A handful of Queensland irrigators use more water than the whole state of Victoria, meanwhile the Darling is dead (not dying, actually dead) from just below the NSW border to the confluence in Bathurst.

If it were up to me I’d send the army in to blow the Queensland dams to kingdom come.
Round the bastards using the water up and put them in a jail cell where they belong.

It’s theft, when someone takes something for themselves that rightly belongs to everyone, it’s theft.

You want to see the Murray survive and the Darling come back to life?
Put a muzzle on the Queensland red-necks that are sucking the whole river system dry.

A handful of Queensland irrigators use more water than the whole state of Victoria, meanwhile the Darling is dead (not dying, actually dead) from just below the NSW border to the confluence in Bathurst.

If it were up to me I’d send the army in to blow the Queensland dams to kingdom come.
Round the bastards using the water up and put them in a jail cell where they belong.

It’s theft, when someone takes something for themselves that rightly belongs to everyone, it’s theft.

You want to see the Murray survive and the Darling come back to life?
Put a muzzle on the Queensland red-necks that are sucking the whole river system dry.

One example was a closed pipeline in Gippsland that was losing more than 60% of the water input. As it was too expensive to repair, nothing was ever done. That pipe line is probably still losing that much water today – and that has nothing to do with wastage of water by the rural sector.

I also have experience of the breakup of State Rivers and Water Supply Commission and the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works and the shredding of all documentation of those organisations. In planning maintenance projects, it is most helpful to be able to access the original construction drawings – but they no longer existed.

To me, this was an absolute dereliction of government duty not to hand over asset information when it was being sold. In fact, some of those organisations didn’t know they owned the asset until it failed.

I guess I am throwing it all back to successive governments that never maintained what we had and that, if they had, today’s shortages might not have been so desperate.

The emphasis should be on managing what resources we have, instead of “oiling the noisiest hinge” by shifting water around to please the most demanding users.

Mind you, I suspect Brumby’s pipe-line should be labeled a pipe-dream.