A community written Basin Plan?
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this crisis – gross over extraction of the Basin’s water, colossal losses associated with 13,000 kms of open channels, outdated, inefficient irrigation practices and dysfunctional/ non existent metering.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
I too attended that meeting and like many people you attended it with the idea as to what or why it was called. The MDBA wanted to explain their process so the public would know of the process that lay ahead. When the MDBA plan for community cosultation that is when we must have input and then after Wong and her other colleagues and bloody public servants alter it to their liking we must have the guts to make comment and tell what we want and that we want it now.
I would be happy to discuss this weth you at any time. 08 8569 2086 or 0418 822 342
Have you seen the website http://www.LakesNeedWater.org? This community group is proposing that we can get started now on helping the Lower Lakes by returning the Lakes to estuaries. The reality is that the barrages are making the environmental problems worse. The website has maps, news articles, letters, etc. as information to back up this proposal.
So in the democratic country that we live in, you will have the government come in, make decisions, change peoples livelihoods up and down that basin without the science or study to back it up?
You want a government that makes rash decisions to fix one part of a 1-million sq kilometer basin while not paying any attention to the rest of the basin?
It is sometimes unfortunate that governments must make evidence based decisions (esp when you can see the river in front of you dying) however, I would much prefer this that a knee-jerk reaction.
What happens when one community’s interests clash with another? You step up the size of the community. Then it happens again, then you have state run systems. And that’s what got us into this mess in the first place. The commonwealth are doing the right thing by taking over the murray-darling, but we must give them the time such a mammoth task requires.
Get involved, engage with them, give them constructive submissions when they call for them. Don’t diss them for coming out and trying to meet with us before they had to (ie: the formal submission period)