Charmaine’s article should be put better: Murray-Goulburn Water doing nothing while 68,000 square kilometres of area they service is turned into a desert while 100-years-plus of irrigation infrastructure is made redundant.
It’s disappointing when the leader of an organisation makes comments that seem so far removed from reality.
She may need to leave the office and take a look around her irrigation district once in a while instead of trying to feed us with bureaucratic rhetoric from Canberra.
Yes, there has been $2.2 billion of irrigation modernisation done, and yes, environmental mistakes have been made with change, but irrigators were sold a pup.
This efficiency measured new system was to reduce costs by a third but what it has done is nearly triple costs.
Unfortunately, while new infrastructure like fishways are built they are never maintain once placed in operation.
A better outcome would be to try and reduce costs now for those who remain farming, producing food for our population to eat, by making government pay the full cost recovery for their environmental water including delivery shares.
Also making sure every last drop of this water is measured like farmers’ water.
If the focus is on the environment, why isn’t dual purpose farm water consider when 93 per cent of the basin’s wetlands are found on privately owned farmland?
Three years of continuous unseasonal watering of a forest, creating a weed-infested creek causing bank erosion and tree collapse with high winter flows, is not best practice.
G-MW should be focused more on a strategy to make sure our district remains cost-efficient and prosperous by continually attracting irrigation business to the district, collecting full costs from government-stored and delivered water and not entertaining any form of water buybacks which would decimate the future viability for those who remain.
Geoff Kendell
Central Murray Environmental Floodplains Group chairman, Cohuna
9°C