Last Saturday, Sydney-based organisation GetUp! launched a petition to ‘Save the Murray Darling’ explaining the Basin was on the verge of ecological collapse because of over-extraction from heavy irrigators. The petition already has nearly 40,000 signatures. Getup! is intending to present the petition to Environment and Water Minister, Tony Burke.
This Saturday/today, there is a colour, quarter-page advertisement in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald (page 13) explaining that taking more water from food producers now, won’t save the Lower Lakes next drought. 
The advert also provides the url for the website www.mythandthemurray.org .
I suggest you rip the page out of the newspaper and post it to Tony Burke.
Tony Burke MP
Ministerial Office
PO Box 6022
Parliament House
Canberra, ACT 2600
You could also include a copy of this blog post: http://www.mythandthemurray.org/getup-and-visit-the-murray-darling/
If you want to fax the advert and blog post, Mr Burke’s number is (02) 6273 6101.
It is important that you can be bothered.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Save the Murray and save tax payer’s dollars, they are bound to wake up eventually.
Pity we have to give money to those senile teenie-boppers at the Age and SMH. You can just hear the Fairfax readership grumbling over their macchiatos at Saturday brunch: “It’s just so utterly simplistic to talk about rain…”
I may be becoming a bit cynical in my later years, but has anyone had a look at Hindmarsh Island South Australia on Google Earth ?
It reveals considerable development, canal/marina development, all above the barrier.
How inconvenient, real estate wise, would it be to remove the barriers at Hindmarsh and Pelican Point (Lake Alexandrina) to allow the tides to resume the natural water flow conditions.
Possibly a considerable amount of the ‘waterfront’ properties would lose considerable value.
On the local news last night (WIN) it said that implementation of MDBA plan would be delayed until 2019. It seems the political will to implement it is fading. And honestly can those idiots say that the river system is on the verge of collapse. The damn ground has still not dried out from the floods.
JeffT,
does any member of the Wentworth Group own property there?
Just asking.
Dave from Wee Waa
It would be much better if some common sense and honesty prevailed.
That Water Act 2007 is based on false assumptions and requires the MDBA to confiscate water ‘for the environment’.
As Jennifer has repeatedly pointed out, this is a nonsense for many reasons, but particularly in terms of ‘end of system flows’ aka the Murray Mouth.
The ‘environment’ there is far from ‘natural’.
JeffT has also pointed out some other highly ‘unnatural’ features in that part of the MDB environment.
The whole plan is devised by using ‘long term averages’ which is also a nonsense because the MDB is so highly variable.
This oft repeated statement ‘on the verge of collapse’ is also turning into an absurdity as dianeh has just highlighted.
Most of our problems (not all) were caused by the drought.
Most of the ‘best available science’ (not all) has also been deiscredited by our own highly variable climate. ie… the dorught broke!
Common sense would dictate that we need to learn the lessons that the drought has taught us if we want to survive the next inevitable drought.
That lesson is NOT, NOT, NOT ,NOT to just trash water out to sea.
I would have thought that the lesson is that we no longer have enough back up storage to supply all the demands we place on the MDB.
We also need to recognise that SA is the most vulnerable state because it is at the bottom of the system.
Some honesty about the problems there would go a long way to solving them!
Pretending that the lakes were always a fresh water system is not being honest. Pretending that the Coorong was always supplied by the Murray River is actually an outright lie!