Previous releases from Fair Water Use on topics of relevance to the Murray-Darling crisis can be viewed via the subheadings of the Media Releases tab on the side-menu.

MEDIA RELEASE

21st August 2012

Comments yesterday by the Federal Minister for water, Tony Burke, following criticism of the proposed Basin Plan by the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, provide long overdue acknowledgement that a significant proportion of Australians do not approve of current water reform.

The public is gradually coming to the realisation that, when given the responsibility of drafting the Basin Plan, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority was handed a chalice containing the most noxious of poisons – privatised water.

MEDIA RELEASE

5th June 2012

When the Murray-Darling Basin Plan was first proposed, integral to the process were initiatives to promote development of non-irrigating industry in the region.

The entrenched resistance of communities dependent on the irrigation industry to any reduction in diversion limits is largely an understandable fear of the unknown -  and a direct result of an absence of information on the support to be offered as part of the much-vaunted $9 billion package. 

MEDIA RELEASE

18th April 2012

Comments yesterday by the National Water Commission’s Laurie Arthur, with respect to the benefit of water markets, are insulting to many farming families, according to a statement released today by public water-rights advocacy group, Fair Water Use Australia:

“To crow that water trading sustained communities across the southern Murray-Darling Basin through the recent drought is an extreme insult to hundreds of farming families, especially those below Lock 1 in South Australia, many of whom went to the wall as a result of the trading of over-allocated water upstream.

Water trading and the maximising of consumptive water-use by upstream irrigators, at a time when conservation should have been paramount, were major contributors to the collapse of the lower Murray system, estimated to have cost the region $790 million, and also prompted the construction of desalination plants in Melbourne and Adelaide - misguided and redundant projects which will cost taxpayers around $24.5 billion.”

MEDIA RELEASE

2nd April 2012

The floundering of the Basin Plan process should come as no surprise, according to a statement released today by public water rights advocacy group, Fair Water Use:

“Australians are waking up to the fact that the Authority is in an impossible situation – an inevitable consequence of the imposition of an extended brief upon the previously independent guardian of the river system.

MEDIA RELEASE

28th March 2012

In a letter received by Fair Water Use (Australia), the Chief Executive of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, Rhondda Dickson, confirms that the Authority has not factored the projected impacts of climate change into calculations contained in its Proposed Basin Plan.

The letter is dated the 22nd March 2012, ironically World Water Day, and the day on which Alexander Müller, assistant director-general for natural resources and the environment with the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), stated at the World Water Forum in Marseille, Paris:

"Climate change can be seen as a multiplier of already existing risks. Where people are vulnerable today, they will be even more vulnerable tomorrow. In the agriculture sector, adaptation to climate change is of the utmost importance, and water very often is at the centre of adaptation to climate change."