Can you not see how hypocritical and mean spirited this is? Have council considered trucking our seemingly abundant water supply to towns that actually will use it more wisely?

Why on earth are we not already on water restrictions in even a tokenistic way?

Liverpool Plains Shire secured artesian supply in the 1970s in perpetuity but have in place reasonable water restrictions anyway.

The GCC customer service operator was helpful but largely uninformed about what council plans to do about excess water usage by residents.

It has now been nearly two weeks since I emailed council and I have not received a reply. If we have water we should be sharing it with those towns who do not.

Council should take a harder line and demand compliance from water users in town by imposing common sense water restrictions that are scientifically based and would be more in keeping with the rest of the state suffering through this horrendous drought.

In the meantime townspeople need to take a good hard look around and see how wasteful they are being with water.

Hasn't it been wonderful to see all the coverage of the Snowy Hydro Scheme, recognised as perhaps Australia's greatest engineering achievement.

Seventy years ago, before a crowd of 2000, Governor-General Sir William McKell pushed a button to detonate an explosive charge. This started the Snowy Scheme which built 16 dams, seven power stations, a pumping station, 145km of tunnels and 80km of aqueducts to harness the flow of the Snow River for hydro-electric power and irrigation.

It opened up the lands of western NSW and made them the food bowl of our nation, providing clean, green food for Australians, plus millions of other human beings throughout the world.

It also laid the foundations for thousands of farming pioneers, many of whom established fertile soils with countless hours of blood, sweat and tears.

How our forebears must sit back in bewilderment at the 21st century result of their efforts. In the NSW Murray region, which has fed our nation for decades, there has been zero water allocated for food production for two years.

This is despite the extra capacity for storing water provided by the Dartmouth Dam, built in the 1970s to complement supplies from Hume Dam and the Snowy Scheme.

Instead of using the water to grow food, we now pour huge quantities down the Murray River. Along the way it unnaturally floods forests, damages fragile river banks, fills lakes that were historically estuarine with fresh water, and the excess flows out to sea.

This waste of our precious resource is disgraceful; the environmental damage it is causing is a tragedy. The failure of our Environment Minister Sussan Ley to stop this happening in her own backyard beggars belief.

As for the efforts of Water Minister David Littleproud, media commentator Alan Jones summed it up in one word: Disappointing. Politicians of past generations had the foresight and courage to build massive projects like the Snowy Scheme to benefit all Australians.

Politicians today are dictated by a green agenda and the voting trends in marginal seats. There has been increasing commentary about the threats to our national food security by a failed Murray-Darling Basin Plan and our appalling water management. Our only hope is that at some point we have a realisation that the current waste of precious water must end, and growing food must become a higher priority.

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