Deniliquin residents rally against Murray Darling Basin Plan
Deniliquin residents rally against Murray Darling Basin Plan
Transcript
00:00 People in Dinillagun are really frustrated, they're really concerned, they're not being
00:04 listened to, they're not being heard.
00:06 And this has been ongoing for decades.
00:09 The Basin Plan is just the latest in a whole series of water reforms.
00:14 The government's already, under the Basin Plan, got 2100 gigalitres of water and they
00:19 keep coming back, they keep wanting more.
00:22 As you can see behind me, this is not just farmers protesting today.
00:27 These are workers, these are rice mill workers, this is local government people, because at
00:32 the end of the day, a farmer might sell his water, they'll get compensated, these guys
00:37 don't get compensation, they get a redundancy notice when their jobs are gone.
00:42 That's what these communities are worried about.
00:44 Loss of jobs, loss of people, loss of productivity from right here in the Basin.
00:49 That's what matters to us.
00:52 It's not balanced, it's about a political solution, not an environmental outcome, it's
00:58 just full of politics.
01:00 It's not about good environmental outcomes for the environment, communities or farmers.
01:06 People are pretty stirred up about it because we had this happen to us about 10 years ago
01:10 and we lived through that, we understand what happened there and we can just see the same
01:16 thing happening again where the guts are just ripped out of regional communities.
01:21 People have rocked up here to Denny today because they're absolutely furious about what
01:25 the Elbow government's up to and Water Minister Tanya Fildes-Ex, she's planning to decimate
01:29 our communities, reintroducing water buybacks.
01:32 It's a massive impact we see in drought, the local businesses really struggle and the rice
01:39 mill basically goes back to skeleton staff.
01:42 While drought's part of life, this would make it permanent, so that would be massively devastating
01:47 for towns like Denelleckman.
01:50 The main message would be there are better ways to do this.
01:53 You don't have to have water buybacks, we've come to the table, we've got a lot of other
01:56 things you can do.
01:57 You've got complementary measures, getting rid of carp out of our waterways, cold water
02:01 pollution, fish screens, fencing off our riparian zone.
02:05 There's so many other things you can do to improve environmental health that don't actually
02:09 require water buybacks and all the decimation that comes with it.
02:12 [BLANK_AUDIO]