The Murray Darling Basin is a huge water catchment that runs through the east and south-east of Australia. The vast majority of the Australian grown food you’ve ever eaten in your life has come from here. (Unless you live in Perth, and even then it’s a pretty large percentage)

The Murray Darling Basin Authority is supposed to be ‘looking after’ this very large and very important place. But, predictably, they’re screwing it up. Big time.

The MDBA were the first federal bureaucracy to draw my ire, and 6 years ago I made this video about their draft plan to ‘fix’ the basin:

Well there’s been much noise and fury since then, but nothing’s really changed. The MDBA shoved their ‘plan’ down the throats of the Murray Darling Basin communities in 2012, without any serious attempts to address the points raised in my video or listening to the outcry from the affected communities. So they were still relying on data from ‘before European settlement’ (who was collecting data from back then?), and still trying to ‘stop’ a salinity problem which had already reversed, and still hadn’t addressed issues with how water was prioritized… but they introduced their ‘plan’ and now farmers are getting squeezed ever tighter with reduced water allocations, all to achieve ‘environmental benefits’ which are impossible to measure and of dubious value, especially given they’re trying to ‘restore’ the basin to a state it was never in.

The fact is that the Murray Darling Basin has been greatly helped by human intervention. For example, the Murray river used to run completely dry from time to time:

But it no longer does, thanks to human intervention and the dams and weirs we’ve built to manage the water flow and spread it out through the dry seasons.

Sure, there’s been some downsides and humans haven’t got everything right. For example the barrages put on the Lower Lakes, and the diversion of flows from the Koorong, were both really bad ideas and have both been incredibly destructive to that region, but neither of those problems are being addressed by the Murray Darling Basin Authority, instead they’re throwing their efforts in to the upstream environment, and taking water from farmers to ‘save’ a river that’s in better health it would be if humans weren’t here.

Well now we know that the MDBA aren’t going to review the impact of their new water restrictions on farmers for TEN YEARS. Despite the fact that they’ve acknowledged they took too much water from farmers in the northern part of the basin, they’re not even going to LOOK at the impact to farmers in the lower part of the basin for 10 years!

The Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) will wait 10 years before reviewing the basin plan’s impact on southern communities.

This is despite the findings of a review into the basin’s northern communities, which found they had lost too much water.

The northern review found the basin plan had a detrimental impact on rural communities in northern NSW and southern Queensland. It found that giving back 70 gigalitres of water to irrigators could achieve the same environmental benefit.

But MDBA chief executive Phillip Glyde said there would not be a similar study in the south, until 2022, the 10-year anniversary of the plan’s implementation.

This kind of bureaucratic arrogance is what really gets me going. First they force a half-baked plan based on fraudulent or non-existent ‘science’ (watch the video above if you haven’t already to see what I’m talking about) down the throats of farmers who’re doing it tough enough most of the time, and then they acknowledge they may not have got it right, but won’t do a review for 10 years… by which time it will be far too late for most of what’s left of our farming families.

It’s been 5 years since this half-baked plan was implemented, plenty long enough to be able to do a review of its impacts. It’s time to call time on the MDBA, and protect what’s left of our food bowl.

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