You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work out if you take away the major economic driver of our communities and replace it with absolutely nothing, there will be significant negative impacts.
Irrigation underpins the success of our communities.
Every small business owner in our rural towns, from the hairdresser through to the manufacturer, will tell you when there is water around there is money flowing into local businesses.
There are teachers and children in our schools and people are out and about on our sporting field.
Our towns are alive and they are thriving.
Buybacks decimate communities and every single megalitre that leaves the productive pool increases the cost of water delivery for those who choose to remain.
A Victorian Government paper produced in 2022 clearly states water recovered under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan (buybacks) in northern Victoria has had socio-economic impacts and resulted in a 50 per cent reduction in irrigation and a price increase of $72/Ml of water.
I wouldn’t describe predicted huge job losses from buybacks as ‘rubbish’, as Professor Wheeler so eloquently put it, but rather as reality (Country News, December 5).
We all know where the rubbish comments are really coming from and it isn’t from the people who actually live and work in our irrigated communities.
If buybacks go ahead and Federal Water Minister Tanya Plibersek takes over 700 Gl of water from the productive pool, at the very minimum, it is goodbye to 20 per cent of the nation’s fresh milk and our Australian rice industry, both of whom are significant employers of people across rural Australia.
Perhaps Professor Wheeler needs a reality check and a trip away from the ivory tower she so clearly has herself encased in.
She states water recovery has led to positive increased impacts but fails to list any, probably because the negatives far out way any of the positives.
Farmers have adapted and changed farming practices and implemented water efficiencies and they couldn’t be any better at what they do.
She should take a trip out to Wakool or Cohuna — towns that have been smashed by buybacks. Empty shops, dried-off farms and closed schools certainly don’t lie.
Chris Brooks,
Southern Riverina Irrigators chair
25°C