Senate to look at Murray water buybacks

Another parliamentary inquiry will be set up examining plans to cut water use along
the troubled Murray-Darling Basin.
The push comes as the opposition accuses Labor of launching a direct assault on the
economic welfare of regional Australia.
Liberal senator Bill Heffernan, a farmer, succeeded on Thursday in setting up a
Senate inquiry to probe the social and economics effects of water buybacks.
The inquiry will also examine the implications for food and agricultural production,
and follows two other inquiries already commissioned.
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has continued his assault on Labor's plan to restore
environmental flows to the Murray-Darling river system.
"The Murray-Darling Basin plan as it currently stands - that is not economic
reform," he told parliament.
"It is a direct assault on the economic welfare of regional Australia."
But federal Water Minister Tony Burke said a year-long process to reform water
management would quell some fears in rural communities.
"Some of the fear that has been around over the last few weeks, people are going to
discover that wasn't well founded," he told ABC Radio.
His assurances appear to have gone unheeded as the chairman of the Murray-Darling
Basin Authority, Mike Taylor, addressed hundreds of farmers in central Melbourne on
Thursday.
The Collins Street meeting was more subdued than recent consultations in southern
NSW, but emotions were still raw.
Andrew Hermiston, an irrigator from the NSW Riverina town of Deniliquin, broke down
as he described the effect of the drought and water cutbacks.
"I have no faith in the water managers of the Murray-Darling Basin," he told the
meeting.
Mr Hermiston, whose his family has worked in the region for more than 90 years, said
his town was at rock bottom.
His wife Robyn told the gathering her husband was on "the verge of a nervous
breakdown".
Earlier, in nearby Spring Street, green groups staged a silent protest on the steps
of the Old Treasury building, where a man dressed in a Murray cod fish suit appeared
in a bath tub, thirsty for water.
The latest parliamentary inquiry comes on top of two others already commissioned.
The Murray-Darling Basin Authority earlier this month responded to irate irrigation
communities by ordering a fresh study into the social and economic effects of
restoring water flows.
The basin authority's new study is scheduled to be completed by March 15 next year.
The authority's study will cover similar ground to a House of Representatives
inquiry previously announced by Labor, which is due to report by the end of April
2011.
But this didn't stop politicians on Thursday from pushing to have their own inquiries.
Independent MP Bob Katter said he would introduce draft laws to halt water buybacks
in the basin until the social effects of the plan were considered.
Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce successfully moved an amendment to Senator
Heffernan's bill to examine the Water Act.
It was carried, 33 votes to 32 despite opposition from the Greens and South
Australian independent Nick Xenophon.