Today I have invited Alistair Wood to write a guest post about the River Murray. Alastair is a local resident at Victor Harbour in South Australia and his article reflects the frustration of many people who live along and near the River.
The idea of a community driven plan for the River is a good one.
Alastair and I would love your thoughts.
“I attended the Murray-Darling Basin Authority meeting at Goolwa on Feb 2nd and it was a total and utter waste of time. Scheduled to last for only two hours, it wasted the first forty five minutes on total trivia – nothing of substance was produced. I left.
The crisis that is the MDB needs action now. The River Murray is rapidly dying from its mouth upwards and twenty of the Basin’s twenty three rivers are listed as being in poor or very poor health. The time for endless consultation, discussion, review and debate is long gone. There is a wartime-like urgency for the MDBA to show leadership and take immediate action to address the long term causes of this crisis – gross over extraction of the Basin’s water, colossal losses associated with 13,000 kms of open channels, outdated, inefficient irrigation practices and dysfunctional/ non existent metering.
But the MDBA does nothing; its priorities are all wrong. It ignores these urgent causes and instead busies itself with trivial ‘community’ meetings that have all the urgency and relevance of a senior citizen’s tea party. It hides behind an endless, comatose bureaucratic process and puts its faith in a ‘Basin Plan’, a de facto code for continuing delay. A convenient escape clause that allows the authority to continue to avoid the hard decisions that are decades overdue. As a distraction, it puts forward obscure projects that address obscure problems and the Rudd government throws vast amounts of money at them, hoping they will go away. But they don’t and large portions of this money disappear into the black hole of bureaucracy, leaving little for the rivers.
The cold reality facing the Basin Plan is that it will be subjected to the same labyrinthine bureaucratic process and years will pass before actual results appear along our rivers, likely to be as late as 2014. These are critical years that our rivers cannot afford to lose.
And the reason for this appalling 40 yr paralysis?
Political parties operate entirely through a prism of self-interest. The Rudd government is paranoid that the solutions required will prove so unpopular they will be unelectable for a decade. So they put their narrow interests first, and nothing is done.
And the answer?
The communities of the Basin must bypass the politicians and bureaucrats and seize the initiative. They must become leaders and visionaries and take control of the Basin’s problems, leaving the politicians follow in their wake.
To do this they must produce a simple plan of action that can be adopted Basin-wide. When it has sufficient support, it should be taken to Canberra. If both major parties approved, the longstanding political paralysis and odium that has prevented progress for 40 years would be removed. Politicians would be relieved from the onerous task of finding solutions to the Basin’s problems. And the communities, the people who know the most about the rivers, would be free to forge ahead with their own remedies.”
Written by Alastair Wood, 8 February 2010
