, no irrigation and no environmentalists the Murray-Darling system would have been dry because there was very little rain anywhere in the region. That is the definition of drought! The Koorong would have dried up, the Darling would have been a series of puddles and there would have been mass deaths of all kinds of regions. That has been happening for thousands of years.

If politicians want to save the wetlands and the woodlands then they need to invest serious money in infrastructure. The best way to do that would be the one thing that is anathema to all greens, but would do far more good than harm. Extend the existing dams and build new ones, with the proviso that all the additional water in the system is to be saved for environmental flows.

In a climate like Australia's where there is so much variability in everything, the one thing that we can do is use technology to smooth out the variations.

Of course in a climate where irrational people rule, and where the lesser speckled wood hen is far more important than 10,000 human beings, that is the one thing that we cannot do.