water woes

How long have we been debating the Murray Darling area and its water troubles? The area and its issues are not simply symbolic of the problems of the entire country they truly reflect well most of the issues.

I would guess that only overseas readers are unaware of the issues here and that they have gone on for decades. The calls from environmental interests in this issue have gone from prediction of problems, identification of problems, identification of impending crisis to finally crisis.

Its only the once in 30 or so years massive La Niña swing which has saved the day (but only for this or next year).

Today I see that people are starting to identify that the Government being involvement is going to hinder solution to this problem.

Folks even printed out on the lightest weight paper, there is a ton of material on this issue and almost all of it is in agreement:

• water is being over used
• the environment is being massively degraded
• there are threats from sulfate soils being exposed to air
• a few high water crop growers are consuming the majority of the water
• the highest use water users are unwilling to pay more for their water

Center to this issue is the fundamental issue that the various State Government Water and Irrigation acts are to blame as well as the Tokenistic historically Colonial governments.

I fully appreciate the local people being up in arms about the "solution" to the issues, but as they say:

• there has been little or no consultation with the community
• the responce is simply that of an unfeeling bureaucratic machine.
  

Like the article mentions:

The result will be a monolith incapable of timely and opportunistic response to changing localised weather conditions.

It will be staffed by federal bureaucrats trying to co-ordinate with state officials with the operational responsibilities, all reporting to politicians eager to secure short-term political mileage that does not necessarily correspond to long-term environmental improvement.

The environmental bang for the taxpayer buck is likely to be significantly muffled by the bureaucratic padding provided by the CEWH.

In reality this problem can only be solved by us ... we need to start to understand the problem at a public level and then tell our politicians what to do.

If we don't do this, then they will simply rule us. But unlike a benevolent Dictator or Monarch this is not a person, but a machine.

Currently that machine is mainly being used by the inept and incompetent to make money for themselves. Don't think so? Well just look at the level of "debate" happening in any area of politics (especially Federal) right now.