$16 MILLION REASONS TO MISLEAD
The whole thing is a con, and Robert Purves is the man getting rich off it. Purves is the founder and the money behind the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, and in a single year he pocketed $835,000 from his stake in a water trading firm called Duxton Water. That same firm has sold $143 million worth of water entitlements straight to the federal government since February last year. He owns 11.2 million shares in it, worth more than $16 million, and every single buyback the government signs off makes that fortune bigger.
So let us be honest about who the Wentworth Group really are, because the name is the first thing designed to mislead you. They are not a neutral panel of independent scientists. They are a lobby group wearing lab coats, set up and bankrolled by a man with a fortune riding on the very policy they push. They have spent years dressing up advocacy as science and selling it to Canberra as gospel, and the whole time the bloke funding them has been buying up shares in the water market their reports help inflate. That is not science. That is a sales pitch with a charity number stapled to the front.
Look at how the money moves and tell me it is anything other than a racket. Purves own foundation tipped $200,000 into the Wentworth Group. His own company keeps the books for them. It is his money, going to his charity, funding the campaign, that lifts the value of his shares, so the circle starts with Purves and ends with Purves, and every loop of it pays straight back into his account while our towns go backwards. The science is bought, the conclusion is bought, and the man who paid for it collects the dividend. If that is independent science then I am the Queen of England.
This is what should make your blood boil, because the fake science coming out of this outfit has the power to gut rural Australia and put the food security of our entire nation at risk. Every megalitre they talk the government into buying back is a job gone, a family off their block, a class lost at the local school, an IGA cutting its hours. Purves walks away with the dividend while we are left with the empty silos and the For Sale signs out the front. A so-called scientific group manufacturing dressed up research so its founder can profit off the hollowing out of his own country is a national disgrace, and it should be treated like one.
So I will say it plainly. The Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists must be defunded immediately. Not reviewed, not gently asked to declare their interests, defunded and shut out of the room for good. You cannot let a for profit front with millions riding on the result write the science that decides the fate of our rivers and our farms. The science that governs our water has to be built on real independence, done by people who do not make a single cent either way, because the moment money is on the table the truth walks straight out the door. Everything this group has produced should now be torn up and done again by people with nothing to gain.
And it cannot stop there. We need a real independent inquiry with the power to put Robert Purves and every one of these players under oath and follow every last dollar, not another stitched up report written by the same crowd who profit from the answer.
This is where you come in, because this only changes if enough of us refuse to let it slide. They are counting on us being too scattered and too tired to make a noise, so let us prove them wrong. If you are sick of being misled and sick of being robbed in broad daylight, hit share and send this to every person you know, because the farmer on the land and the family doing their grocery shop are on the exact same side of this fight. The bloke in the bush grows the food and you eat it, and the same handful of city investors are cashing in on a river that belongs to all of us. Comment below so they can see how many of us are awake to it. Like it, share it, tag a mate, and put it in front of your local member.
One post does not scare them, but a hundred thousand of us speaking with one voice turns this from a story they can bury into the election issue they cannot. This is our water, our food, and our country towns, and together we are going to make Canberra answer for it.
Stand up for our water: https://standupforwater.lovable.app/
