A former irrigator says more environmental flows in the Murray Darling Basin should be diverted to those growing fodder for drought-stricken Queensland and New South Wales farmers.
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Bill Burke irrigated in Pyramid Hill and later on at a property in Tandarra, near Dingee. He can remember droughts dating back to the 1940s.
He is now based in Echuca and says the Murray is in good shape after a number of years of healthy flows.
“In my view it’s criminal that water’s being wasted there right now, because we need to irrigate crops and hay that are desperately needed over the river,” he said.
“When I was young the forests would only get watered when there was a big flood. That would only happen every five or 10 years.”
On Tuesday, the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder announced it would sell 20gl of water to irrigators in the Goulburn Valley early next week.
That was the kind of action Mr Burke welcomed, though he said more was urgently needed.
Environment Victoria’s healthy rivers campaigner Juliet Le Feuvre said winter and spring environmental flows were needed to set up wetlands for a dry summer and insure against possible drought.
“It’s not that farmers don’t need the water, of course they do, but the water holders and the environment need it just as much,” she said.
Ms Le Feuvre said environmental water holders were perfectly entitled to sell water if it was determined to be excess to their needs.
Her concern was that political pressure was starting to mount on federal and state water holders as governments and others grappled with ways to deal with dry conditions.
Last week Victorian water minister Lisa Neville wrote to her federal counterpart David Littleproud urging him to look at ways the CEWH could trade into the market – part of a raft of measures the state government actioned to try to help irrigators and communities in the state’s north.
And the federal government’s newly minted special drought envoy Barnaby Joyce this week raised the ire of green groups when he suggested environmental water should be diverted to farmers.
Related – Green groups savage Joyce’s drought plan
Ms Le Feuvre stressed that the independent processes of groups like the CEWH would need to be respected if dry conditions continued or morphed into drought.
“The holders were set up in the first place to take those decisions out of the hands of politicians. It put decisions in the hands of a statutory body with rules around how these types of decisions are made,” she said.
“That’s the situation we want to see play out as things get tough.”
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Tom O'Callaghan
I grew up in Bendigo and I want to tell your stories.
I grew up in Bendigo and I want to tell your stories.
