Water - The Lifeblood Of The Regions

He was cool, calm, collected - and well-informed.

Third-generation citrus farmer, Chair of the Griffith and District Citrus Growers Association and NSW Farmers member, Vito Mancini spoke about the Murray Darling Basin Plan with an eloquent directness.

He began by talking about his ancestors settling in the area.

“They built infrastructure, they built the dams, the weirs, the lochs, everything to make this system work as efficiently as possible.

“Today’s plan seems to be the reverse.

“It seems like we’re trying to take as much water away because productive water is inefficient water for the environment and I think that language and the concrete nature of the plan makes us uncertain.

“We deal with climate every day of the year - when it’s dry, when it’s wet, when it hails, and when it snows.

“We’ve been adapting for decades.

“When I start my pump on to irrigate, I’m not looking to try and pump water just to waste it.

“It’s a very costly product that we deal with now and we need to be as efficient as we can.

“We hope that the environment can be just as efficient as we can be.

“Like any industry, there will be some irresponsible people, but I think the majority of the industry there that want to deal with water do it in a very respectful way.

“It’s a resource that costs us.

“It’s very costly for anybody to deal with, water.

It’s not something that we aim to waste, and when we drive from our homes to our properties we don’t want to drive through a barren wasteland because we degraded the environment.

“We want to work with it, we want to be able to drive down the road to our mate’s place and see luscious beauty that our nature intended.

“We’re not these criminals that we just feel like we’re being targeted.”

The Hon Tanya Plibesek, MP, Minister for Environment and Water, said that she didn’t want irrigators to feel that way from the Federal Government.

“To talk about being prepared to build infrastructure, we are,” Ms Plibesek said.

“We’re currently changing 85km of open canal into pipes to save water.”

She went on to say that she wanted to work with irrigators to come up with on-farm and off-farm solutions to the complex issue of water.

Mr Mancini said although she said that she wanted to work with irrigators, the language and rhetoric he had heard over the past three to four weeks had failed to mention the triple bottom line.

“It’s always about 450 (gigalitres) and these targets here really do upset us because it puts us on uneven ground,” he said.

“We don’t know where it’s coming from and where it’s going to go or how you’re going to get through the constraints points to the river.”

Ms Plibesek said there were conversations the Government had to have with irrigators.

“I have a responsibility tot he whole Basin area,” Ms Plibesek said.

“My job is to prepare us for the next dry stretch.

“Henry Lawson called drought the great red marauder.

“The Federation Drought lasted an awful eight years.

“As long as we live on this continent, dry years will follow wet years.

“I’m not going to make up my mind without having those conversations,” she said.

Mr Mancini was quick to respond that it sounded as though she had already made the decision.

• Topics:

• Agriculture & Farming
• Water
• Politics