Dear Editor,
Recent media reports indicate the SA Government has handed out $15 million in penalties for over extraction at the end of the Murray system.
As a former irrigator from the Murray Valley in the nation’s food bowl, I am totally disheartened by the lack of compliance in various parts of the Murray Darling Basin. Those left trying to farm in southern NSW and northern Victoria have the most modern and well metered irrigation systems in the world, and as a consequence cannot take a cupful of water without an alarm going off in a building somewhere.
In the Northern Basin (at the top of the system) we have compliance, metering and licencing issues which urgently need to be addressed. Likewise, at the end of the system, though the SA Government should be commended for its efforts to curb some of this over-extraction.
The key issue, of course, is that in parts of the system governments have failed to put checks and balances in place leaving irrigators to self-manage. When they do either deliberately or inadvertently take more than they should, all irrigators get tarred with the same brush of irresponsibility.
The obvious solution is far more rigour around compliance for everyone, including environmental water, across the entire Basin.
This needs total support, including peak farming bodies who have been fairly silent on the lack of compliance, licencing and metering issues in Northern Basin which make the volumes taken from bottom of the system look like a drop in the ocean.
Is it any wonder those of us in the middle are screaming and kicking? We do the right thing, using the world’s most efficient irrigation system, while those either end, don’t. Yet we have been accused of being divisive for trying to protect our farms and communities, which are suffering through poor policy and compliance efforts.
And where is the independent umpire, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, which should be there to support us? They treat us with utter contempt and have left us to shrivel and die while the mismanagement and political games continue.
All we want is a fair go, and since the start of Basin Plan implementation eight years ago that has not happened. There is enough water for everyone, thanks to our forefathers who had the insight to build the Hume and Dartmouth storages.
What we don’t have is an MDBA with the ability to effectively manage it, or governments who are prepared to demand that it be managed to maximum efficiency.
Compliance issues, like we have just seen in SA, are just one part of this systemic problem.
Shelley Scoullar
“Carinya Ridge”
Albury NSW
