Jennifer Marohasy has been campaigning to have the barrages – a form of dam – removed from what most of us would think of as the mouth of the River Murray. While much has been made of the fact that the Murray often doesn’t run into the sea, hardly anyone is aware that it is stopped from doing that by a series of dams.
During the Federation plus 100 drought that we have just experienced, water was being siphoned off from higher up the Murray and Darling to keep the lakes at the mouth of the Murray full. If they had been in their natural state the tide would have done that for free, and saved a considerable amount of water for upstream communities.
On Line Opinion first published Jennifer’s controversial views on the lower lakes in August 2008.[1] We did that because they made sense. The current arrangements with the lakes are obviously artificial, and their listing as a RAMSAR wetland is just as obviously mistaken.
Media Watch contacted Marohasy on Friday seeking answers to a list of questions with the intention of going to air tonight. If another program behaved like this they would run the risk of making a star appearance on Media Watch. Marohasy formed the opinion that the story had already been written. That seems a reasonable point of view.
Certainly the questions that Media Watch put to Marohasy indicated that they either had done no independent research about the lakes, or were incapable of understanding simple physical concepts. The questions about her sources of income were bizarre and mostly irrelevant, but obviously intended to frame her as a stooge for some group or another...
Read more here: //www.ambitgambit.com/2012/03/12/media-watching-her-watching-them/
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Saving the Coorong by Restoring Its Native State Available Online here: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7762
I'm with Sean,
Why weren't they mentioned?
Pandering to the politics perhaps?
Peter,
Thank you.
"We actually looked at that when we did modelling during drought, because we considered during drought letting the sea into the Lower Lakes and concluded that water body would become hypersaline very, very quickly. We concluded at the end of the drought that it was a good thing that we had not let the sea in. It would have created a lot of problems that would have taken a long, long time to get over and we would not be in the situation where Lake Albert is less than 5,000 a day, because Lake Albert would quite quickly have gone hypersaline and it would have taken a long while to recover."
I wish you luck in the next drought, looks like it's 2008, 2009 and 2010 revisited the Lower Lakes being allowed to fall below sea level and collapsing river banks all the way back to below Lock 1. Not one mention to the Senate committee of a Lock below Tailem Bend and not one S.A. Senator asking about one. With a bit of luck Goolwa Channel will get the Clayton Regulator as the dirt has been stored nearby.