A new book exposes the Basin Plan
For nearly twenty years we have been told one story about the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, that pulling water off our farms is saving the environment. A new book has finally put the facts on the table, and they tell a very different story.
Caught in the Current, by Patrick Byrne, lays out 125 years of basin history and footnotes every claim so the people who got us into this mess cannot just wave it away. It was started by people who actually ran our water system, the late Neil Eagle AM and former NSW Water Director-General Peter Millington, men who knew the difference between managing a river and punishing the communities who live along it.
The book shows how the 2007 Water Act swapped a cooperative basin commission that worked for a top-down authority that answers to almost no one, and how the balance between water for food and water for the environment got flipped from roughly half and half to 71 per cent environmental and just 29 per cent productive. In six years, irrigated food production across the basin has fallen 29 per cent, three and a half times faster than the rest of the country, and we are now staring down the barrel of becoming a net food importer within five to eleven years.
At the launch in Barham, dairy farmer Sophie Baldwin told the room she bought her first farm back in 2002 for two million dollars, water and all, and today the water on its own would set you back four point four million, which is exactly how you price the next generation of farmers out of the bush.
This is why a book like this matters. The Basin Plan is under review right now, and for once our communities have a properly researched, evidence-based reference to hold up against the spin, instead of being handed another round of inquiries designed to keep us quiet. Grab yourself a copy, it is in local newsagencies now, and read what they would rather you never saw laid out in black and white.
And if you want the truth tested where it counts, under oath, back the call for a Federal Royal Commission into water.
