There is not much Wakool mixed farmer John Lolicato doesn’t know about water. He has spent decades as a landholder representative involved in natural resource management, policy and advocacy. The recent release of the Restoring our Rivers draft framework has once again left him shaking his head.
The framework is to support the removal of an additional 450,000 megalitres of water from the productive sector to the environment despite the state and federal governments already holding over 4,622,000 megalitres of environmental water (which is more than the full capacity of Dartmouth dam – one of Australia’s largest).
John said this buyback is disastrous for the region environmentally, economically and socially.
“Once the productive capacity leaves the community, you will never get it back. Buybacks might be good for individuals who sell their water, which is fine, but it does have a huge impact on the community,” John said.
He said Murray Irrigation has already lost around a third of the productive water from the footprint under previous buybacks.
“Every megalitre that leaves our region makes the cost of running the irrigation system more expensive in the future because there are fewer farmers to share costs – this ultimately pushes up the cost of delivery and impacts on future production,” John said.
As a proud rice grower, John said it will have a devastating impact on the Australian rice industry, Australia’s fresh milk production and other irrigated commodities, including hay and cereal production, horticulture and irrigated cropping – which then rolls onto manufacturing, local businesses, employment, health and education.
“People move away because there are fewer jobs and then business in town starts to close and then numbers drop at the school and then we start to lose health services and our once thriving towns turn into ghost towns with no services,” John said.
John said it is ironic the basin plan is supposedly meant to be about environmental outcomes and yet the damage to upstream river environments, to send huge volumes of water downstream to South Australia, is being ignored.
He added the framework fails to say how the government proposes to deliver these additional 450,000 megalitres and there is no mention of the increasing flood risk relaxing constraints poses to our communities.
“Floods like the disastrous 2022 flood will become more frequent and this is just another example of how destructive this piece of legislation is for our region, it just doesn’t make sense,” John said.
He said this legislation, in conjunction with the productive water that has already left the region, has created a shift in productive capacity and wealth away from mid Murray irrigation districts developed over decades to unsustainable downstream developments and ideological and unachievable environmental outcomes.
“I am disgusted with federal water minister Tanya Plibersek and the Albanese government’s continued dismissal of what impacts this legislation will have on our rural towns.
“The water minister even had the gall to suggest that regional communities may be exaggerating the consequences of water leaving even though there has been a myriad of federal and state government reports which clearly illustrate the impacts of buybacks on our community, economy and the environment.
“This government continues to ignore them all.”
He said Australia is the driest inhabited continent on the planet, however, our forefathers planned for future generations by building dams, including the iconic Snowy Mountains scheme, to help reduce the variability of our river systems and encourage inland development.
“This Labour government will go down in history as having the most anti-farmer policies ever recorded. Instead of the $13 billion basin plan achieving long term benefits for future generations, it is now being used by government to achieve unrealistic political goals and targets at the expense of the mid Murray region environmentally, socially and economically.”
This article appeared in The Koondrook and Barham Bridge Newspaper, 15 February 2024.
