Press Release

MURRAY-DARLING-SNOWY BASIN REHABILITATION AUTHORITY NEEDED NOW TO PREVENT REPAIR BILL BANKRUPTING FUTURE AUSTRALIANS

The repair bill for the Murray-Darling-Snowy Basin will beggar today's young people and their children unless the Commonwealth Government takes the lead immediately to establish a Rehabilitation Authority, Native Fish Australia's Craig Ingram said today.

Craig is National President of Native Fish Australia (NFA), the peak native fish protection organisation, and Independent Victorian MP for Gippsland East, one of the three Independents holding the balance of power in the Victorian Parliament.

If an immediate start is not made on comprehensive and coordinated repair work, he said, the cost will continue to compound to the point where it will bankrupt today's young people in their retirement. "Not only will Australians have a repair bill they can't pay, most of their once-great food bowl will be unproductive wasteland and national icons such as the fabled Murray cod, along with other animals and plants, will be extinct", Craig said.

"It's that serious but as yet, most Australians have simply not realised how big and potentially devastating to Australia's lifestyle it really is", he said.

To try to head off such a disaster, Native Fish Australia decided two weeks ago to initiate a campaign to gather support from opinion leaders, stakeholders and Australians generally to influence the Commonwealth Government and the other five governments involved to quickly legislate and fully resource establishment of a national and independent Murray-Darling-Snowy Basin Rehabilitation Authority.

As proposed by a former President of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, the Authority would not be just another government bureaucracy.

Instead, it would be a permanent national project, independent and with the expertise and powers to coordinate and build on the wealth of required skills, knowledge and research ability already resident in Australian institutions such as the CSIRO, the Murray Darling Basin Commission, universities, private corporations, research institutes and centres of excellence and the like.

The Authority's job would be to rehabilitate, manage and enhance in perpetuity the natural resources and environmental sustainability of the basins of the Murray, Darling and Snowy Rivers.

Craig said NFA, a member of Recfish Australia, the representative body of Australia's multi-billion dollar a year recreational and sport fishing industry, fully supported the five-point plan announced jointly this week by the Australian Conservation Foundation and the National Farmers Federation.

"The forward-looking alliance of these two bodies is itself evidence of the seriousness of the immensity of the disaster all Australians are facing", Craig said.

The ACF-NFF plan calls for an annual $6.5 billion investment by governments and the private sector over 10 years - a total of $65 billion - to repair and protect the Australia's seriously damaged land and water environments nationally.

"A majority of this investment will have to be spent in Australia's food basket, the Murray-Darling-Snowy Basin, which produces half the nation's annual gross value of agricultural production and provides many of the raw materials for Australia's manufacturing and processing industries both within and well beyond the Basin", Craig said.

"The ACF-NFF plan is sound but it will need leadership and coordination of the type we know governments simply cannot provide from within their bureaucracies. We need a Rehabilitation Authority with the sort of operational, political and decision-making independence and powers - and community support - that the Snowy Mountains Authority had."

Craig said he hoped to open dialogue with the ACF-NFF alliance, together with other stakeholders and opinion leaders, aimed at quickly and mutually progressing implementation of both the ACF-NFF five point plan and the Native Fish Australia proposal for a Murray-Darling-Snowy Rehabilitation Authority.

He invited comments and expressions of support from all Australians.

Craig can be contacted through his Gippsland East electoral office at Box 443, Bairnsdale, Victoria, 3875; e-mail: craig.ingram@parliament.vic.gov.au; fax: 03 5152 2023 or phone 03 5152 3491.