Isherwood: “The MDBA—sneaks and liars”

Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood today castigated the Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) following their sham “public meeting” in Mildura on 10^th February.

“The MDBA are sneaks and liars who intend to take no notice of the people whose lives they are destroying through their Green Fascist plot to smash food production in the Basin,” Isherwood charged.

“During last year’s ‘consultations’ in the Basin, residents turned out en masse to castigate the MDBA’s obvious intent to simply shut down most of the Basin, as per the green fascist Water Act 2007 supervised by former Goldman Sachs boss and former Water Minister Malcolm Turnbull, but actually dictated by Prince Philip’s Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. Facing the assured extinction of even entire towns, 5,000 turned out in 2010 in Griffith alone to blast the MDBA, while 12,000 fronted up again just before Christmas.

“Therefore, this time around, the MDBA simply rigged the ‘consultations’ such that they would take place largely behind closed doors, with only handfuls of ‘stakeholders’ who, according to one local source, are caving in to the MDBA’s plan out of fear of the repercussions to the community if they don’t. Compared to the dozens of massively-attended meetings from one end of the Basin to the other during the first MDBA consultation period in 2010-11, this time there have been almost no public meetings to speak of.

“Typical of this process is what just happened in Mildura last week, on which I got firsthand reports from CEC activists who attended the meeting. The MDBA scheduled this ‘public meeting’ for a Friday afternoon in the middle of harvest time, when—as they well knew—it was impossible for most irrigators to show up. Indeed, only around 50 of those who did show were farmers, while total attendance was down to only 250 this year from 2,000 last year. In fact, the vast majority of the hundreds of Mildura residents to whom our organisers spoke, were convinced that the MDBA had scheduled the meeting at the time and in the manner they did, precisely in order to suppress attendance. Indeed, the MDBA booked a much smaller venue than last year, and even advertised the wrong meeting date in the local paper.

“Furthermore, the meetings are stage-managed: the audience members are forced to ask their questions in batches, so that Tony Burke and Craig Knowles can pick and choose which questions they answer.”

Isherwood said it was obvious that Water Minister Tony Burke and MDBA chairman Craig Knowles have no intention whatsoever of ‘consulting’ communities in the Basin.

“Burke and Knowles are hatchet men for the fascist green drive—instigated by the British Crown itself—to strip away the irrigated agriculture and other industrial achievements that enable Australia to support a growing population.

“The very existence of the Murray-Darling irrigation communities such as Mildura flies in the face of the Crown’s green lies that ‘dry’ Australia can’t be developed, and instead point to Australia’s potential to be a food bowl for the whole world. For that reason the Crown has assigned their MDBA stooges to crush it.”

Isherwood gave as an example Burke’s reaction to a question about the strongly-worded denunciation of the Water Act 2007 and the entire MDBA process by Harvard University professor John Briscoe, one of the world’s leading water experts and the former Senior Water Advisor at the World Bank, who led the international “peer review” of the MDBA’s original “Guide to the Basin Plan”.

In a 24^th February, 2011 submission to the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs’ “Provisions of the Water Act 2007” inquiry, Briscoe denounced the Water Act 2007 and the political process surrounding it as a “political deception”, driven by the [orchestrated] rise of the city-based “environmental vote”. He characterised the MDB Basin Plan process as “we will run the numbers and science behind closed doors and then tell you the result”, and reported, “In all my years of public service, often in very sensitive environments, I have never been subjected to such an elaborate ‘confidentiality’ process as that embodied in the preparation of the Guide to the Basin Plan.” Briscoe urged the government to scrap Malcolm Turnbull’s Water Act and start again, this time including input from the farmers and experts who made the MDB a world-class model of efficient water management.

When challenged at the Mildura meeting on Briscoe’s submission, Burke sneered, “I will admit, on the John Briscoe stuff, I am more interested in the views that I get directly from communities, than an American university academic telling me what Australian law should say.” (To which an interjector correctly pointed out, “That’s because you choose the science to back you up … You just choose the models to support your argument.”)

Isherwood continued, “Tony Burke’s answer fooled nobody who was present at the Mildura meeting, whose concerns he’d spent the entire meeting fobbing off. It was a big ‘screw you’ to all the Basin communities, who are well and truly getting his message.”

Local grower Don Marciano who was present at the Mildura meeting told the CEC, “They’re not genuine—we know that. This is just to soften us down, quieten us down, and see if they can get their agenda through.”

“But Basin residents can’t win this fight on their own”, Isherwood concluded, “especially when the MDBA has essentially shut down any ‘consultations’ precisely in order to avoid popular outrage. This is really a fight for all Australians. We can’t just stand by whilst the communities who grow our food, and feed millions beside, are destroyed by an out-and-out Green fraud—the whole ‘humans-upset-the-balance-of-nature’ ecosystems garbage. And one way you can fight, is to order a copy of the CEC’s new video, ‘Ecosystems’: A Genocidal Fraud, and make sure all your friends and your local state and federal politicians watch it. That video, which is a review of a devastating 2011 BBC film on the same subject, proves beyond the slightest doubt, that the concept of ‘ecosystems’ upon which the Water Act 2007 was drafted is a witting fraud cooked up by arch-British imperialist and eugenicist Sir Arthur Tansley back in the 1930s, and that it has since been proven by competent ecologists to be utter hogwash.”