AS TENSIONS surrounding the Murray Darling Basin Plan reach a critical point, the Minister responsible for federal water policy has said he is unable to attend this week’s Basin Plan forum in Barham.
It has been a precarious couple of weeks for the Basin Plan, following announcement of a Senate Inquiry to investigate the social and economic impacts of the plan’s implementation on agricultural communities.
Victorian independent senator John Madigan, who set up the inquiry, then helped organise a community consultation meeting in Barham this Wednesday, which senators Bob Day and Dio Wang and MPs Bob Katter and Sharman Stone have promised to attend.
The meeting intends to allow local irrigators and community members to speak directly to politicians about their experiences with the Basin Plan, after representative groups complained their concerns weren’t filtering through to policy-makers in Canberra.
Those concerns centred around the perception among productive communities, in particular Wakool Shire, that the Basin Plan’s triple bottom line favoured environmental interests at the expense of local economies along the basin.
The Minister overseeing federal water policy, Parliamentary Secretary for the Environment Bob Baldwin, has told The Guardian he is unable to attend the Barham meeting due to a preplanned commitment at Uluru.
However, he said he would be visiting basin communities in the coming weeks.
“My first priority upon coming into this role was to visit, listen to and understand Basin communities, and I’m continuing to travel the Basin to do this,” he said.
For more on this story, grab a copy of Monday’s Guardian (July 6).
