So its official (again), it’s the DROUGHT! In fact the worst drought in recorded history according to Penny. If it would just rain everything would be hunky dory again for the rice growers and the cotton farmers and the guys who just like to slosh the murrumbidge, the darling or the murray around in an endless maze of open ditches. Meanwhile overseas interests continue to snap up our environmental assets with the news that Singapore-based agribusiness corporation Olam International has purchased the rights to 40,000 megalitres of water in the system. Penny’s not getting that water back anytime soon.
The whole idea seems founded on two conflicting notions. On the one hand we have this seemingly untouchable notion that property owners can privatise their own local water assets with dams and on the other hand they can convert public water in the river systems and underground into economic assets via farming. The upshot of this bizarre situation is that everyone can pass the buck on responsibility for the state of the rivers and no one is even thinking about the underground water table, which as they say is pretty much out of sight and out of mind.
The problem with Penny Wong’s approach is that she seems to think that all the farmers and other interested parties dependent on water in the Murray Darling basin are prepared to share in the pain that comes from a forced restructure of our inland water regime when its perfectly obvious that local self interests will exploit inconsistent state and federal policies while doing whatever they can to protect their own water supplies. Its easy to preach a mantra of share and share alike when something is in plentiful supply but when the chips are down it doesn’t take long for the situation to revert to everyone for themselves.
Ms Wong probably grasps the situation as well as anyone which might explain why she is now reduced to blaming the whole thing on the rain, which isn’t falling.
Darling River under seige
original picture by suburbanbloke
Drought, not buyback, killing rivers | The Daily Telegraph.
