|
|
Print this Article
Address at MDBA Public Meeting, Deniliquin Racecourse
16-December-2011
I cant believe one year after we all met in Deniliquin, we’re presented with a
plan that is essentially just the same
Craig (Knowles) you have been, your Authority has been lazy in the production
of this plan today. You have used $218.7m of public money in the last 12 months
and $15m of that you have spent on consultancies.
What about the consulting that has failed to happen in this local community?
So I ask you, Mr Knowles, if you would consider putting just one shopfront in the
Basin. One sign that says Murray Darling Basin Authority that people could walk into….
and I would like you to put it into Deniliquin.
This is the town that will be most affected by this disastrous plan.
This one single town.
And I know I sound tough but you’ve produced a plan that is sending 4000ml
of water per day below Hume Dam in a channel that only has a capacity of 2500.
You have a plan that is pushing all this water, creating a channel down the Murray to apparently meet the objectives of keeping the mouth of the Murray open for a certain number of years.
By the way, on its way, as it waters 2500 wetlands. Not sure how its going to get back into the channel to do the job at the end. There hasn’t been the work done to do this.
Tony Burke, you are a good person. You’re a colleague of mine in the Federal Parliament. You’ve been a good Labor Minister - mind you the benchmark is not very high at the moment - but your Department is out of control. They have an agenda of growing trees on farms for climate change that is ridiculous – perhaps that is a discussion for another day.
As an Agriculture Minister in a previous Government sitting around the Rudd/Gillard cabinet table, you should know that it is agriculture that saved Australia from the global financial crisis.
Agriculture, irrigated agriculture, makes up 25% of our total production.
And we have put that at stake. We have put Australia’s economy at stake.
Where you should be today, Minister Burke & Mr Knowles is at the Finley High School.
You should be looking in the eyes of every year 11 student and saying there isn’t a future when you leave school.
Or you should be down at footy training talking to the 3rds and 4ths of the Rams or Rovers and you should be telling them there is no pathway. Not to a trade, not to the rice mill, not to the job on the farm, not to a job in the shearing shed, only to university… somewhere else.
And that is the great shame, a community here that has worked so hard for Australia
and has been such a credit to this nation is being put under that sort of threat.
Tony, as I said, you’ve been a good minister, I ask you do not let your legacy to our town
be that you broke this community’s heart.