MDBA REPORT FORGETS FARMERS EXIST

The man in charge of the Murray-Darling Basin stood up at a Rural Press Club lunch in Sydney this week and admitted he forgot to put farming in his plan for the rivers that grow our food.

Andrew McConville, CEO of the MDBA, calls it "the missing chapter". I was in the room when he said leaving agriculture out of the Basin Plan Review "was a miss on our part" and that he was "very happy to own that". So I asked him about it to his face. I have been in this water fight since 2007 and stood at every rally and protest along the way, and when his report reads like this is the first time anyone has told them what buybacks are doing to our communities, that simply is not true, because our people have spelled it out over and over and nothing has changed.

Nearly 2,500 submissions poured into his review saying exactly that. Buried on page 77 is the admission that the current buyback program was "not within the scope of this review" anyway. They asked the question, wrote down the answers and made sure none of it could change a thing.

This Basin grows 40 per cent of Australia's farm production. WaterNSW has just hit some valleys with water bill rises of up to 46 per cent over the next four years while Minister Murray Watt's department assesses a fresh round of buyback offers, chasing 400 gigalitres by Christmas. By the time they finish stripping the water off our farms there will be nothing left to salvage.

Forgetting the people who feed this nation is not the kind of slip you wave away with a shrug over lunch in Sydney. An admission three years too late does not put water back on a paddock or a family back on the land, so I will keep pushing for a Federal Royal Commission into water, where someone is finally forced under oath to answer for this scam.

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