Jennifer Marohasy

THE Victorian Premier, John Brumby, has waited until New Year’s Eve to announce the end of timber harvesting and grazing in 83,000 hectares of red gum forest in the Central Murray Valley in north western Victoria, Australia.
The creation of new national parks was a 2006 election promise to secure inner-city votes but is based on a [...]

ACCORDING to Australian aboriginal mythology Bunyips are monsters that live in rivers.  According to Ron Pike, an Australian who has spent his life working with water from the Murrumbidgee River, much of what is being claimed about Australian rivers is as unreasonable as a belief in Bunyips: 
“The lack of flow volumes in the rivers of the [...]

DR Dennis Jensen BAppSc (RMIT), MSc (Melb), PhD (Monash) is the only member of the Australian Parliament with any training in science a PhD in a science discipline. 
[As correctly pointed out in the comments following this posting, my brother Jim Turnour, also a member of the Federal Parliament, has a Batchelor of Agricultural Science.  Other [...]

IN Aboriginal mythology the Bunyip was also known as Dongus, Kianpratty, Bunyup and Tumbata, depending on the tribal area. However regardless of name he was always evil and emerged from the water in search of prey as he sought to use his supernatural powers to punish evil doers.
While it is easy for modern man to [...]

REMEMBER the stories about how the Murray Darling Basin, the food bowl of Australia, was going to be lost to salt?  Headline after media headline told of imminent ruin from rising water tables bring salt.  
The Riverina, a once rich farming area in south western New South Wales, was considered most affected by this “scourge of [...]

THERE has been much written about Australia’s national character emerging from a bush ethos: the idea that a specifically Australian outlook emerged first amongst workers in the Australian outback.  Banjo Paterson, perhaps more than any other writer, created and defined this cultural heritage.  His story about the shearer and his sheep (the jumbuck) remains our most [...]

Kelvin Thomson is the federal member for Wills, representing inner-city northern Melbourne.   He was the Shadow Attorney-General in early 2007 when it was discovered that he had provided a notorious Melbourne gangster, Tony Mokbel, with a personal reference describing him as a “responsible, caring husband and father”.   Mr Thomson subsequently resigned from the front bench, but he still [...]

 
IS the ongoing drought in the Murray-Darling Basin affected by climate change? The simple answer is that there is no evidence that CO2 has had any significant role. Like it or not, that is the science.
 
In fact, the drought was caused by an entirely natural phenomenon: the 2002 El Nino event. This led to particularly [...]

The Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is in Adelaide today for a community cabinet meeting. Various media reports suggest there will be pressure on the government to “save” the lower lakes with a special water allocation from upstream.
As part of the meeting the federal cabinet will be briefed by the Murray Darling Basin Commission on [...]

The Australian government is currently in the process of finalising the purchase of just 35 gigalitres (billion litres) of water from the public tender process announced on 26 February 2008 whereby $50 million was allocated in the 2007-08 budget to buy back water in the Murray Darling Basin.
This is a very small amount of [...]