Everyone acting too late for the Lower Murray to survive

Isn't it marvellous. After decades of warnings and years of inaction, suddenly the move is on to save the lower sections of the Murray River system.

It's almost laughable that independent Senator Nick Xenaphon is reported in The Age as calling on people power to save the Coorong and Lower Lakes.

Speaking at a protest meeting yesterday in the Murray River town of Goolwa, where about 2000 people observed a minute's silence for a river system dying from the bottom up, Senator Xenophon challenged federal Water Minister Penny Wong's recent assertion that no extra water could be found upstream to save the lakes.
"I say, Penny, look harder," Senator Xenophon said. He urged the rally, held in Alexander Downer's former seat of Mayo — which will be contested by Liberal Jamie Briggs at a federal byelection on September 6 — to use "people power" and public pressure to force the Federal Government to act.....
"Why should we sacrifice Storm Boy country so that big business can grow crops in the driest continent on earth?" Senator Xenophon said. "Why have we abandoned our international obligations to the lower lakes so that managed investment schemes can fatten the wallets of well-heeled city investors who couldn't find the Coorong on a map?"

Where was Nick Xenaphon and those 2,000 over the last six years? Probably still supporting the overallocation of water resources in their own state and local government areas.
Most were almost certainly not camping at the doors of then prime minister John Howard and then federal environment minister Malcolm Turnbull asking for them to act and act now.

Unfortunately for communities on the Lower Murray and the nation as a whole, the Murray Darling Basin Commission is correct when it states that water released from northern basin storage points would not make it down the length of the river system as far as the Lower Lakes in any appreciable volume.

It is of no use whatsoever to blame this state of affairs on the current Rudd Government, which has been in power for only nine and a half months.

The entire nation spent too much time heeding the expedient words of politicians of all persuasions, allowing the rapacious agendas of irrigators to hold sway and giving too much credence to climate change naysayers.

We have all killed the Murray Darling river system in its historical form.

It is now only a myth we can recount to our great-grandchildren.