Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

More Money for the Murray (Updated)

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The budget for the Australian Government for the next financial year was announced tonight by our Treasurer Peter Costello.

He didn’t mention global warming, or the Great Barrier Reef, or saving Tasmanian forests.

There was only one major environmental initiative announced, “saving the Murray River”.

Under “border protection”, there was also a special allocation announced for “securing borders against illegal foreign fishing”.

I’m surprised.

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Update at 10.30am, 10th May

Online Opinion has just published the following opinion piece by me about the decision to make the Murray River the focus of environmental spending: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4446 .

Why not choose ethanol or wild dogs?

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Comments

  1. cinders says

    Saving Tassie’s forest does get a little mention in the Budget, but it is really only the confirmation of expenditure announced in May last year in the Tasmanian Community Forest Agreement. In Securing Australian Agriculture under Forestry it states:
    Under the Agreement, the Australian and Tasmanian governments are committing over $250 million to revitalise the State’s timber industry and preserve old-growth forests.
    The mix of conservation and jobs-preserving measures in the Agreement includes commitments to provide additional protection to well over 170,000 hectares of forest on public and private land in Tasmania, reduce clearfelling on public land, and extend the area of protected old growth forest to more than one million hectares.
    The Agreement also undertakes to invest more than $200 million to maintain the Tasmanian industry’s timber supply levels, and to assist it to adjust to a future increase in the number of logs sourced from regrowth forest and plantations.

  3. Hasbeen says

    An item in the paper today, The Qld Gov is after Fed cash to buy a couple of cotton farms to give the water to the Murray.
    In the cotton area, there are GROWING rural towns, because of the work generated. New houses are being built & businesses established. Only those of us who have lived in declining towns can realy understand the joy of seeing an old town grow again.
    Houses are no longer dragged out of town on
    low-loader trucks, & the elderly can sell the house they could not give away a couple of years ago.
    But for a few lousy ratbag greenie votes our Qld government will destroy this. They will leave young families in a town which is dying again, with mortgages on homes they can not sell, & the work drying up, again.
    There’ll be bankruptcies, & probably a few suicides, no compensation for the townies, but who cares, the suburban greens will be able to feel quite smug.
    Meanwhile, it did not take long for my prediction that a rapacious Brisbane would be after Marybouough water, with a dam on the Mary already announced. As sydney has sucked Goulburn dry, so Brisbane will suck all of south east Qld dry, before they start to take responsibility for catching their own water.
    I have had no trouble supplying my family with the water off our roof for the last 21 years, drought or wet, regardless. Why can’t these bloody cities do the same?
    It is ironic though, that I’d be typing this under water if it had not been for another Labor poly, [Goss]. I’d be in the middle of the Wolffdene Dam, if he had not canned it, to buy a few greenie votes.
    Hasbeen