Griffith councillor Paul Rossetto and local winemaker Darren De Bortoli addressed a public rally against the Murray Darling Basin Plan (MDBP) on Wednesday.
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The rally was held at Barham, on the banks of the Murray River, where more than 1000 people from irrigation towns across the Basin vented their frustrations.
A new Senate inquiry into the MDBP offers fresh hope to water-weary farmers in the southern Riverina, who dragged themselves into town in massive numbers in another effort to get decision-makers to heed their warnings.
While the inquiry is yet to kick-off, action can’t come quick enough for Riverina residents, who want federal agency the Murray Darling Basin Authority’s (MDBA) moves to reclaim yet more water from production halted.
Farmers said the skyrocketing price of water has flowed from the Basin Plan, which threatens the future of agriculture in the southern Basin.
"No major parties are willing to face the facts because of political risks, political point-scoring and a fear of a backlash from environmentalists," Deniliquin mixed farmer Louise Burge told the public forum.
Independent Senator John Madigan championed the Basin towns’ call for for an inquiry.
He was supported in the call for an inquiry by independent Senators David Leyonhjelm, Bob Katter, Bob Day as well as Liberal Sharman Stone and Labor’s Sam Dastyari.
“This is an opportunity to rectify a great bloody stuff up,” Senator Madigan said.
The Basin Plan is designed to recover a total 2750 gigalitres for environmental flows.
The Senators sat on the stage in front of the capacity crowd to listen to a litany of concerns that came from the floor of the rally.
Speakers said that local input is absent from the Basin, the impact of water prices on farmers is ignored, flood risks from future environmental flows have been swept under the carpet.
De Bortoli Wines managing director Darren De Bortoli said the Basin Plan is an “economic and social disaster”.
The meeting moved four motions the want the MDBA to abide by:
- Amend the Water Act to indisputably give balance to the triple bottom line of environmental, social and economic impacts from the Basin Plan
- Community has lost confident in the MDBA
- Pause the roll-out of the Basin Plan
- Ban further water buybacks
Each motion was voted in unanimously.
Despite state governments working to a November deadline for project proposals to return a whopping 650GL to the environment from irrigation, the MDBA hasn't finalised how it will handle impacts to landholders from increased environmental flows, which ramps up the likelihood of floods wiping out public and private infrastructure, as well as stock and crops.
Southern Riverina Irrigators chairman John Bradford has forecast up to 45 per cent of his district's irrigation water could go to environmental flows when NSW returned the 470GL it had committed to deliver under the Basin Plan.
