SUNRAYSIA growers are confident their concerns over the health of the Murray River will be heard when they converge on Federal Parliament next week.
Growers from the northern Victorian irrigation communities will join other irrigators from throughout the Murray-Darling Basin in a convoy to the nation’s capital on Monday and Tuesday in a combined effort to highlight the failure of the Murray Darling Basin Plan.
They will hold a vigil on the steps of Parliament House and call for the plan to be scrapped before it causes too much damage.
Sunraysia Citrus Growers’ chairman Kevin Cock on Friday said irrigators feared the Murray River would suffer the same fate as the dry Darling River in New South Wales unless there is change.
“We’ve already had people saying, ‘gee, look at the river, that is horrendous’,” Mr Cock said.
“The Chaffeys would be turning over in their graves if they saw what was going on in this community,” he said.
“They had the water situation sorted out and that’s what the town grew on and now it’s being dismantled.
“You look at the water now and it’s turned green in the past two days.
“I fish in it, I swim in it, I boat in it, I live in it … I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve watched it go backwards under whatever plan they’ve got.”
Mr Cock said that while a royal commission into the water crisis might fix the problems, farmers could not wait that long.
“The Murray Darling Basin ‘dream team’ will shut the river down and we’re going to end up with blue green algae which will affect our tourism,” he said.
“Wentworth was one of the original sites for Canberra, so they made a mistake right at the start, they should have put it there and then they would be concerned about the rivers.
“They would be sitting on top of the mess that they’ve made and they’d make a change.”
Mr Cock said the convoy to Canberra had received support “across the board” from growers, processors, packers and others industry-wide.
“It’s been overwhelming,” he said.
“Company CEOs tell me they are really worried about their businesses when there isn’t product throughput and the price of produce is rising because costs are also rising and that then hits everyone.
“There’s a massive amount of buses and people going to Canberra and I’m still getting people from outside the community saying ‘can we come?’.”
Mr Cock said politicians would be invited at attend a breakfast Monday morning to hear the concerns of those in the convoy.
“If they don’t come out there then we know they’re not interested,” he said.
