BASIN FARMERS AND COMMUNITIES NOT BEING LISTENED TO

7^th March 2012

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

BASIN FARMERS AND COMMUNITIES NOT BEING LISTENED TO

Firstly, to all farmers and communities affected by the recent flooding, my thoughts and prayers are with you all.

Through my Facebook page “Save Murray Darling Basin communities” I have been keeping in contact with people from right across the Murray Darling Basin and indeed Australia. I have been doing this from the outset of the farcical MDBA “consultation process”.

There is one message that is coming back to me repeatedly “We are not being listened to”.

What we have is a federal government and its body (the MDBA) that are totally out of tune with the people in the Basin and quite frankly do not give 2 hoots about that.

I sat at a MDBA meeting in Cobram and a staff member of the MDBA from Canberra was quite sure the Murray River would not have stopped flowing prior to dams and irrigation, well just read this:

According to Andrew Close the then Murray Darling Basin Commission water resource manager in the Australian in 2006:- “If the Murray River still had its natural flow it probably would have stopped flowing this year, as it did in 1850, 1902 for about 6 months, 1914, 1915 & 1923 while the Darling River dries up more frequently”.

This same person also told me that their “computer modelling” was accurate and correct.

My question to the MDBA is “Who wrote the computer programmes this modelling is based on”, because the modelling is deeply flawed and contains outright lies.

How can we as decent fair minded Australians stand idly by while this deception is being forced down our throats, we can not and must not, it is time for all of us to draw a line in the sand and say “We have had a gut full of your lies and deception” and make a stand.

My argument has always been and always will be that we can achieve all water required for environmental flows plus much more via infrastructure spending.

KEEPING UP THE FIGHT

Peter Gilmour

Cobram