NO PLAN BETTER THAN A BAD PLAN

Hello once again from sunny Cobram on the majestic murray river.

I was travelling yesterday with some of my family and admiring the vibrant colours of our wonderful countryside. Plenty of green grass, cattle and sheep and enormous canola crops and it got me to thinking, this countryside would look nothing like this without one main thing, water, our area around Cobram was sheep and cropping country before the emergence of irrigation, just look at it now, thousands of acres of highly intensive agriculture eg fruit growing, dairying, olives plus all the other types of agricultural endeavours.

Cobram High School is 50 years old this year and I am involved in organising a reunion, so that means our High School started in 1962, not long after the irrigation schemes were established in our district, so with the benefit of irrigation Cobram and its sister town Barooga have gone from being villages on the Murray River to being a quite sizeable business hub, the 2 towns have a population of 6,500 and our “shopping population” is 13,000, that is why we now have major department stores in our town.

The majority of this is because of that marvellous invention, irrigation.

This story is repeated many many times right across the Murray Darling Basin.

We can thank our forefathers for having the vision, determination and commitment to establish the agricultural powerhouse the Murray Darling Basin is today.

We are now getting snippets of information about where the Murray Darling Basin plan is up to and some expert reckoned that the plan will go through pretty much as is, mate that is not going to happen, because if the opposition and states crumble now there will be an enormous protest, we will be looking for scalps.

I will only touch on Cubbie Station, the decision to let it be sold to overseas investors shows a total lack of vision and very little understanding about what the issues are in the Basin and rural Australia.

NO PLAN IS FAR BETTER THAN THE PLAN CURRENTLY IN FRONT OF TONY BURKE

Keep well and all the best,

Peter Gilmour