There have been many suggestions of what to do to manage this river system and yet there is a declining river where unless excellent ways to bring in good management for this river system is discovered and put into place very soon the river will become almost impossible to bring it back into a healthy state in our lifetime. There has been many political plans and programs adopted with results that have not delivered the water security the river needs. This is the era of ALP being in charge of establishing a Murray Darling Plan and here is the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wumfo3AJ57c

To understand the system, we need to understand the people who live within the system and each group along the river has different issues and not all of the issues are considered are considered with their due weight. How does one evaluate the true weight for each demand upon the system. See this link to understand the people and the needs of the system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18MM0MbIkkA

Here is one of the documentaries done on the river https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrcy3fNBcwk

Part of the plan to manage the system is to manage the amount of water extracted from the river system and here are some links that address some of these issues https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsdGZZSaUXw and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oR0GLDiPxUs

Some other issues which it is hard to find a lot of evidence on is the effect of the mining industry has on the water of the Murray Darling Basin. Mining uses a lot of water, and the Coal Seam Gas extraction can also bring to the system huge challenges. Until we consider that water is a valuable resource that needs to be protected and that water is not to be wasted. While we may need to control the flow somewhat it seems that we ought to stop blocking the river with on river dams and commence creating off river dams. The benefit of the off-river dam is that they can be located in better chosen places than a on the river blocking or restricting the river’s flow. Such dams ought to dug deep so as to limit the evaporation from these storage areas and the river can continue to run as only the excessive flow will be extracted and the environmental flow will continue to deliver greater health to the river.

During the 1930’s a plan was proposed to connect the coastal river dams to the inland dams so that water could be moved from significantlly full dams to dams with depleated water supply especially when there was a potential large rain fall event predicted. The advantages of such connections is to alow space to collect the runnoff from large rainfall events and distribute to and drought prone area, in this way limiting the flooding in the significant rain fall area by having an increased storage capacity and as such reduce the potential flooding impact. If the dams were created as being off river dams then the health of rivers would not be advereslly affected during dryer seasons as the normwl flow of the river would continue.

Policy position:

The Christians for Community will prevent excessive extraction of water from rivers that will adversly affect the river flow; we must keep our river flowing as they are  the life blood of the fsrming communities that supply us all with the food we need to eat. We will seek to commence connecting dams to transfer water between dams as necessary and where possible convert on river dams to off river dams.

I am certain many have the capacity to contribute to this policy development so that we have the best policy we can get so we will bring back the best of the river basin we possibly can. Please send your contributions to my email at: ad***@*4c.com