200 TONNES OF DEAD FISH AND 13 YEARS OF BUYBACKS

Two winters ago, 200 tonnes of dead fish rotted along 20 kilometres of the Coorong, the wetland every water buyback since 2008 has supposedly been saving.

The mullet went first, then the mulloway, the black bream and the flounder. A commercial fisherman who has worked that lagoon for more than 40 years called it the biggest kill he had ever seen. The ecologists on the ground found the fish were killed by spiking salinity and toxic black ooze stirred up off the bottom, which is a management failure at the end of the system. No gigalitre taken off a rice farmer in the Riverina fixes the bottom of a lagoon that the people running it will not manage properly, and nearly $80 million had already been handed out to study the Coorong in the five years before that kill. The fish died anyway.

Buybacks started in 2008 and the Basin Plan became law 13 years ago. In that time Canberra has taken more than a thousand billion litres of water off food growers and hollowed out irrigation towns to do it, yet the lower Murray is still in critical condition and the wetland at the very end of the system produced its worst fish kill in four decades.

Murray Watt is deep into another buyback round right now, $430 million for 86 billion litres in June and the door open to more in the north, and I would bet my farm that 200 tonnes of rotting fish will not slow him down one bit. That kill should have been the moment somebody in Canberra asked whether the medicine is working, because any farmer will tell you that when a fix has not worked after 13 years, you question the fix before you order more of it.

Australia needs a Federal Royal Commission into water so the whole rotten system finally gets examined under oath. Back it here: https://helendalton.com.au