‘Treated With Distain’ – Murray Regional Strategy Group.

Among many criticisms of the Federal Government’s treatment of rural communities via its water removal programme, Murray Regional Strategy Group Chairman, Geoff Moar, states that the Government’s actions are ‘incomprehensible’.

Actually, the Government’s actions are entirely comprehensible.

To form government in Australia, whether it is a Labor or Liberal/National coalition Government, these Parties must win seats in South Australia in both the House of Representatives and in the Senate. There are ten Members of the House of Representatives and twelve Senators from South Australia.

South Australians are determined to save what they call ‘the environment’, and are consequently implacably opposed to water being removed in irrigation quantities from the Murray River and its tributaries upstream of South Australia.

Neither the Labor Party or the Liberal/National coalition will ever form government without the support of these South Australian Members of Parliament. They will not have the support of these members unless they remove water from the irrigation areas in NSW and Victoria in order to ‘save the environment’.

Further, within NSW and Victoria there is great electoral support among their urban populations to also ‘save the environment’. This support is most obviously personified by supporters of parties such as The Greens and Sustainable Australia, who oppose all irrigation water use. It is also personified by many Labor and Liberal party voters that will otherwise vote for The Greens etc if the Labor and Liberal Parties do not also act to ‘save the environment’. Any urban politician that declares that he or she will ‘save irrigation communities’ by removing water from the Murray River for irrigation purposes, rather than ‘saving the ‘environment’ by leaving the water in it, will lose so many votes that he or she will endanger his or her very election.

The belief that removing water from irrigation use is ‘saving the environment’ is factually disprovable, but the politics demanding this removal is not. Politicians and their parties must do what they are doing to be elected and to form government; and they are.

The politics under-pinning the destruction of the livelihoods of the people in these irrigation areas can only be countered by the formation of a Riverina State, and the authority that this State will assume. Even then, the people in this State will need to act in a most determined manner.

To preserve the prosperity of the people in these areas, the formation of this Riverina State is essential.

David Landini.