I have been watching with a great deal of interest the ongoing debate between Foodbowl Unlimited and the Plug the Pipe group.

While Foodbowl Unlimited has shown enormous leadership at a time when our community virtually has none, and I include federal, state and local government representation, the Plug the Pipe group seems only intent on playing the man and failing dismally to come up with any constructive and well thought out ideas.

Having lived and worked most of my life in the Goulburn Valley I can never remember an opportunity coming our way such as the $2 billion for the Foodbowl Unlimited initiative.

It's very easy to criticise from the comfort of one's armchair, but to really show some leadership it would have been better for everyone to have worked towards a common goal rather than try to stop a project with personal attacks.

Weren't we lucky that Foodbowl Unlimited had the ear of our Premier John Brumby and we were even luckier that we have a premier that has a very good understanding of the needs and aspirations of the Goulburn Valley.

He has supported many projects here in the past.

It would have been just as easy to spread the money around the whole of the state on projects that would have shown no benefits to us.

Melbourne Water could have just come in and bought the water (as did Ballarat and Bendigo) and we would not have had the opportunity to repair and redesign our degraded irrigation infrastructure to gain more water for irrigation and the environment.

Think how many jobs are being created, surely the influx of so many skilled tradesmen, contractors and engineers and their families is going to stay with the ongoing development of the Goulburn and Murray valleys at a time when we really need an injection of funds into our communities.

So I encourage everybody to watch and support this project, go out into the irrigation region and have a look at what is going on instead of wasting money on full page ads in the metropolitan media (I hope personally that these ads are not being paid for by my taxes) and thank our lucky stars that we have a group of leaders in our community such as John Corboy, Ross McPherson and the members of Foodbowl Unlimited.

Jeremy Gaylard

Shepparton

Call to harvest Melbourne's water

No-one would deny that the Goulburn Murray irrigation infrastructure should be upgraded.

Extracting water from the Goulburn for Melbourne is an entirely separate matter.

The temerity of NVI, Foodbowl Unlimited and other proponents of piping Goulburn River water to Melbourne is amazing.

That water is not theirs to bestow.

The justification gained for their cause by adding together the estimated volumes of irrigation water transferred to the groundwater system, water lost by evaporation and calibration errors in measurement, to create savings is breath-taking nonsense.

The Goulburn River is located in the Murray-Darling Basin, which is desperately, and in some areas terminally, short of water.

On the other hand, Melbourne has surplus water: 750 Gl is spilled into the sea each year.

In the past, Melbourne was a world leader in developing the technology of supplying town water.

Yan Yean reservoir was completed in 1857, 23 years after Melbourne was settled, and the Werribee sewage farm, another world beater, was established in the 1890s.

Today, the government in Melbourne is content to follow the out-of-date formula of collecting stream flows in dams from our diminishing rivers, or following the oil-rich Arab states into desalinating sea water.

The dams of the 21st century are the stormwater outlets that collect water very efficiently from the roofs and pavements of our cities and towns.

The CSIRO and the universities have the expertise to produce clean, safe water from this source.

Moreover, the water is produced at the customers' doorstep, and despite diminishing rainfall, its volume will increase as more land is taken for urban use.

Harvesting this wasted resource would not only allow the government to abandon its extravagant and destructive plan to extract more water from the Goulburn, but also to restore the 25 Gl/year flow of Silver and Wallaby creeks that were first diverted to the Yan Yean reservoir in 1884.

Harvesting 500 Gl of the available stormwater would assure Melbourne's water supply for some time.

Tony Nicholas

Violet Town

Bonus for leaky irrigation system

The average long-term losses from our leaky irrigation system are more than twice Melbourne's entire annual usage.

Even last year - the worst drought year on record - we lost 1 Ml for every 2 Ml delivered to farmers.

If most Melburnians truly understood the magnitude of that waste of water they would have insisted on John Brumby simply buying our water at market rates and piping it to Melbourne.

No irrigation upgrade and no set-off at all.

The recently completed Bendigo/Ballarat pipeline is an example of what could have happened.

Instead we got a government funded $1 billion investment in upgrading our irrigation system with a third of the consequent water savings piped to Melbourne to help overcome their water shortage.

This investment attracted a further $1 billion investment by the Commonwealth.

The total investment equals $1 million dollars a weekday for eight years.

Most other irrigation systems in Australia are only upgraded at the expense of irrigators.

All things considered we got a good deal.

In addition we get an extra 75 Gl of water to be added to irrigators' entitlements.

That's a further boost to the local area at a conservative $2400/Ml.

And let's not forget the 75 Gl to go to the environment.

I for one am pleased that strong local leadership has resulted in what history will see as a huge win for the bush, the environment and local irrigators and economies.

Jim O'Connor

Shepparton

Piping water lacks logic

Re: Proposed pipeline from Murray Goulburn to Victorian cities south of the divide.

Middle of the road people, as I hope I am, may not really understand all the momentous issues that governments must react to in the national interest because of the present drought.

A possible permanent change in seasons could give the Murray-Darling Basin a drier climate than ever recorded.

The lack of federal management and control of our river systems remains the most obvious and probable culprit for today's inability to meet the challenge.

This should have been remedied with Howard's water plan and hopefully will be embraced by the Rudd Government.

Parochialism and political expedience has made longterm planning with state control difficult.

This seems to have threatened the future of generations of Australians who would follow the varied agriculture pursuits of their fathers.

The Victorian Government has seemed to be obstructionist during the election year, taking precious time for them to come aboard.

I believe with many others the Brumby administration has been blinded and misguided in regard to pumping water from the Goulburn and Murray systems over the Great Divide to the booming metropolis of Melbourne and other southern cities.

Surely this lacks any form of logic, reason, or common sense, a policy impossible to be in the national interest or the international one, with a world food famine on the horizon.

To propose saving some water through modernising the old irrigation systems from the evaporation and waste, then use it as a lifeline for an urban sprawl growing at prolific rate, that expects to arrive at 6 million eventually, is, in my opinion, very short sighted.

Whether the science is right or not with this project creating substantial savings in water, what logic is there taking 1 Ml of this precious commodity from the great agricultural Murray-Darling Basin, when the world is relying on it to contribute to feeding her millions.

What Premier Brumby is proposing is basically flawed in principal; history will surely vindicate this view.

He is just as wrong as the Bracks administration was with the toxic dump; except this is a far bigger threat to all Australians.

Ian Findlay

Mildura