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The Plan - One Year On
12-October-2011
A year ago this week, I was among many eager to learn of the Murray Darling Basin Authority’s explanation of its plan for the future of the nation’s premier agricultural food bowl.
Well documented now, was the heated local dissatisfaction to that first MDBA proposed “Guide”, a volume that found all manner of ways to return water to the river system but forgot to assess the impact on the people along side it, those who produce one third of the nation’s food supply.
The result was enforced closer inspection of the MDBA’s follow up work.
And while I am more confident the eventual end plan will go some way to easing our early concerns, this confidence does not extend to the Gillard Government’s ability to deliver a satisfactory outcome.
This week, the Water Minister was quoted as saying one of the biggest challenges with
Basin reform was keeping people interested. Let me assure him, where I come from the
Plan is still of vital interest to every one of us.
But the uncertainty we felt 12 months ago remains.
Longer term planning, development and investment into our region is plagued by the Government’s ambiguous messages on when this revised Plan might reappear and then be enacted.
Adding to the uncertainty is the Water Minister’s continued pursuit of non-strategic water
buy backs, which seem almost to be saying ‘the longer we can plunder these vital irrigation communities, the less likely we’ll need to have any Plan at all’.
12 months on, the message to Labor is this.
Deliver the revised Draft Basin Plan next month - get it right – and, for once, start delivering
a major policy in a measured and timely way.