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Eroding confidence

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When I think of tragedy and tales of woe, it is hard not to go past history’s greats like Romeo and Juliet, but Australia as a nation is penning an even more tragic story, one sadly not confined to fiction.

The Australian Federal Government’s Bush Summit was the chance for the mirror polished RM Williams to swagger off the marble floors of parliament and mingle with the people of the bush.

Sadly, the tone that emanated sounded like the final act or curtain call for faith in community engagement, or for a balanced Murray-Darling Basin Plan protecting our environment, communities and economies.

With water or the environment not being big enough portfolios for the Albanese Government to separate, Tanya Plibersek has the job of forcing Southern Basin communities to swallow the pill promised to South Australia in the federal election.

Minister Plibersek opened with, “Irrigation has been unequivocally a great thing for this country, no one wants to turn that around anymore than we would want to stop the Murrumbidgee in its tracks and send it back east.”

Before jumping on the well warn track of “On time and in full” communities have come to expect.

“I don’t share a lot of the taboos the previous government had around water recovery,” said Ms Plibersek after she confirmed Labor’s intention to see the Basin Plan completed in full with the additional 450,000 megalitres.

“Water management is just going to get harder in this country,” she said.

It looks like meaningful change, the ability for young people to get into irrigated agriculture and the protection of our rivers are also going to get harder.

For pity’s sake, the amount of time I spend in trying to remain unbiased and with an open heart to future potentials, without the filter of past behaviour, and this is what we can expect?

It was like I was watching Juliet clutching at a dying Romeo all over again. Thank God I had Vito Mancini.

Vito, a third-generation citrus grower and chair of the Citrus Growers Association delivered a calm, articulate voice of reason, shining on that stage.

“You say that you want to work with us but the language and the rhetoric that I’ve heard in the last three or four weeks never mentions triple bottom line, it’s always about 450,” said Mr Mancini.

“We don’t know where it’s going to come from, where it’s going to go, how are you going to get through the constraint points in the river.”

The erosion of the river channel is testament to the natural constraints of the majestic Murray and sadly, governments continue to ignore this issue and the protections provided under the water act.

“Tanya was mentioning about losing half our livestock (in the Federation Drought) and there was the royal commission after the Federation Drought,” said Mr Mancini.

“They didn’t say let’s go out there and take water off the irrigators because it has been over allocated, that was the issue, they built infrastructure.

“They built the dams, the weirs, the locks, everything to make these systems work as efficiently as possible.

“Today’s plan seems to be quite the reverse; it seems like we’re trying to take as much water away because productive water is inefficient to the environment.

“I think the language and the concrete nature of the plan makes a lot of us uncertain, every time we hear rhetoric from both sides of government, it means we have to deal more with less and we are the ones that have to face it.”

The plan rolls on, forget on farm environment and ecosystems, staple food production and vibrant communities.

The feds are circling, easy to see why water trading companies are raising capital to ‘invest’ in the shrinking pool of rural Australia’s lifeblood, water.

The Koondrook and Barham Bridge Newspaper 8 September 2022

This article appeared in The Koondrook and Barham Bridge Newspaper, 8 Seeptember 2022.

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