IT appears we are in an era where those who stand in the way of inner-city environmental ideologies must accept their fate as “sacrificial lambs”, supposedly for the broader good.
No longer do many city-based Australians respect their fellow rural “neighbours”, a sad indictment on our society which, even more unfortunately, is led by our political elite.
In days past, the Labor Party was the champion of the working class, and while its base has never been in rural Australia, there are many examples of the party supporting rural workers and their causes.
Today, the Labor Party under Anthony Albanese bows to academia. That is not surprising when you consider the party’s leaders have predominantly been born, educated and raised in our cities; they themselves are university academia, not representatives “of the people”.
The trend to sacrifice rural communities has never been more evident than the past week during a Senate Inquiry into Water Minister Tanya Plibersek’s Murray-Darling Basin Plan amendments.
Firstly, let’s be clear. This was a bipartisan plan to recover water for the environment. It is behind schedule, but so are the vast majority of government projects over the past five years, many due to COVID-19.
An early part of this water recovery was through water buybacks which, the Labor Government of the time claimed, were from willing sellers. This ignored the indisputable fact that at the end of the Millennium Drought many farmers were forced to sell water to satisfy banks and remain viable.
It was widely recognised that water buybacks would cause social and economic damage to regional communities, though job loss modelling was staggeringly short of reality. As government data has since shown, these job losses were in the thousands, not hundreds as our academics with their computer modelling had predicted.
Back then, Water Minister Tony Burke promised there would be no buybacks to recover the 450GL under the plan (an amount that wasn’t actually in the original Basin Plan, but that’s yet another political saga) without strictly enforcing the so-called “socio-economic neutrality test”, which was designed to protect rural communities. This promise was strengthened and reinforced several years ago by all Basin governments after they realised the damage which buybacks had caused.
Now, let’s fast forward to the present day. Despite Minister Burke’s promises, despite the massive job losses, despite the economic damage to many rural communities and despite the numerous projects that have been developed to save water and avoid buybacks, we have a recalcitrant Water Minister in Tanya Plibersek who does not care about the rural communities that will be affected.
Like so many of her inner-city friends and colleagues, her job will not be lost. Her income will not be impacted. There will be no reduction to services such as education, health, retail or any other in her inner-city suburb.
The only impact this will have on Ms Plibersek and others in our cities will be the inevitable increase in the price of fresh Aussie-grown food, as we grow less and import more. But I’m sure she can afford it.
All the downsides of buybacks have been highlighted yet again this week to a Senate Inquiry into Ms Plibersek’s compassion-less Basin Plan amendments. But lo and behold, by an amazing stroke of political coincidence on the day of the inquiry, the Productivity Commission – the same one that Labor pledged as an election promise to “reform” and “modernise” – comes out with a report that has a few snippets which Ms Plibersek and her government can use as some feeble justification of their position.
Naturally, we haven’t seen the government spruiking the commission’s statement in its report that “it makes little sense for the Australian Government to rapidly pursue the 450GL a year target”. That one doesn’t suit the political narrative.
And so the frustration in rural communities continues, under a Prime Minister who promised to govern for everyone, but didn’t really mean it.
Paul Pierotti
Water campaigner
Griffith
