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28-November-2011
Dear Friends,
The Murray-Darling basin is our nation's food basket, it produces over 90 per cent of our oranges, almost 70 per cent of our tomatoes and half of all our fruit. If you eat and you live in Australia, you are part of the Murray-Darling Basin, whether you are the irrigator who makes a living out of it, the homeowner whose asset is underwritten by it or the family whose costs of groceries is kept down because of it. If the Green-Independent-Labor party pull the economic rug out from under this vital national asset we are all going to pay. Labor’s draft basin plan fails to provide economic and social security to the 2.1 million Australians who live in the Murray-Darling Basin, and the more than 1 million that rely on it for their water supplies. The draft plan provides people with less information, less transparency and less certainty. This plan has all the hallmarks of another fiasco for this Labor government, a Labor party that puts image and deals in front of fact and diligence. This plan does not provide security for local communities. Locals will not know how much water will be taken from their community for another 8 years, until 2019. Instead we have the mysterious x-factor. It's like saying your house is going to cost $100,000 + "x", but you won't have a clue how much your house will cost until they decide on what the x-factor is. These x-factors expose communities to a crushing level of uncertainty. The government has failed to demonstrate what the environmental benefits will be. The draft plan does not deliver a detailed environmental watering plan, showing where environmental water will be used. How can you decide how much water is needed if you do not know what you are going to use it for? The government has failed to consider the economic and social impacts of the plan. When we replace Australian food with imported food we expose ourselves to currency fluctuations and food inflation. Once again, the government seems to have ignored that the Murray-Darling basin delivers Australians cheap food, thousands of jobs and ongoing financial security for families who live on the land. This draft plan raises more questions than answers. That’s why over the next 4 months I, and my Nationals colleagues, will be travelling around the Basin to hear what you have to say about this plan. We need to get this right because if we botch this, it goes home to every shopping trolley in our nation.
Kind regards, Senator Barnaby Joyce Leader of The Nationals in the Senate Would you like to receive our regular Enewsletters? Subscribe here.