HELEN Dalton is one angry independent NSW state MP following her recent five-day tour of South Australia’s Lower Lakes – the last stop of the Murray-Darling Basin before the open sea.
Mrs Dalton said it was time for governments such as NSW and Victoria “to step up and stop the lies”.
The Member for Murray said she was calling calling on NSW Premier Chris Minns to visit the area immediately.
“We have all been conned and it must stop,” Mrs Dalton said.
“Water and politics don’t mix, but we are selling out our farming communities and our economy so a privileged few in SA can have their waterfront holiday homes and private jetties.
“These are fake lakes, being kept artificially full of river water taken from the Murray-Darling Basin.
“Yet at the same time, sea water is being kept out of those same lakes by seven huge barrages, which were erected in the 1930s and 1940s.
“Those lakes were a mixture of sea water and river water for tens of thousands of years.
“We shouldn’t be wasting valuable river water, which should be used for food production. This has been one of the biggest con jobs pulled on rural farming communities across the Murray-Darling Basin and Premier Minns must intervene.”
Views about the Lower Lakes and their historical mixture are contested.
An independent panel in 2020 examined hundreds of studies on the Lower Lakes, Coorong and Murray Mouth and consulted with almost 100 scientists and technical experts.
In its final report, the panel wrote that the weight of evidence pointed to the main body of the Lower Lakes being largely fresh prior to European settlement.
They wrote that there would be moderate tidal influence and incursion of sea water during periods of low Murray River inflow.
Evidence was gathered from palaeoecological records, water balance estimates, hydrological and hydrodynamic modelling, traditional knowledge of the Ngarrindjeri people, and anecdotal accounts of early explorers and colonists.
“Upstream development has reduced the river inflow by about half (about 6000 GL/year before the Basin Plan and about 7500 GL/year under the Basin Plan), resulting in more frequent incursion of sea water into the Lower Lakes,” the report said.
The panel was appointed on the recommendation of the Advisory Committee on Social, Economic and Environmental Sciences, a source of independent advice to the Murray-Darling Basin Authority.
Mrs Dalton claimed that if the Coorong and Lower Lakes were returned to their natural estuarine state they would be healthier and that her meetings with multi-generational fishing families and Indigenous elders in the region confirmed this.
She said delivering the massive water volumes guaranteed to SA was devastating the rest of the basin.
“We are being asked to be highly-efficient farmers but our progress is being held to ransom by SA’s antiquated barrages and its self-centred approach to managing national water resources,” she said.
“Rural and regional communities the length of the system are being stripped of their water at a time when we actually need more for production.
“No more water should be taken from farmers upstream if it is going to be used to fill up these fake lakes – I am happy to show the Premier what I have seen, and introduce him to the people I have spoken to.”
Mrs Dalton said 1850 gigalitres of high-security water wasn’t going to SA farmers, but rather the tourism industry.
“South Australian politicians have whinged for a century or more and now their bully tactics are paying off,” she said.
“And until we say to the Commonwealth and to SA that we are no longer going to suck up this crap just because we are the world’s most efficient irrigators, we are going to pay the price.”
