Submitted by rickeyre on
(This item is my contribution to Blog Action Day 2010, whose topic this year is "Water".)
Australia is being confronted with a national dilemma which has a major impact on its society and the environment, and it will take a huge amount of wisdom, courage, co-operation and, yes, pain to reach a stable outcome.
Submitted by rickeyre on
I have always been a vigorous supporter of the national interest taking precedence over states' rights in this country. The Australian Constitution, while in many ways robust and successful, was also a document of compromise, with the six states ceding specific areas of responsibility to the Commonwealth, and retaining everything else.
Submitted by rickeyre on
"...if it doesn't rain in sufficient volume over the next six to eight weeks, there will be no water allocations for irrigation purposes in the [Murray-Darling] Basin."
- John Winston Howard, press conference, 19.4.07
It would be easy to see this as another example of the PM playing politics and thus response with the line Howard to Farmers: Drop Dead. But it's a problem much more genuine and more serious than that.
Submitted by rickeyre on
Woohoo! We've made another worldwide top ten!
The Murray-Darling river system has been listed by the WWF as one of the world's top ten rivers at risk of dying. Up there with plenty of heavyweights, including the Ganges, Yangtze, Danube, Nile and the Mekong.
The World Wide Fund for Nature takes up the s
