NSW Farmers' president Xavier Martin slams the Murray Darling Basin Plan
NSW Farmers' president Xavier Martin slams the Murray Darling Basin Plan
Transcript
00:00 So our concerns centre around the bill that's before the Senate at the moment and the inquiry that's reporting back today
00:05 because everything we see about that is
00:08 taking a sledgehammer
00:11 approach to the plan by bringing buybacks back onto the table. Just crazy stuff.
00:17 I mean you look behind here and the amount of water, these riverbanks are just over soaked from
00:24 taxpayers water, they've surged down these rivers, these inland rivers, just causing the banks to collapse,
00:31 the hundreds of years old river gums just to fall in. We've seen sections where
00:37 10, 20, 40 trees have just all piled into the river. Just nonsense
00:42 that that's somehow an environmental success or natural and that more water would actually help.
00:48 Just crazy stuff and there's got to be a whole lot of other tools other than the sledgehammer approach of
00:54 buybacks by the taxpayer.
00:57 We've got is a whole lot of well-meaning ministers and
01:00 bureaucrats in the basin that think they know everything and so they're out there with these theories that talking to academics, talking to
01:07 environmental activists, that farmers and the communities that live in the landscape, we actually know what's going on.
01:14 We've felt the pain, the socio-economic impact of the
01:18 1,100 gigs that have already been bought and can't be put down the rivers anyway.
01:23 So they're not even using all the taxpayer water anyway.
01:27 So the concept that you would buy more, that you would cause the taxpayer to confiscate more water and
01:33 actually take enough food and clothing out of the Murray-Darling Basin for people for 10 million people.
01:40 You know, I mean seriously these senators need to look in the mirror and ask themselves
01:45 which 10 million people around the world do we want to go hungry and cold because that's what happens when you confiscate
01:51 another 450 gigs out of the productive water pool.
01:55 [BLANK_AUDIO]