Here’s two things we know about the threats facing our heritage-listed Goulburn River.
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The first is that the Federal Government is now the largest owner of water in Eildon, our major water storage — a storage originally designed to support irrigated food production.
Over the past 15 years — taking advantage of the pain inflicted on farmers by the millennium drought — the government acquired more than a third of that water, ostensibly to improve the health of the basin environment under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.
The thing is, there is no way the government can get all that water out of Eildon without destroying the Goulburn River, albeit it has been trying to do just that.
And now it wants to buy even more from our irrigators.
The second thing we know is that the damage already inflicted on our river by the government and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority — through a mixture of incompetence and carelessness — is past reversing: all the low benches along the river, reflecting the seasonal flows of past centuries, have been eroded by sustained artificial flows over the past 15 years that never gave the river time to recover.
They have treated our river like a channel, and the low benches covered in sedges and grasses — filtering run-off and providing nutrients for the creatures of the river — have collapsed into the river bed, silting it up and raising the level.
We saw the so-called Environmental Water Holder, appointed by the MDBA to deliver this environmental water from Eildon, accentuating the damage by dropping water levels too quickly, causing massive bank collapses because the saturated river banks had no time to dry out.
Instead of seeking advice from people who knew the river, the EWH acted “without fear and without research”, as Dorothy Parker once observed. He had his training wheels on for the best part of a decade.
The silting up of the river bed has depleted food resources for the bottom-dwelling crustaceans and bugs and the fish that feed on them. The MDBA pours resources into monitoring fish populations and wonders why the yellowbelly aren’t breeding — we can tell them.
Federal Labor is hell-bent on arriving at “a number” — originally aiming to recover an extra 2750 billion litres (2750 gigalitres) for the environment, a number since extended through political shenanigans to 3200GL. It doggedly pursues this number, irrespective of the improvements to basin health in the past 15 years.
It avoids measuring the health of the river environs convincingly, or telling us what success looks like. The government and the MDBA are not really interested in environmental health at all, or they would use the environmental water available to improve the health of the wider environment, such as the 30,000 wetlands across the basin.
The health of our heritage river — still far healthier than the degraded lower Murray — is of no interest whatsoever. Nor is the viability of the Goulburn-Murray Irrigation District system, which faces a tipping point with our reduced irrigation water and seasonal restrictions in the face of climate change, such as this year’s 60 per cent allocation.
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