. THE SHUT-DOWN OF THE MURRAY-DARLING BASIN.
In 1994, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) agreed to a national “Water Reform Framework”, under the auspices of Paul Keating’s National Competition Policy. This was the agreement to change the status of water from that of human right, to tradable commodity, so that speculators such as Macquarie Bank—the author and beneficiary of most National Competition Policy “reforms”—could make money by driving up it’s price, at the expense of food production. This could only succeed if water was scarce, so the Howard government seized upon the drought to impose it. Also in 1994, following the push for global population reduction at the U.N’s Cairo Conference, the House of Representatives Committee for Long Term Strategies conducted an inquiry into Australia’s Population “carrying capacity”. The resulting report, entitled “One Nation, Two Ecologies”, recommended a government policy to shift to work toward a range of “politically and socially” realistic population goals that included a preferred option to stabilized the population at 23 million, but also included an option to reduce the population to as low as 5 million. Recommendation 11 stated, “Australia should adopt a consumption strategy, to be developed around the challenge of learning to move from high levels of consumption based on high levels of material throughput per unit of consumption to lower levels of consumption based on lower levels of material throughput per unit of consumption. Such a strategy need not reduce quality of live although it may change the way in which people enjoy quality lives.” Along with the recommendation that a ministry for population be created at Cabinet level –achieved this year with the appointment of Tony Bourke as population minister, just before the MDBA report came out. The committee’s overall recommendation was that with regards to the population increase, “Australia should adopt a precautionary policy in accordance with the principals of ecologically sustainable development.”—the exact same language of the 2007 Water act that set the terms of reference for the Murray-Darling Basin Authority.
Under John Howard water rights were separated land title; the Murray- Darling Basin Commission started interstate water trading in 1998. In 2003, the Liberal-National coalition initiated the National
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Water Initiative, And in 2004 the National Water Commission. Under John Howard, In 2007 his legislation established the Water Act, which established the Authority (later to absorb the separate MDB Commission), and charged it with determining “the volume of water required to maintain and restore environmental assets, using the best available science and the principles of ecologically sustainable development” As the report foreword states –The Water Act captured the spirit of the 1994, population report: targeting the level of population, by imposing environmental objectives on Australia’s food bowl. When push comes to shove this has been Liberal -National party coalition policy to shut down Australia’s food bowl, and depopulate the nation. The labor party and the greens will push this along because it is their policy too. The one good thing that might come out of this is that some people might wake up to the blind faith and levels of near comatosed complacency that they have been in because the next time you vote you may literary be voting for your life.
In 1828, Charles Sturt traveled down the Darling River, he found that the water in places was too salty to drink, and when he reached the mouth of the Murray River he had to turn back because it was closed. In 1923, Victoria’s water commissioner Sir Ronald East was photographed at Nyah, (near Swan Hill) standing astride the Murray River, which was a trickle. Dry rivers are not sick rivers they simply reflect the state of the biosphere at the time. Rivers are how water, evaporated mostly from the oceans and rained over land, flows back into the oceans again. And any water drawn from a river for irrigation isn’t lost; it ends up evaporating and returning as rainfall, either somewhere else on land and flowing out to sea through another river or raining directly into the ocean. In Australia it is a natural occurrence to have dry periods followed by drought breaking rains.
In 1963, Prince Phillip founded the Australian Conservation Foundation (which he chaired from 1971-1976 as a branch of his World Wildlife Foundation. Prince Phillip has repeatedly stated that he wants to be reincarnated as a “deadly virus” to help solve the supposedly over population problem as was reported in the Deutsch Presse Agentur in 1988. Early in 2010, the ACF filed a formal complaint with the then Environment Minister and also two time ACF president, Peter Garrett, that human population is a “key threatening process” to biodiversity, today shares an overlapping leadership with the Sustainable Population Australia (SPA), which openly calls for reducing Australia’s population. Tim Flannery leading Wentworth Group member is on record advocating a maximum population for Australia of just 6-7 million people, justified by citing the claim that the ‘fragile’ nature of Australia’s ecosystems means that Australia cannot sustain more people than that amount.
The Clarence River system is one of the great water projects that would provide increased water supply, on the scale of the Snowy Mountains Scheme to the Murray- Darling system and was most recently proposed by the late Emeritus Professor of Engineering, Lance Endersbee AO. His proposal was to take some of the large amounts of annual flood waters in the Clarence River catchment area and pump it over the Great Dividing Range, and the let it flow down into the Murray-Darling system.
This project would open up new irrigation areas along the Dumaresq, Macintyre and Barwon rivers as well as increased flows of water into the Darling and Murray rivers. As apposed to reducing the population and reducing food production this would be able increase both. The Murray-Darling Basin area has just 6,4% of Australia’s water run off and utilizes 80% of that water to grow one-third of the nation’s food the Clarence River Scheme would put an extra 1000 GL per year into the Basin system a similar amount to what the Snowy system puts in now

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