Enough is enough

Murray Irrigation constantly keep changing the goal posts on their so-called sustainability product, and recently announced they will sell $7 million worth of our water back to us with no allocation advance or resource distribution.

This decision was made with no thought of any impacts to shareholders, communities or water market implications.

It’s mainly to cover up their ability to run a fairly straight forward water delivery company.

They now think they can just sell any amount of shareholders’ water to prop up their poor management and unsustainable business plan. A poorly constructed business plan, which the CEO was alerted too during his first meeting in Deni.

Much to my amazement the CEO dismissed this assertion and told the meeting in as many words ‘I am the man to fix this, this is what the board have brought me in to do’.

Well now, nearly 12 months on and with all the money we pay a CEO and executive management team, the best they can come up with is taking an extremely lazy and reactive response to the putrefying state of the company’s balance sheet, is to sell our water back to us. I repeat, it’s our water.

It was always going to be a slippery slope when they started selling a small amount, and now it’s just too easy to sell any amount of water for any means necessary.

The directors who approved this disgraceful act of betrayal on the shareholders should all hang their heads in shame as well.

Where has the company exhausted every avenue of cost cutting?

The board of MIL should start with seeking independent advice on the company’s own failings within management.

Ironically it seems management are quite happy to get independent advice on the boards failings, but will not allow or entertain the board the freedoms to initiate an independent review into their own poor management.

Which asks an extremely important question: Who did the shareholders elect to run this company?

We seem to have more unelected decision makers which incur no economic outcome or accountability for their poor decisions.

A recent example of this is that the board relinquished control of all operational policies, which meant that during the flood drainage issues last year, management were able to change drainage policy without alerting the board and did so prior or maybe even during the event.

We as shareholders cannot let control keep being eroded away from the board, our elected representatives.

MIL should not be run as a large, publicly listed company like it is currently and must be much more in tune with the shareholders within its footprint that pay the fixed operating costs.

I’m sure the CEO and management mean well, but they don’t have any skin in the game and these decisions they make don’t have any direct impact on their cost of living.

That is why we need astute, free thinking directors in place to prevent continual bad decisions from occurring.

We must demand strong, robust independently smart and collaborative board members who are future focused when representing the company, its shareholders prosperity and the communities within its footprint.

Can I suggest that the CEO and his team focus less on an unlikely local university, dreaming up where to build brand new headquarters and craning in a boardroom table to the second story and instead focus on the fact that we have a broken company that needs re-energising, an appetite for the hard decisions to be internally taken within the business structure and business model, rather than lightweight decisions such as selling shareholders’ water back to them after all the sacrifices that they have already endured.

Yours etc.

Jon Gatacre

Pretty Pine