WETLANDS ARE WORKING
I would like to make it clear that there is no problem with the actual 'wetland' – the water component of the Tiddalik Wetland site – which is functioning successfully, exactly as it was designed to do, and has done from its inception.
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Water is filtered as it passes through the ponds, and habitat is provided for many birds and a range of aquatic life-forms, just as was intended.
The problems that have arisen relate to the surrounding grounds, intended to be regenerated bushland. Tiddalik Wetland functions despite the management committee having had a budget of nil since the expenditure of the original Centenary of Federation grant in 2001.
It should also be noted that it was Murrumbidgee Council's own initiative in 2012 to take on the maintenance of the area, in lieu of the community grant our committee had applied for. I had misgivings about this right from the start and voiced them in a letter to the the general manager of the time.
Not only did it leave the management committee unfunded still, but I feared the project might be steered off-course and its original vision and aim would be lost or misunderstood. Also the management committee might be relegated to a mere advisory body, if that. This is pretty much what has now come about.
Despite a number of meetings between management committee and the mayor and senior council staff, the report and budget that was eventually put to council did not much resemble the rather more modest listing put forward by the wetland management.
Faced with a page of figures that included costings for jobs that could be many years down the track, council decided it was all too difficult and too costly, and voted to scrap the project.
Their decision was taken in the face of the existence of many wetlands all around -- Hay, Griffith, Leeton and Narrandera, and all over the state -- which are recognised as an asset, and expenditure on them as an investment, and in fact need little maintenance once established.
The Tiddalik project was initiated by a great deal of work by many volunteers, and supported by other community groups. I feel I have an obligation to all those people, and am not willing to see all that community goodwill wasted and disregarded.
I have hope that a solution can yet be found to this impasse, and that council can be induced to reverse its decision.
Mona Finley, Tiddalik Wetland Management Committee
LONG ROAD AHEAD FOR PM
Dear Prime Scott Morrison, congratulations on becoming Prime Minister of Australia. You have a hard road ahead, the Wentworth by-election is not what the rest of Australia is thinking.
Australia is in the middle of one of the worst droughts and city people are worried about climate change, refugees, immigration and the ABC that does not tell the truth. The elite of Wentworth do not know what climate change is, they live in a concrete jungle, they do not know what it is like when a farmer seeing their livestock dying of hunger and no water.
What we need is more dams to store water in times of drought. What we have in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area is low allocation of water of seven per cent and the Murray zero per cent. It all came about with Malcolm Turnbull who came up with the Murray Darling Basin Plan in 2007 to take 43 per cent of water from irrigation farmers, in the middle of a drought that lasted nine years 2001 to 2010 for the environment.
Climate has four seasons winter, spring, summer and autumn. There is a time to plant and a time to harvest what has been planted and the sun travels the sky, that's what gives us the four seasons and governments cannot change the weather.
Before the dams were built there were droughts and the government of the day came up with a plan to build the Barren Jack dam for irrigation to produce food.
The Australian environment is a country of droughts, floods and bushfires. Before the dams were built, the only people who lived in the outback lived near the river.
It's time to think for all the people of Australia and not city only people, who do not know where their food comes from.
The other problem with irrigation water is it has become a tool to be traded and sold like shares, when it is God's free gift. Who owns the water in the dams, the Burrinjuck, Blowering, Hume and the Dartmouth Dams?
Australia is one of the only countries in the world that sells water entitlements to overseas investors who produce food for their own country.
And I stand against the Adani mine which poses the biggest threat to water supply. We need to protect our groundwater.