Letters to the editor

A major Australian food bowl is in northern Victoria and southern NSW, where our forebears invested in world’s best practice irrigation infrastructure to drought-proof the nation and ensure we could grow food during the inevitable dry periods.

This benefits the prosperity of the regions where it is grown, and provides an economic boost to the nation while also putting food on kitchen tables, especially in our capital cities.

A knee-jerk reaction to the millennium drought was the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, which was developed not to ‘save’ the iconic Murray River and its environs as the politicians would have you believe, but rather to solve a political problem in South Australia and guarantee the cheapest possible water supply to Adelaide, that is, using the Murray River as a drain to transfer water from Hume and Dartmouth dams at the top of the system, to the lower reaches in SA.

As a result we are growing less food because water has been taken away from farming.

We are also destroying the Murray River, as its banks collapse under the strain of these huge flows.

Alarmingly, it is proposed that under the basin plan even more water should be acquired and delivered to SA and this will lead to even more food shortages, higher food prices and more environmental damage to the Murray.

If our nation wants food to be grown domestically by the best farmers in the world, we must force a change to the present nonsense and demand a basin plan built on science and common-sense, not politics and self-serving.

Andrew Hateley, Finley

Make your vote matter in Mallee

As the federal election looms, I urge all Mallee voters to seriously consider how you will vote.

A vote is a powerful tool. If, over the last few years, you have felt concerned about where Australia is heading, express that in your vote.

Don’t, I beg you, vote the way you always have, out of habit.

Ask yourself: has our federal MP, Ann Webster, done anything to deserve your support? If not, give an independent candidate a go.

With climate change, with declining wages, with floods and bushfires, on women, with COVID-19, with refugees, on corruption and personal integrity, her Coalition government has failed us miserably.

Use your vote to tell our MP how you feel.

Choose your preferences carefully.

If you want to send a message to Ann Webster, put her last on your ballot paper. That is the only position in which she cannot get your support. If you put her anywhere but last, the distribution of preferences will almost certainly give her your vote.

Janet Field, Swan Hill

Confusing position on basin plan

Are we to believe the Coalition’s Minister for Resources and Water, Nationals Keith Pitt, “we will deliver the basin plan in full and on time”?

Reinforced by Liberal Coalition leader in the Senate, Simon Birmingham, “we are proud as a government to have ensured that billions and billions, thousands of billions of litres of additional water entitlement have been secured to support environmental flows across the Murray-Darling Basin. The government stands resolute in its support for the implementation of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, as we have said, in full and on time".

Or believe our Liberal and National party candidates for Nicholls, who both appear to be advocating the undermining of the basin plan and are at odds with Coalition policy?

Who can forget the Liberals last year killing the Nationals’ motion to amend the basin plan, and gagging Nationals whip Damian Drum from speaking, despite support from Labor to continue the debate.

Not even to get Nationals’ support for the Coalition’s net zero carbon emissions target by 2050 did amending the basin plan get a mention.

Are we to accept Liberal policy ‘delivery of the basin plan in full and on time” as being portrayed across electorates nationally or a version apparently designed to confuse, perhaps mislead, in selected country electorates?

John Pettigrew, Shepparton