I watched the Murray-Darling basin enquiry on Apac and truly it troulbes me the type of Public Servants we have, when they are unable to explain what they have put in the Act. They hide behind Legalities and the Attorney Generals office, and have the audacity to say they have legally decided not to disclose what they may or may not have said. Perhapes we need to have and enquiry into the practices of our Mr Appleby's in our Public service. Go for it Senator Barnaby Joyce keep speaking sense to these servants, one never knows how contageous the truth can be, especially when they hear it often.

Australia has been a signatory to the Ramsar Convention since 1971, It's pretty simple Barnaby, no water = no frogs = no other animals. When big agriculture has turned Australia into a dustbowl, who is going to support Barnaby Joyce then?

I think the answer to this is simple.

The government has promised a "triple bottom line". To me, this means that they want to send social, economic and environmental considerations to the bottom of their list of agendas, but also to stick with doing it in their own particular order.

1. Social considerations to the bottom first.

2. Economic factors to the bottom second.

3. Environmental concerns to the bottom last, after their corporate mates have taken over and fleeced all Australians to the greatest extent possible.

Therefore the government doesn't really give a single croak about a frog, other than as a manipulative tool to thwart farmers' and graziers' increasingly desperate attempts at achieving and maintaining a sustainable income.

Brian:

What!!!

Surely you must know that Planet Earth is a fully self-contained unit. The amount of water cannot become more and it cannot become less.

Therefore there is plenty of opportunity for all of the flora and fauna to coexist with humanity. In case you weren't aware, a rice crop is part of the flora.

In some Asian countries, they now grow rice and fish together in the same habitat.

Lorikeet

What??

By your reasoning we could grow rice on the beach at Surfers Paradise and catch reef fish in the Cooper Creek. Water ain't just water Lori.

If there was enough water in the Murry Basin we wouldn't have to have these discussions, I understand people want to make a living, I understand people want to have a pristine environment, I understand Barnaby wants more country constituents, I understand the economy is important, I understand peoples lives will be impacted whatever the final Murry Basin plan looks like, but if they get this wrong, everyone loses. I feel it's better to err on the side of the environment so we have room to move in the future. You know, for when the Nationals win in their own right.

No, I was talking about freshwater fish swimming amongst the rice and eating all of the insect pests. Later I remembered that the farmer also had a flock of ducks which were allowed into the rice paddy for a finite amount of time each day. They ate all of the snails (rice eaters) and provided a natural fertiliser at the same time, along with the fish.

There is a specific name for this kind of farming, which I cannot quite remember, but it is fairly labour intensive. It was being used in an Asian country and supplies a steady diet of rice, fish and poultry.

The rules on the land will change once our farmers and graziers are forced off it, and large corporations have taken over pretty much everything.

Its not the native frogs killing the River Murray. Its the excessive extraction of water by irrigators and other humans.

Here's a link to the rice, ducks, fish integrated method of farming.

http://www.pcd.org.hk/eng/programme_perspectives01_agriculture01.html