DAVID Wroe from The Sydney Morning Herald has written a well balanced article on the waste of money in buying Toorale (pronounced Too-rally) Station at Bourke: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/station-buyout-a-waste-of-money-20111223-1p8ln.html.
I attempted to leverage this with a letter to the Editor which failed to make the final cut:
Congratulations to the SMH (Station buyout a waste of money- 23rd December) for “outing” the Commonwealth and former NSW State Government for the total waste of $23.75m in purchasing Toorale Station. Not only was this a waste of taxpayer’s funds for negligible environmental benefit, it also took out of production the hard hit Bourke community’s most productive enterprise. How downstream grazier Justin Mc Clure can argue that a 0.01% increase in flow can generate downstream environmental benefits is a real mystery.
The episode has wider ramifications in terms of the Draft Murray Darling Basin Plan. The Commonwealth Water Act 2007 and the approach of the Murray Darling Basin Authority is deeply flawed and the Toorale outcomes represent a good example of the likely consequences-negligible environmental benefit, but significant negative economic consequences. When flows are low, license conditions prevent extractions and diversions, when flows are significant the impacts of extractions and diversions are minimal. Dorothea Mackellar was absolutely right in describing inland Australia as a land of “droughts and flooding rains”, she could have added and “not much in the middle.
In using absolute numbers as the MDBA has done, to prescribe acceptable extractions/diversions limits without gearing these to actual flows (availability) is really nonsense. To argue that these numbers are “averages” doesn’t help, given the enormous spreads around the averages. Our current water bureaucrats could do worse than studying how the existing control system operates. It works rather well.
J.D.O.(David) Boyd
St Ives NSW 2075
(Former Chairman and CEO of Clyde Agriculture, the previous owner of Toorale Station)
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And sign the petition here please http://listentous.org.au/
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
It’s to be hoped that when the Fed govt is in the hands of smarter people it will return Toorale to the private sector.
This won’t be without considerable cost to both the taxpayer and the locals but it should be done.
We can only hope the dumb Feds don’t wreck it in the meantime and run up the bill even further.
Imagine what that place could be producing now if they had kept their meddlesome fingers off it?
I just sent a Listentous Ecard to the pollies re the barrages and got about 50 automatic replies.
If anyone’s thinking of doing likewise it might be smart to wait till they come back from hols.
I just sent a Listentous Ecard to the pollies re the barrages and got about 50 automatic replies.
If anyone’s thinking of doing likewise it might be smart to wait till they come back from hols. 1
Finally, someone in the City has noticed.
This is a huge can of worms. Any who doubt that should look ,for themselves, at the ‘mouth ‘ of the Warrego, where the overflow from the river historically dribbles into the Darling.
On a scale of 1- 10 ,for western riverbed size it is about minus 20.
All the main Warrego infrastructure does is control the floodwater which always stayed on Toorale – when it gets there.
If the con artists who bought it were serious , they would have bought JanBeth off Clyde -Now there IS a cotton farm. They didn’t
This is O/T I know but could be very important in reference to the global nature of Med WP when compared to Mod warming.
This study involving scientists from many countries finds that S America had a warmer MedWP than our warming today and it lasted for at least 500 years.
http://nipccreport.org/articles/2011/dec/14dec2011a4.html
Off thread but not far off.
I was given a copy of Charles Massy’s “Breaking the sheep’s back”. If he’s right then there are some more scalps owing from the wool reserve price scheme.
And it should be mandatory reading for anyone contemplating a crusade on government money such as this IMO.
I found this comment from the linked SMH article interesting:
‘An ”infrastructure decommissioning plan” drawn up by engineering consultants Aurecon in 2009 found there were environmental obstacles to scrapping the dams and channels because a new ecology has grown in the 150 years since the station was established.’
This situation is repeated all over Australia.
We have changed the environment (which had already gone through major remodelling courtesy of the original settlers) and, far from the damage and danger scenario dreamed up by hysterical nativists, the environment adapts itself to the new conditions.
Irrigated farms become surrogate wetlands but with different dependencies.
Red gum trees, held in check by thousands of years of fiery landscape maintenance, rapidly grow into vast forests which then become the target of shrill campaigns to save the trees that never were part of the original landscape.
And along the way hundreds of millions of dollars are wasted, rural shires and their ratepayers are seriously impacted and industries are damaged or lost, all because a noisy bunch of self appointed guardians (and politicians who foolishly put votes before common sense), can’t see the simple truth that nature is never a fragile thing but is in fact as tough as old boots.
Strangely relevant to the’ Rambunctious Garden’ thread. The summer before the station changed hands, it had rained a bit, but just before the first major flooding in the Warrego, a yabby net dropped in the “infrastructure” produced a load of baby catfish. Plus heaps of the little Warrego crabs (with some yabbies ). How did they know to breed like that?
Perhaps they thought that Mr Brown and friends had the $78 million to destroy their home ?
‘Home’ is a huge billabong , enhanced to harvest floodsand save for the dry. Bad, naughty infrastructure
Totally support David and Ian.
It is the man made water structures that have for over 100 years provided fresh water aquatic species with the mostly permanent habitat in which to procreate and prosper.
Prior to modern mans determination to improve the availability of water in the MDB, the so-called wetlands spent a large part of the time bone dry.
Most aquatic species died, but promptly reappeared in abundance when conditions improved after flooding.
It is the irregular flood events that fill the wetlands, most of which are less than 4 metres deep and when the flooding stops it takes less than 3 years for this habitat to again be dry and remain so until the next flood, which can be a decade or more away.
The Federal Water Act although drawn up and passed by both sides of Politics is an exercise in how Politicians get it totally wrong when they enter an area with no practical experience in response to media hype.
All the Water Act and its bastard child the MDBA has achieved is:
Totally waste several Billion dollars.
Decrease Australias productive capacity.
Decrease Australias net worth.
Decrease the number of productive jobs in rural communities,
Increase the number of taxpayer jobs in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne.
Decrease the area of permanent wetland.
Increase both the base and delivery cost of water.
Put in place another costly and totally unneeded Canberra bureaucracy.
All for NO advantage for the so-called environment.
Politicians got it wrong.
But they will only fix it when we the people demand that they do so.
Please keep up the pressure because there is a better way that will benefit us all and the environment.
The Mott plan for the Coorong is practical, affordable and should be undertaken ASAP with money set aside for water buy-backs.
The return of the lower lakes to a tidal estuary is also valid.
But as a first priority we must build further dams to conserve more water in times of excess.
That way everyone is a winner and the future growth of Australia is assured.
Happy New Year to Everyone.
Pikey.