Geoff Adams is to be congratulated for calling out Professors Grafton and Williams for peddling incorrect information on the Murray-Darling Basin (Country News, October 23) which they like to pass off as scientific truths due to their academic standing. Geoff is one of the very few journalists who has a long and solid understanding of the Murray-Darling Basin and the Basin Plan.
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It seems to me that these eminent professors should do some fact-checking before condemning Australia’s water management. Without our weir and dam infrastructure which they condemn, the Murray River during the Millennium Drought would indeed have run dry and without this infrastructure our burgeoning population would have little water available for drinking and basic living conditions, let alone any home-grown food to eat.
For far too long scientists, academics and politicians alike have called for greater volumes of water to be returned to the river systems believing that this will solve the fish kills, sediment build-up, bank revegetation, when they should be emphasising water quality as their number one priority.
The professors state,“There is no more obvious sign of the ongoing destruction of Australia’s waterways than the fish kills along the Baaka.”
They obviously have not seen the Goulburn River where all we are seeing is increased bank collapse, loss of hundreds of mature red gums, proliferation of carp into every waterway, lagoon and waterhole. And we question why this has all occurred since the Basin Plan started.
It is the continuing accumulation and management of environmental water that is frightening and calls for an immediate scientific review of whether the initial aspirational assumptions of the legislated “enhanced environmental outcomes” in the Lower Murray and South Australia are in fact achievable. I would hope that the professors could apply their academic qualifications to such a factual science-based review.
