Australia was once self-sufficient in rice. We now grow less than 25 percent of domestic rice consumption. The SunRice Group has been importing rice from Vietnam and repackaging it to make-up the shortfall. Since the Corona Virus pandemic, the Vietnamese government has banned the export of rice, while the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has feigned […]
RECENT billion-dollar plans for the Murray Darling Basin have never been about the environment. Rather they have been about special interest groups doing deals through constant negotiation, with commercial interests in South Australia generally trumping all others. As Geoff Adams recently explained – with his newspaper article republished in various regional newspapers – Waterfront houses […]
LAST week I got to fly over the Murray River’s mouth and Coorong with two, hard-working, cross-bench Senators, Bob Day and David Leyonhjelm. That was immediately after the Senate Select Committee hearing in Goolwa*. You may yawn: issues discussed included the availability and price of water for food production. According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, […]
I will be in Goolwa, just to the north west of the Murray River’s sea mouth, on Tuesday 8th December to give evidence to the Senate Select Committee on the Murray Darling Basin Plan. This committee is chaired by David Leyonhjelm, the libertarian senator from NSW, and has a mandate to report on both the […]
There is nothing sustainable about the current management of the Lower Murray and its crippled estuary. Lakes Albert and Alexandrina are vast shallow near-coastal lagoons that started to dry-up during the recent Millennium drought (2003-2009). Despite legislation to mandate the buyback of over 3,000 GL of water, when the next drought is properly upon us […]
Bendigo-based long-range weather forecaster Kevin Long has repeatedly reminded me that, at the end of the day it is rainfall cycles that are most important in Australia, not temperature cycles. Can we expect a run of drier years in the Murray Darling? Is this the consensus amongst not just the mainstream climate science community, but […]
THROUGH the Millennium drought of 2001 to 2009, I was optimistic that it would rain again, that the drought would end and probably with flooding rains. The drought did break, and the aggregated average annual rainfall for the Murray Darling Basin as calculated by the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) shows 2010 was the wettest year […]
AUSTRALIA was erroneously considered terra nullius at the time of European settlement. I know this wasn't a land belonging to no one because there are the dreamtime stories, including the story about the formation of the Murray River. It happened as the hunter of creation times chased the mighty Murray cod downstream, the bends and […]
Not so long ago, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, released a report about how it is now hotter, and that there is a 95% chance this has been caused by human activity. This key finding was from just part 1 of a 3-part report. Part 2, is probably more relevant to […]
