By Sophie Baldwin
Southern Connected Basin Communities (SCBC) spent four days touring the Lower Darling region and I would love to say we all came home with a renewed faith in the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, Water Minister Melinda Pavey and NSWDPIE’s ability to implement the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. What we witnessed couldn’t have been any further from the truth.
If environmental degradation, economic destruction and communities in despair right along the Darling-Baaka and Murray Rivers were the goal, then management is spot on.
A key principle of the plan is a connected river system and a healthy and sustainable basin, and we stand by our claim the basin plan is ruining industry, community and the environment – from where we started at the Barmah Choke and some 600kms later at Wilcania, the story was the same.
Communities along the length and breadth are all suffering from the impacts of an out-of-control system and questionable and corrupt leadership.
Despite the rhetoric, floodplain harvesting in the north is draining the Murray-Darling system as their out-of-control greed for water has stopped the Darling-Baaka from flowing and contrary to the water ministers claim, it is also impacting the southern basin through reduced water reliability and environmental damage by sending too much water down the Murray river.
At Wilcania, the Baakinji are meant to feel grateful to have received a 24,000 megalitre pulse of water after unlicensed and unmetered flood plain harvesters in the north have taken 2,000,000 megalitres to produce cotton for corporate giants.
Their river is now dry more often than not and yet a flowing river is an integral part of their culture.
Just down the road at Menindee we drove past thousands and thousands of dead vines and lost industry on our way to Sunset Strip, a once thriving little community on the banks of Lake Menindee.
Angela Clark has lived there for near on 50 years and she said gone are the thousands of birds, the yabbies, the fish and the happiness of the community. She said she will forever remember the stench of dying kangaroos as the lake dried up and they dropped dead around her.
At Boundary Bend we took a trip down Pauls Road – a functioning road five-years ago. Today it is surrounded by corporate almonds and is impassable at one point as a rising water table has forced salinity to the surface and rendered the low-lying area desolate.
We saw the extremes of a river bursting its banks to deliver water to flow out to sea at South Australia to one that had stopped flowing because of greed in the north.
We organised our trip on the fly within a week and managed to pull together 10 people from different SCBC organisations.
We all heard the same repeated message they listen, but they don’t hear. Local knowledge is being ignored and communities are being dictated and bullied by the very people who were voted in to serve and protect them.Sophie Baldwin is part of the Southern Connected Basin Communities.
