The Guide to the Draft Murray Darling Basin Plan is to be released tomorrow, but media leaks have suggested that there will be substantial cuts to water allocations for irrigators.
Senator Barnaby Joyce said today, “This is a very peculiar way to help regional Australia by coming up with a plan that could send a large section of it broke. To take water from the Murray Darling Basin in the way suggested by these staged leaks would decimate the economic fabric of many towns in the Basin.
Even if the farmers have been compensated for the water what happens to the local townspeople? After all the environmental aspects have been assuaged, what happens to the businesses that go bankrupt after their regional economy has been turned upside down?
What would Sydney say if tomorrow there was an announcement that 27 to 37 percent of the people were to be removed from the CBD because of environmental reasons?
The ramifications of this decision will come home to the kitchen table in the price of food. The ultimate goal of a plan such as this seems to be that we wish our nation to be fed by somebody else.
Australia has suffered one of the highest food inflation rates in the western world with one reason being the drought. People should be made aware that any added restriction on our capacity to produce food, will create a permanent upward pressure on the price of some essential food items. Likewise, our capacity and our moral obligation to feed others around the world will be reduced or removed altogether.
Labor’s process in this has been arbitrary, haphazard and mischievous.
Arbitrary, as seen in the way water was purchased from Toorale which doesn’t even flow into the Darling River.
Haphazard in the way they purchased over $ 300 million of water from one family and in the process decimated the town of Collarenebri.
Mischievous in the way that we have a lock up where we have the fourth estate in one room and the elective representatives in another, so they can’t talk to one another to get a story for the weekend news.
Maybe this is a true reflection of that new, tortured term, paradigm we live in.
Ms Gillard should prepare herself for some very unhappy people coming to visit her in Canberra. They’ll be comingwith their friends and if they pursue this plan they’ll be coming by the bus load. Then she can see one on one her relationship with regional Australia.”