The large crowd of over 150 concerned people from places as far afield as Griffith and Gundagai, along with hundreds online, were treated to a range of speakers who all spoke about the social, economic and environmental impacts of the basin plan on their business and community.
The Redemption: Saving the basin from the highway to hell, held on April 1 was organised by Central Murray Environmental Floodplain Group, The Bridge Newspaper, Upper Goulburn and Southern Riverina Irrigators.
CMEFG co-chair Geoff Kendell said the forum was a great success.
“The forum came about after we were asked to submit yet another submission,” Mr Kendell said.
“We are sick of departments including the MDBA not listening to us, so we decided to live-stream our submission to the world.
“The impacts of a $13 billion basin plan have been horrific on our irrigation dependent communities and staple food production for the future of the nation – not only did we outline the problems, we also outlined some solutions.”
Independent Member for Murray Helen Dalton spoke about the importance of a royal commission into water.
She has an online e-petition on her website and she urged the community to jump on board and support it.
“Without water, we have no Australia — politics and politicians continue to destroy our waterways, our rural communities and our way of life,” she said.
“Politicians are causing this problem — only an Independent royal commission will fix it.”
Professor Peter Gell spoke about water turbidity, and how many of Australia’s true wetlands have lost their vegetation because they receive too much water, and are no longer experiencing the required drying cycles which are just as important.
An industry economic panel including Justin Sutherland from Ricegrowers, Darcy Kirchhofer from Kagome and Jason Limbrick from Australian Consolidated Milk, spoke about the impacts water reform has on their businesses and what it would mean if more water was taken from the productive pool.
Additional buybacks will devastate productivity and processing across these three industries, which will flow onto job losses and impact on the food security of the nation into the future.
Third generation farmer Sharni Lundie from Deniliquin spoke about the challenges of farming and how she hoped there would be an opportunity for her children to continue their irrigated farming legacy in the future.
A Cohuna dairy farmer spoke about the environmental opportunity in irrigation and the importance of acknowledging this in the basin plan as a solution to achieving environmental outcomes in the future.
Darren DeBortoli spoke about the farce of South Australia and how no amount of upstream water will ever fix the problems of the Coorong, Lower Lakes and Murray Mouth.
The livestream will form part of a basin plan review submission due May 1.
