THE COURT RULES NOBODY OWED IRRIGATORS A DUTY OF CARE

28,000 irrigators from the central Murray and the Goulburn Murray have just lost their $1.5 billion class action against the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and been ordered to pay its legal costs on top.

The NSW Supreme Court ruled the Authority owes no duty of care to avoid economic loss falling on one group of people over another. So the body that flooded the Barmah and left farmers unable to fill their contracts won on the basis that our losses were never its responsibility, without ever having to prove it did no harm. They won by having no responsibility not to do harm to us and I think that is ridiculous. The Authority even admitted in court that its overbank transfers waste between 36 and 41 per cent of the water they move.

I have seen up close how little our communities count with these people. When I asked the MDBA's Chief Executive why our communities were left out of the Basin Plan Review, he told me "it was a miss on my part". A judgment that says nobody owed us care and a boss who forgot we exist are describing the same organisation. How can they care so little about the people they are destroying?

No court can hold them responsible and no review remembers we exist, so the only place left where the truth can be forced out under oath is a Federal Royal Commission into water. Parliament backed my call unanimously in February and nothing has happened since.