Katter and NSW country MP call for shake-up of nation’s lack of water management

QUEENSLAND MP Robbie Katter and NSW MP Helen Dalton have revealed why Australia needs to take a national approach to water management and implement something like the old Bradfield Scheme.

Mrs Dalton, the Independent Member for Murray, has called for a Royal Commission on the use of water in the Murray Darling Basin. She says the equivalent of 1010 Sydney Harbours falls on the Basin every year, yet only four percent of that water ever reaches our rivers. “The rest is lost, leaked, or pinched before it even hits the gauge,” she says.

Robbie Katter, MP for Traeger, represents the northern river basin that feeds into the Gulf of Carpentaria. “We’ve just had big floods tear through the North and yet the truth is, the system still has no real idea how much water actually moved through these catchments,” he says.

The last major floods in the far north were only two years ago in March 2023. Australia’s current wet spell will not last forever and it may only be a matter of months or years until drought bites again.

“Flow meters failed. Gauges went under. Data gaps everywhere. There were no proper warnings, no clear picture in real time, and still no accurate picture now,” said Mr Katter.

“And here’s the kicker: This same rubbish data is what government relies on to allocate irrigation water. That’s how serious decisions are being made on guesswork, patchy readings and systems that collapse the moment the river does what rivers have always done up here.”

So, in the north massive amounts of unaccounted-for flood water are simply flowing into the Gulf of Carpentaria while in the south-flowing Murray Darling Basin system, the water in a run of wet years is being used to the maximum.

“You can’t manage water properly if you don’t measure it properly,” says Mr Katter. “You can’t allocate it fairly if the data falls apart in every major flood. This isn’t nation-building water policy, it’s a joke.

“And the people paying the price are the ones actually living and working on the land.”

Mrs Dalton, meanwhile, wonders where all the rain that falls on the Murray-Darling Basin is going to. Going on her 4% figure, it appears to be well and truly in demand. And then there are the “environmental flows”.

It’s a bitter pill for irrigators to be paying big money for irrigation allocations and then to see the federal government forking out millions for water that is simply left to run out to sea. That’s the power of environmentalist ideology.

Also, under current Murray-Darling Basin Authority water management regulations a corporation can buy water and trade it as a commodity, without growing a single crop. But proponents of the present water allocation system will argue it is the most efficient system, hence the small amount that makes it back into the rivers.

As one commenter put it: “China alone owns 27% of our total water allocations and overseas companies can make half a billion dollars profit just trading water without growing as much as a single tomato. It’s not hard to see where the problem is ….the effect on our food security and economy can’t be measured.”

Mrs Dalton says the part they don’t want you to focus on is that the food bowl of Australia only uses 1.5% of all that rainfall. “That’s it. One and a half drops out of every hundred to feed the nation,” she says.

“Instead of fixing a system that wastes 96% of the water, we’re told the answer is buybacks – junk policy, rigged from the start. It hollows out our towns, kills jobs, and hands water to corporate mates while family farms are shut down.”

Cairns News notes that the former Coalition and Labor governments can take much of the blame for this situation, and in particular the dealings of former Energy Minister Angus Taylor who made a motza in a corporate water deal.

“If we captured just 1.5% more of the rain that already falls, every drop used for food production would be covered. No buybacks. No town destruction. Problem solved,” says Mrs Dalton.

“So why isn’t that happening? Because we don’t count each drop properly. Instead of building smart storages like raising Burrinjuck Dam or using Lake Coolah, bureaucrats keep pushing buybacks because it’s easier than fixing the mess.

“That’s why I’m calling for a Federal Royal Commission into water. We need the truth under oath. Where the water is going. Who’s benefiting. And why regional communities are paying the price.

“Enough junk policy. Enough hollowing out our towns. It’s time to fix the system, not destroy the food bowl of Australia.”

Cairns News says the solution to the problem of water allocation and scarcity in the MDBA is staring us in the face in North Queensland, where massive volumes of flood water are simply flowing into the Gulf.

Sooner or later Australia will be dealing with another drought and it’s more than obvious that we need more storages in the north with feeder pipes into the Murray-Darling system, a system along the lines of the Bradfield Scheme as proposed by Dr J. J. Bradfield in 1938, and revised in 1983 by the Queensland Government.

The revised scheme proposed diverting 924,000 megalitres of water per year to the Hughenden area, and after allowing 60,000 megalitres per year for industrial and urban demands, the remaining water could irrigate 72 000. hectares of intensive cropping for which ample land was available.