Going Against the Flow

Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party may be in mothballs, but the rural discontent that helped fuel it is alive and growing.

Nothing illustrates this more than the so-called "Living Murray Initiative".  The Murray Darling Basin Commission (MBDC), which runs this campaign, goes through the motions of consulting with the river communities and does so in a carefully orchestrated manner.

In the past, the MBDC was close to the rural communities which draw their livelihoods from the river.  But in recent years it has begun pandering to the green lobby.  This lobby is essentially urban and has little real understanding of the state of the river.

When the green lobby began claiming that the river was becoming "brinier and brinier" the MBDC did not set the record straight.  When CSIRO's Lands and Water Division jumped on the green bandwagon claiming that "salt levels are rising in almost all of the basin's rivers and now exceed WHO guidelines for drinking water in many areas", MBDC again did not publicly disagree.

The MBDC and the river communities, however, knew these claims to be false.  The evidence is clear:  salt levels have been falling at key sites for the past 20 years.  This should not be surprising given that hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on programmes designed expressly to reduce salt flows into the rivers.  Moreover, salinity is the one aspect of water quality for which there are good data and the data clearly show declining salinity levels at key monitoring stations.  Indeed, at Morgan, which is just upstream from where Adelaide takes its drinking water, salinity levels have declined by 50 per cent over the last 20 years.

It took protests from river communities and reports from independent scientists, before MBDC publicly came clean about salinity.  In the meantime, rising salinity had become an urban myth and provided the foundation for a campaign to take even more water from irrigators.

In the report released this week, Dr Jennifer Marohasy examined the evidence behind the other claims of the declining health of the Murray River, including poor water quality, dying red gums and threats to continued survival of the Murray cod and other native fish populations.  She found in each case that the evidence was at odds with the claims of the green lobby.  Indeed, with the possible exception of native fish populations, she found a healthy river and plenty of examples of communities working hard and successfully to further improve the River's health.

While Dr Marohasy's research was greeted with relief in the communities along the river, it was treated as heresy by the MBDC and the green lobby.

The Ministerial Council of the MBDC acting on these myths has adopted a programme to remove an additional 500 million litres of water per year from irrigators for environmental flows.  While this target falls short of the demands of the green lobby, the Council made it clear that this was just the "first step".  While the Council promised to respect property rights and buy the water in the market place, it did not rule out compulsory acquisition.

Is it any wonder the people on the land feel ignored and powerless?

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