Too little too late for Snowy in its death throes
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“Sh-t. Mate, I wouldn’t drink the water if I were you. It’ll give you the bloody scours,” a middle-aged man yells from his bar stool. It’s 10am at Buckley’s Crossing Hotel and the locals are drinking anything but tap water. “If you’ve come to see the Snowy River, you’ll be disappointed,” the local barman grunts, pointing towards the town’s water supply. In Dalgety — an alpine hamlet in south-east NSW — the Snowy River exists as a shallow channel with flat beds of sediment and grass running between it. Starting out from Jindabyne, the waterway passes only Dalgety before it heads south-east; piercing the Victorian border where its contents are emptied into Bass Strait. Among the attributes that might be expected of one of Australia’s major tributaries, it lacks only water. At the completion of the Snowy Mountains-Hydro Electric Scheme in 1967 the Snowy River was left with only 1% of its natural water flow. Masses of immobile sediment began to choke the river channel, leaving little room for the wildlife to survive. “There are times when the river hardly moves. It gets warm and stinks,” Dalgety café owner Julie Pearson says. “Not so long ago, people couldn’t even do their washing and if you did, you’d be walking around in dirty brown clothes. It isn’t much better now.” But things may soon change. In a desperate bid to increase Labor votes in the Eden-Monaro electorate, Minister for Water Penny Wong yesterday announced that a re-elected Labor government would return 56 gigalitres of water to the Snowy over two years. The $13.7 million election promise is a planned compensation payment to Snowy Hydro, the company responsible for storing and diverting water from the Snowy. Local environmentalists have welcomed the measures, but say the announced flows will do little to improve the health of the river. “Of course we welcome the announcement, we have been fighting for it for years, but we have to realise that it will only increase the annual natural flows by an extra 2% this year,” Louise Crisp, vice-chair of the Snowy River Alliance said. In 2002, the Commonwealth, Victorian and NSW governments made a commitment to return 15% of the river’s annual natural flow by June 2009 and 20% by 2010. But as Crikey has previously revealed, despite a Snowy Scientific Committee report detailing that the river is closer to systemic failure than ever, the ailing Snowy River currently subsists on a mere 4%. Crisp says that if the recent outcome from the Labor government had arisen from the First Five Year Review of the Snowy Water Licence, no compensation would have been allocated to Snowy Hydro. “This compensation payment should have arisen from the review and the taxpayers would be $13.7 million better off,” she said. Back at the river’s edge in Dalgety, the town is waiting for change. Along the main stretch of town, business looks as tired as the river. The caravan park is for sale and the garage next door is closed, leaving the pub and café to service the 70 locals. “Take a look at the cars that have gone past in the last hour, that’s an indication of just how bad things are,” Pearson says scanning the empty street. “I moved here so that my kids could go to school in a small town. But more and more locals are leaving. We need to leave some sort of legacy here for our kids,” she says. “The people that are old enough to remember the wild river will die soon and we will have lost our history,” Pearson says. “No one will remember what it was like.” *This article first appeared on Electioneering, a project from Express Media giving eight young writers the chance to blog on the election campaign |
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13 Comments
A small point for a now small river: It is not a tributory.
4%!…that is sheer luxury. Come to the Hawkesbury Nepean which circles the Sydney basin and that river ‘trickles’ on less than 3% currently and soon it will be down to 1% or less…..NOW that is serious draining of natural water from a mighty river, once the life blood of the early colony.
Inner Sydney City dwellers vote Greens EXCEPT when it comes to draining the Hawkesbury Nepean river of all of its natural flow, for their domestic use……..
@Cato Except that via the Snowy Hydro Scheme it is now effectively a tributary of the Murray.
If the Feds and States return 20% of the Snowy’s natural water flow, then that 20% will have to come from a reduction in the water the Snowy Scheme diverts into the Murray. Meantime we are told the water from the Queensland wet this year will never make it into the Murry Darling basin because of Agri-business allocations. Meantime, meantime we are told the Murray Darling basin is stuffed. Meantime, meantime, meantime the Governments are promising to fix the Murray Darling by buying more water. From where? Hullo???
@ Matthew Brennan Breathe.
Rumors of the end of rainfall in the Murray Darling basin are greatly exaggerated. There are many willing sellers and agriculture will change. If we could accept that the Coorong was and should be, brackish, not a freshwater source for lower Murray irrigators, things might look different.
Can’t this bloody country do anything right?
As soon as something gets to the level of serious thought, we can rest easy that nothing more complicated than a football score will never be able to engage anyone’s brains. It is too complicated
Maybe the giant mining companies have got it right. Oz is nothing but a gigantic hole in the ground. The moral to that is “Find it. Get in quick. Flog it off overseas. Retire. Activate the Swiss Bank Acc. Go and live in the Bahamas.”
a large part of the murray darling basin’s problems are due to the NSW government introducing a “use it or lose it” water policy 20 years back, leading to 150% of inflows to the basin being allocated to irrigation. This decision forced land owners to spend money upgrading their farms so they could use the water productively (largely on rice, cotton, corn, and pasture). Then when the drought arrived, there was no water left in the reserviors for the permanent plantings (fruit trees, vines etc), a large percentage of which is now dead, not to mention the disastrous effect on the health of the rivers and flood plains. Greed, incompetence and dodgy dealings have screwed one of our major food production areas in a couple of decades.
So very very sad to see the ongoing degradation of all our rivers. If all we needed was water it would be one thing, but we need a change of attitude in all the stakeholders. That is next to impossible when self interest is the only plentiful commodity.
Geography test
Q. So why have there already been 2 flood warnings on the Snowy River this year?
A. Because the 4% AAI is from above Jindabyne Dam and below it there is still a huge catchment.
eg Wulwye Ck, McLaughlin R, Bobundara, Bombala R, etc
Q Where is the only place you can see the Snowy R. between Jindabyne and The Pinch?
A. Dalgety
Q. River distance?
A. Over 150km
Q. What percentage of the Snowy Scheme is government owned?
A. NSW 55%, Vic 33%, Feds 12% = 100%. So who’s paying whom for what?
Venise;
our country is bloody wonderful and that is a true fact. The state of things in Britain is far far worse…
HOWEVER youre absolutely right, it beggars belief that Dams in Australia are built in gauranteed seats rather than good catchment areas in swinging seats, its unbelievable that the tillegra dam is still being pushed forwards despite the fact that it is in one of the richest and most verdant parts of NSW (which incidentally would be, due to fault lines, incapable of retaining water properly without vast cost) - can you believe the government does not put in desalinated water pipes from the ocean into the most drought stricken parts of the country?
How can the federal and state governments take themselves seriously considering the apalling management of the murray darling which goes through three separate state governments who each allocate too much water?
Why doesnt the government crack down on rediculous industries such as flood irrigated cotton farming?
Well I suppose a good block of it has to do with money in the pocket, and politics too.
Money in the pocket of politicians that is.
A hell of a lot of good enivronmental ministers acheive, and dont even get me started on the Labour party or the National party.
I wish some of those climate sceptics would home in on the claims made by all sides in the Murray Darling debates. It would give them something real and productive and to do.
HUGHG: I think the present Liberal Party is solemnly living in the nineteen fifties. The National Party thinks of Oz being as it was in the nineteen twenties. Their true motto should be the Gotcha Party. As in watcha got?
Socialism for the farmers with everyone else’s profits going to pay the permanently whinging rurals. A week without rain! Shock, horror! Time to petition the government for another heap of money.
As for my opinion about Labor? If I was to write what I really thought about Labor, Crikey would ban me for life.
HUGHG: Sorry, I cut myself off before I’d finished.
WTF are politicians even doing anyway? It is their job to actually run the place. HTF were farmers, irrigators, (sic) etc, investors, allowed to plant crops like rice, and cotton in the first place? Why can’t the Federal government stand up to the states of VIC, NSW and SA? Most especially to the Premier of Vic, the unlovely John Brumby?
Why can no one in parliament go into the nearest library and study a map of Oz? Given the fact that many of them are barely literate, they could hire a headset and listen to how Australia is the driest continent on the planet.
I am so furious with the Australian political scene that I am going to vote for either the Greens, or the Sex Party.
My main concern, one that I’m attending to now, is who to put absolutely last in the Senate. The Labor Party, The Liberal Party, the DLP, Australian Christian Alliance, the non believers of Global Warming Party, Steve Fielding, any Party which claims to be on the side of Christ, any Party which says God is on their side, the reborn Democrats, etc etc. The Australian Communist Party (I’m pretty sure I found one of them on the list) The Right to Lifers, and every other lunatic group prepared to advance a hopeless candidate when he/she has to pay for not getting enough votes.