Dear Charlie,
In Australia, there are big water problems! How far behind are we in western Canada? SInce Sept 8 we have had less than a quarter of an inch. Our winter wheat is ugly.
Intersting times to say the least!
If the US midwest had a drought... which we are about due for... what would happen to grain prices?
Scarry thought... and one we should think long and hard about before hedging the farm away for 08!
Have a look at this article!
"Playing politics a matter of life and death
Alan Ramsey
November 3, 2007
From the potato grower on the Murray to the waterless hamlet just inside the Queensland border and the wheat farmers, with their failed crops, in between, exactly 2600 kilometres straight up the guts of NSW. Up and back, that is, in three days and three hours. The election is irrelevant by comparison. Water is now Australia's absolutely critical issue, not the campaign games of John Howard and Kevin Rudd.
"There's the real world," said Bill Heffernan, nodding to the conveyor belt and the thin stream of wheat making a pyramid in the grain holding centre we were passing near Walgett in the state's far north. "That's where the loaf of bread in the supermarket starts."
Heffernan is the NSW Liberal senator some people think, quite wrongly, is just another dinosaur. He knows more about country people and what is happening in the bush - and what needs to be done - than all those bone-headed Nationals in John Howard's Government put together.
And while Heffernan won't thank me for saying so, Howard's lousy judgment, as well as his lack of courage, failed him and his Government when he didn't move outside the conventional envelope and make the outspoken farmer politician from Junee the minister for primary industries after the last election.
Instead, Howard took the easy Coalition option and continued elevating National dunces like Warren Truss and Peter McGauran and John Cobb and left Heffernan to rot on the back bench because he wouldn't trust his friend and ally after Heffernan had said what he thought, under parliamentary privilege, in March five years ago about the High Court's Michael Kirby, a darling of the Labor Party.
Howard cared more what the judiciary thought of him personally, a former suburban solicitor, than he did about the political wellbeing of his Government.
Howard's error was a grievous one.
Which brings us back to two grumpy old men in a four-wheel-drive.
As always, Heffernan went to look for himself. He had a wad of letters and emails from NSW farmers here and there across the state, most of them desperate for help for the same reason. Water.
If Howard wouldn't make him a minister, he did make Heffernan chairman of a taskforce looking into how Australia might develop its waterlogged north as our next great food bowl after the ailing Murray-Darling Basin.
The job has become Heffernan's passion.
Locking up Australia's food security, he calls it.
He tells a great story about a young farmer from Gilgandra who moved to the Northern Territory five years ago, bought 2000 acres of bush at $10 an acre south of Darwin, and who, joined by his brother, last year cleared $1 million growing watermelons for city buyers in the south.
Heffernan tells the story as he likens the opportunities for agriculture in the north to having bought a house in Sydney and Melbourne in the 1960s.
Whatever, when he left Canberra at lunchtime last Sunday, he drove south to Mulwala on the Murray, opposite Yarrawonga, first to talk to a potato grower in trouble buying water at soaring prices after his licence allocation was reduced, then to see Doug and Bronwyn Thomas, a couple with four school-age children, who've spent $470,000 on the family farm in the last six years on the latest, most efficient irrigation technology to grow feed to fatten lambs, only to have the NSW bureaucracy cripple their water allocation by an arbitrary 84 per cent reduction in their licensed entitlement of 600 megalitres a year.
Now they have to buy bore water at prices that have gone crazy.
Brian Peadon is chief executive officer of the National Water Exchange, the stock exchange of the exploding water trading market in NSW and Victoria. Last year, he says, was dreadful for farmers in both states. The water licensing system is out of control.
"The stress farmers are under this year is even more intense," Peadon said by phone yesterday. "And there's all sorts of awful political games going on at the moment which don't help.
"The message we're trying to get across is that last year was a disaster socially in country areas, and this year is going to be worse because [governments are] still fiddling. In fact, what is going on within the government bureaucracies is just putting the most enormous strain on farm families. My short-term objective is to alleviate that strain. The long-term policies, we're fighting those out, but diabolic things are happening at the moment [within state government agencies]. To put things in perspective, a normal temporary transfer of water takes three or four days by the time you get [the water]. This year it's taking 36 days, and counting.
"So even though people have made the decision, 'Well, I'll sell the scrap of water I've got, here's my income for the year, I'll save the farm', given the record prices, they're not being paid because the governments just won't approve the transfers. Approve or deny them or do anything.
"It's even worse in Victoria because they won't let anything go and [are] putting the pressure back on NSW farmers. We're seeing state governments, or state bureaucracies, playing with people's lives. We have people desperately wanting the water, paying the money, it's held in trust accounts, the [sellers] desperately wanting the income, yet neither is happening.
"People are just watching their crops die while these guys are playing bureacracies. It's the national plan and, you know, there's the state thing too, and the poor old farmer is being held as the ammunition in the fight. It's really very serious.
"In the data last year, in our customer base - we have 22,000 customers - we had eight identifiable suicides in the Murray region, with the majority in northern Victoria. Now the pressures are even greater. I can't stress enough what's happening is absolutely appalling.
"My part, in NSW, is just getting somebody [within the bureaucracy] to try and take some ownership and responsibility with Victoria. Again, to put it in perspective, in the Murray-Darling Basin we deliver the same document to 17 separate governments agencies. You know, doing the same thing with 17 of them. You get held up at that mid-bureaucratic level and you can't get anything done. And you just don't know who to grab and shake to solve these problems, whether it's policy or just incompetence, or whatever. But at the end of the day the system doesn't work. It's been going on for years, but this year is crisis year."
Heffernan knows exactly what Peadon means.
He tells an awful story about a farm family south of Gundagai when cattle prices plunged in the 1980s. The father went to the station to pick up his children on their arrival home from boarding school. One wasn't on the train. The others he drove home. There he shot the family, including his wife, and hanged himself on a shed hoist.
He has another piece of horror involving a family dispute among siblings over division of the farm. The father settled by later going to the shearing shed and plunging a pair of electric shears into his throat. They found his body at the bottom of the shute where the sheep are dropped outside.
"People in the cities don't understand the pressures on farm people," Heffernan said, as we drove north from Mulwala through Griffith and West Wyalong, Forbes, Parkes, Dubbo, Walgett and on up to Lightning Ridge and Angledool, near the Queensland border (see sidebar).
"When I wanted to get into politics some years ago, an old state Liberal colleague told me that so long as the bread, the milk, and the meat and veg were in the supermarket, city people didn't give a rat's arse about where it all came from. They just looked on farmers who complained as whingeing cockies.
"Nothing has changed."
Nothing but muddy pools left in Angledoon
ANGLEDOOL is 60 kilometres north of Lightning Ridge and 12 kilometres south of the Queensland border. It was founded in 1870 and used to have 3000 people, locals say. It also had five pubs, two stores, a memorial hall, a school, a police station and an Aboriginal mission. It now has 36 people, 20 occupied dwellings and two open rubbish pits. The hall is still there, sort of. It is very decrepit. The police station, the stores and the school are long gone. So, too, the mission. The last pub burnt down 30 years ago.
Something else Angledool used to have was a quite stunning river, the Narran, that fed into the heritage-listed Narran Lake wetlands 140 kilometres south-west. Now the river's gone, too. The cotton farms upstream, across the border, have taken its water.
Quite legally, it seems.
All that is left of the Narran River near Angledool, if you walk far enough upstream, is a series of steeply banked, shrinking waterholes, dead freshwater mussels, and choking weed growth. The water stinks but some things still live in it, including "protected" long-necked turtles. Angledool's Alan Guihot found a 12-kilogram Murray cod dead in the mud a few weeks ago. It had tried to slide from one pool to another. Sun-baked slide marks and turtle tracks are still visible in the river bed.
A 2002 "fact" sheet, issued by Commonwealth bureaucrats, lists the Narran Lakes as "a wetland of international significance well-known for its water bird populations". It adds: "The area is particularly important for Aboriginal people, and graziers depend on floods for their livelihoods." Well, not any more they don't. What the "fact" sheet delicately calls "off-river storages upstream", have reduced the Narran River's "median annual flows" by 74 per cent. That was five years ago.
The authors should take another look.
Two years earlier, in July 2000, ABC television's 7.30 Report told viewers: "The water has been trapped upstream, where huge Queensland cotton farms have been licensed to harvest floodwaters. Just a few months ago, the bulldozers at Cubbie Station were working flat out, finishing off massive dams which can now store twice as much water as contained in Sydney Harbour."
Queensland's state environment minister at the time, Rod Welford, told the program: "The bulk of scientific opinion now acknowledges that in Queensland, in the Condamine-Ballone [river] system [that feeds south into the Narran River and NSW's Darling River system], we're overtaxing the system. The question is, how do we make an effective and satisfactory adjustment?"
That was seven years ago.
Seven years later and the three governments - federal, NSW and Queensland - are still fiddling while the rivers and the wetlands die. Coalition interparty politics and Labor inertia have have found no "effective and satisfactory adjustment" to "unblock" the "over-taxed system" north of the Queensland border. Drought and climate change have only compounded the "problem".
However, what Angledool does have is Michelle Pymble. She has two preschool daughters and works two days a week in Lightning Ridge. Her husband works on a property three hours away and comes home every fortnight. They moved to Lightning Ridge from Sydney's Peakhurst 13 years ago and they've been in Angledool since 2001. They have a two-storey mudbrick house, with television, air-conditioning and a home computer, and they wouldn't live anywhere else.
On October 17, Pymble, as secretary of the Angledool Progress Association, wrote to (among others) Senator Bill Heffernan, in part: "The Narran River, which the residents of Angledool rely on for water for washing, has approximately two weeks water left. In the past it has been released from St George [dam] in Queensland. We have not received any water for more than 580 days. We are hoping you would be able to help us."
People rang people, emails were exchanged, and the Brewarrina Shire Council, already alerted, organised for a water tanker to truck in water once a week. Each Angledool residence is to get, on average, 882 litres a person. Each house pays, with a 90 per cent state subsidy, $3-plus per thousand litres. The first water arrived last Sunday.
Heffernan arrived on Tuesday. But like the rain, nobody knows when the water from upstream might arrive in the Narran River. Moving Queensland's politicians is as difficult as moving its cotton farmers.
Alan Ramsey
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/11/02/1193619142372.html"
In Australia, there are big water problems! How far behind are we in western Canada? SInce Sept 8 we have had less than a quarter of an inch. Our winter wheat is ugly.
Intersting times to say the least!
If the US midwest had a drought... which we are about due for... what would happen to grain prices?
Scarry thought... and one we should think long and hard about before hedging the farm away for 08!
Have a look at this article!
"Playing politics a matter of life and death
Alan Ramsey
November 3, 2007
From the potato grower on the Murray to the waterless hamlet just inside the Queensland border and the wheat farmers, with their failed crops, in between, exactly 2600 kilometres straight up the guts of NSW. Up and back, that is, in three days and three hours. The election is irrelevant by comparison. Water is now Australia's absolutely critical issue, not the campaign games of John Howard and Kevin Rudd.
"There's the real world," said Bill Heffernan, nodding to the conveyor belt and the thin stream of wheat making a pyramid in the grain holding centre we were passing near Walgett in the state's far north. "That's where the loaf of bread in the supermarket starts."
Heffernan is the NSW Liberal senator some people think, quite wrongly, is just another dinosaur. He knows more about country people and what is happening in the bush - and what needs to be done - than all those bone-headed Nationals in John Howard's Government put together.
And while Heffernan won't thank me for saying so, Howard's lousy judgment, as well as his lack of courage, failed him and his Government when he didn't move outside the conventional envelope and make the outspoken farmer politician from Junee the minister for primary industries after the last election.
Instead, Howard took the easy Coalition option and continued elevating National dunces like Warren Truss and Peter McGauran and John Cobb and left Heffernan to rot on the back bench because he wouldn't trust his friend and ally after Heffernan had said what he thought, under parliamentary privilege, in March five years ago about the High Court's Michael Kirby, a darling of the Labor Party.
Howard cared more what the judiciary thought of him personally, a former suburban solicitor, than he did about the political wellbeing of his Government.
Howard's error was a grievous one.
Which brings us back to two grumpy old men in a four-wheel-drive.
As always, Heffernan went to look for himself. He had a wad of letters and emails from NSW farmers here and there across the state, most of them desperate for help for the same reason. Water.
If Howard wouldn't make him a minister, he did make Heffernan chairman of a taskforce looking into how Australia might develop its waterlogged north as our next great food bowl after the ailing Murray-Darling Basin.
The job has become Heffernan's passion.
Locking up Australia's food security, he calls it.
He tells a great story about a young farmer from Gilgandra who moved to the Northern Territory five years ago, bought 2000 acres of bush at $10 an acre south of Darwin, and who, joined by his brother, last year cleared $1 million growing watermelons for city buyers in the south.
Heffernan tells the story as he likens the opportunities for agriculture in the north to having bought a house in Sydney and Melbourne in the 1960s.
Whatever, when he left Canberra at lunchtime last Sunday, he drove south to Mulwala on the Murray, opposite Yarrawonga, first to talk to a potato grower in trouble buying water at soaring prices after his licence allocation was reduced, then to see Doug and Bronwyn Thomas, a couple with four school-age children, who've spent $470,000 on the family farm in the last six years on the latest, most efficient irrigation technology to grow feed to fatten lambs, only to have the NSW bureaucracy cripple their water allocation by an arbitrary 84 per cent reduction in their licensed entitlement of 600 megalitres a year.
Now they have to buy bore water at prices that have gone crazy.
Brian Peadon is chief executive officer of the National Water Exchange, the stock exchange of the exploding water trading market in NSW and Victoria. Last year, he says, was dreadful for farmers in both states. The water licensing system is out of control.
"The stress farmers are under this year is even more intense," Peadon said by phone yesterday. "And there's all sorts of awful political games going on at the moment which don't help.
"The message we're trying to get across is that last year was a disaster socially in country areas, and this year is going to be worse because [governments are] still fiddling. In fact, what is going on within the government bureaucracies is just putting the most enormous strain on farm families. My short-term objective is to alleviate that strain. The long-term policies, we're fighting those out, but diabolic things are happening at the moment [within state government agencies]. To put things in perspective, a normal temporary transfer of water takes three or four days by the time you get [the water]. This year it's taking 36 days, and counting.
"So even though people have made the decision, 'Well, I'll sell the scrap of water I've got, here's my income for the year, I'll save the farm', given the record prices, they're not being paid because the governments just won't approve the transfers. Approve or deny them or do anything.
"It's even worse in Victoria because they won't let anything go and [are] putting the pressure back on NSW farmers. We're seeing state governments, or state bureaucracies, playing with people's lives. We have people desperately wanting the water, paying the money, it's held in trust accounts, the [sellers] desperately wanting the income, yet neither is happening.
"People are just watching their crops die while these guys are playing bureacracies. It's the national plan and, you know, there's the state thing too, and the poor old farmer is being held as the ammunition in the fight. It's really very serious.
"In the data last year, in our customer base - we have 22,000 customers - we had eight identifiable suicides in the Murray region, with the majority in northern Victoria. Now the pressures are even greater. I can't stress enough what's happening is absolutely appalling.
"My part, in NSW, is just getting somebody [within the bureaucracy] to try and take some ownership and responsibility with Victoria. Again, to put it in perspective, in the Murray-Darling Basin we deliver the same document to 17 separate governments agencies. You know, doing the same thing with 17 of them. You get held up at that mid-bureaucratic level and you can't get anything done. And you just don't know who to grab and shake to solve these problems, whether it's policy or just incompetence, or whatever. But at the end of the day the system doesn't work. It's been going on for years, but this year is crisis year."
Heffernan knows exactly what Peadon means.
He tells an awful story about a farm family south of Gundagai when cattle prices plunged in the 1980s. The father went to the station to pick up his children on their arrival home from boarding school. One wasn't on the train. The others he drove home. There he shot the family, including his wife, and hanged himself on a shed hoist.
He has another piece of horror involving a family dispute among siblings over division of the farm. The father settled by later going to the shearing shed and plunging a pair of electric shears into his throat. They found his body at the bottom of the shute where the sheep are dropped outside.
"People in the cities don't understand the pressures on farm people," Heffernan said, as we drove north from Mulwala through Griffith and West Wyalong, Forbes, Parkes, Dubbo, Walgett and on up to Lightning Ridge and Angledool, near the Queensland border (see sidebar).
"When I wanted to get into politics some years ago, an old state Liberal colleague told me that so long as the bread, the milk, and the meat and veg were in the supermarket, city people didn't give a rat's arse about where it all came from. They just looked on farmers who complained as whingeing cockies.
"Nothing has changed."
Nothing but muddy pools left in Angledoon
ANGLEDOOL is 60 kilometres north of Lightning Ridge and 12 kilometres south of the Queensland border. It was founded in 1870 and used to have 3000 people, locals say. It also had five pubs, two stores, a memorial hall, a school, a police station and an Aboriginal mission. It now has 36 people, 20 occupied dwellings and two open rubbish pits. The hall is still there, sort of. It is very decrepit. The police station, the stores and the school are long gone. So, too, the mission. The last pub burnt down 30 years ago.
Something else Angledool used to have was a quite stunning river, the Narran, that fed into the heritage-listed Narran Lake wetlands 140 kilometres south-west. Now the river's gone, too. The cotton farms upstream, across the border, have taken its water.
Quite legally, it seems.
All that is left of the Narran River near Angledool, if you walk far enough upstream, is a series of steeply banked, shrinking waterholes, dead freshwater mussels, and choking weed growth. The water stinks but some things still live in it, including "protected" long-necked turtles. Angledool's Alan Guihot found a 12-kilogram Murray cod dead in the mud a few weeks ago. It had tried to slide from one pool to another. Sun-baked slide marks and turtle tracks are still visible in the river bed.
A 2002 "fact" sheet, issued by Commonwealth bureaucrats, lists the Narran Lakes as "a wetland of international significance well-known for its water bird populations". It adds: "The area is particularly important for Aboriginal people, and graziers depend on floods for their livelihoods." Well, not any more they don't. What the "fact" sheet delicately calls "off-river storages upstream", have reduced the Narran River's "median annual flows" by 74 per cent. That was five years ago.
The authors should take another look.
Two years earlier, in July 2000, ABC television's 7.30 Report told viewers: "The water has been trapped upstream, where huge Queensland cotton farms have been licensed to harvest floodwaters. Just a few months ago, the bulldozers at Cubbie Station were working flat out, finishing off massive dams which can now store twice as much water as contained in Sydney Harbour."
Queensland's state environment minister at the time, Rod Welford, told the program: "The bulk of scientific opinion now acknowledges that in Queensland, in the Condamine-Ballone [river] system [that feeds south into the Narran River and NSW's Darling River system], we're overtaxing the system. The question is, how do we make an effective and satisfactory adjustment?"
That was seven years ago.
Seven years later and the three governments - federal, NSW and Queensland - are still fiddling while the rivers and the wetlands die. Coalition interparty politics and Labor inertia have have found no "effective and satisfactory adjustment" to "unblock" the "over-taxed system" north of the Queensland border. Drought and climate change have only compounded the "problem".
However, what Angledool does have is Michelle Pymble. She has two preschool daughters and works two days a week in Lightning Ridge. Her husband works on a property three hours away and comes home every fortnight. They moved to Lightning Ridge from Sydney's Peakhurst 13 years ago and they've been in Angledool since 2001. They have a two-storey mudbrick house, with television, air-conditioning and a home computer, and they wouldn't live anywhere else.
On October 17, Pymble, as secretary of the Angledool Progress Association, wrote to (among others) Senator Bill Heffernan, in part: "The Narran River, which the residents of Angledool rely on for water for washing, has approximately two weeks water left. In the past it has been released from St George [dam] in Queensland. We have not received any water for more than 580 days. We are hoping you would be able to help us."
People rang people, emails were exchanged, and the Brewarrina Shire Council, already alerted, organised for a water tanker to truck in water once a week. Each Angledool residence is to get, on average, 882 litres a person. Each house pays, with a 90 per cent state subsidy, $3-plus per thousand litres. The first water arrived last Sunday.
Heffernan arrived on Tuesday. But like the rain, nobody knows when the water from upstream might arrive in the Narran River. Moving Queensland's politicians is as difficult as moving its cotton farmers.
Alan Ramsey
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/11/02/1193619142372.html"