Comments on: Toxic: what is rotten in the Murray-Darling Basin?

By: Toni

Toni — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 00:20:53 +0000

A thorough article on the governance issues that have drawn us here. Resolution is difficult: returning more water to the river has significant social impacts and will create stranded assets in irrigation districts (ironically, ones that have had large sums of money sunk into reducing water losses to recover water for the environment). Water policy needs to integrate with agricultural policy, and time frames develop that understand that communities need time to accept change and adjust.

Splitting the MDBA into independent orgs with clear roles and accountability seems critical to resolve conflicts of interest in governance. Separating out the political drivers as a state level is more complicated. Interesting times ahead.

By: Daphne Dunphy

Daphne Dunphy — Sat, 12 Jan 2019 09:33:38 +0000

Years of miss management, water sold off to overseas interests are a big part of the story. The Murray/
Darling plan has never worked. This miss management has been going on for years. An enquiry by Four Corners was quite obviously shut down. It will take a whole generation for the fish to recover and that’s only if the problem is dealt with. It hasn’t been previously.

By: Ruby Davies

Ruby Davies — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 19:55:53 +0000

Thanking you all for this concise assessment of the horrific water extraction that’s been ongoing and increasing on the Darling Baaka.

The other straw that killed the Darling below Bourke are the 2012 changes to the Barwon Darling “Water Sharing Plan” (sic), allowing huge (26 – 36 inch) pumps to extract water, leaving a mere trickle of 350 ML/day flowing into the Darling Baaka below Bourke. This has sucked the very bottom out of the Darling and can be easily seen on graphs and obviously in the river itself.

I took the first photos of the dry Darling below Wilcannia on my brother’s property Culpaulin, in 1994. We had never seen it so low. A tragedy unfolding