Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Budget allocated hardly any new money for River Murray

The above is a headline from the Adelaide Advertiser and is available to read in the Shared Items alongside this blog. I remain absolutely aghast and it is time that the population of Australia started to deliver the message more aggressively.

Channels like the one that appear in the heading of this blog are literally covering the Murray Darling Basin in Queensland, Victoria, and New South Wales. South Australia removed their Channels some 30 years ago. The saving in lost water from evaporation and seepage would indeed go a long way to reinstating environmental flow, as a minimum, to the River Systems. Infrastructure programs to put these channels into pipes, incentive programmes to encourage better farm practice and incentive programs to remove agriculture and horticulture that require flood irrigation techniques would go even further to correcting the problem.

The employment opportunities in creating these infrastructure programmes are enormous and the benefit to Australia's GDP even greater.

The dozen's of projects that have been presented to the Murray Darling Basin Authority, over decades, to further consider environmentally friendly Flood Mitigation Programmes from Northern Rivers that would again deliver more than enough water to the basin have fallen on deaf ears for too long.

We must bring this matter to the urgent attention of the Prime Minister, Senator Penny Wong and Peter Garrett MHR and it is time that they actually did something about fixing this crisis

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