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March 29, 2010
Unlike the state Treasurys that are into slash and burn, budget surpluses and GDP as a measurement of population wellbeing the Australian Treasury under Ken Henry, the Federal Treasury Secretary, has a progressive tendency, especially when it comes to wellbeing, the value of the environment and water issues and the plundering of natural resources by Australians. The core argument is that development that did not respect conservation was not development at all because it denied freedoms to future generations.
At a forum staged by the Weereewa festival based at Lake George near Canberra Henry at the Winds of Change forum told the truth: that water management on this driest inhabited continent on earth has been a disgrace, and that there had 'massive environmental destruction'' as a consequence of fishing, hunting, forestry and farming practices.
In his speech entitled “Sustainable development - implications for human activity” (not online yet) Henry said that water extraction from the Murray-Darling Basin this year amounted to 93 per cent of the average natural flow to the sea. In the past decade, inflows into the Murray-Darling had been below average. ''In three of these 10 years, water extraction actually exceeded inflows.''
There we have it. It is not just the drought. It is bad water management by the states, irrigators taking all the water they get, free riders and the resistance of the national party to water reform. Thus the opposition's new spokesman on water, Barnaby Joyce, is saying that he did not accept it was necessary to return the Murray-Darling Basin to health by buying back water entitlements. Joyce's politics are to support the irrigators whose conception of restoring health to the Murray-Darling Basin is the increased profitability of the irrigation industry.
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Barnaby Joyce supports the irrigation lobby, with special emphasis on Queensland irrigators and Cubbie Station. He's an old style National Party populist.