Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release  5^th of December 2012

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au
 

As Australia destroys its water infrastructure,

China is completing the greatest water project in history

Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott teamed up to gut Australia’s food bowl last week, finalising Tony Burke’s Murray-Darling Basin Plan to strip farmers and irrigators of a quarter of the water they use to grow food for 60 million people.

On average, the Murray-Darling Basin has 32,800 gigalitres (Gl) of annual surface water inflows. Until this MDB Plan, in a good season farmers used 13,680 Gl, or 42 per cent—in many seasons they used far less.

The finalised plan permanently rips a combined 3,200 Gl of water out of productive farming, to add to the more than 19,000 Gl of untouched surface water that is already left to evaporation, to swamps, and to run out to sea.

Compare Australia’s act of national suicide, to China’s current project to guarantee its future food security, through an epic project to divert water from the south, where it is plentiful, to its grain belt in the dry north.

China’s South North Water Diversion (SNWD) project will divert, via three separate routes, 44,000 Gl of water—more water than the entire surface flow of the Murray-Darling Basin system:

• The Eastern Route will transport 14,800 Gl from the lower Yangtze River some 1,467 km north to Shandong and Hebei provinces and Tianjin, via the ancient Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, which was built starting 2,500 years ago; engineers completed a huge double tunnel beneath the Yellow River in January this year.
• The Central Route will divert 13,000 Gl from the greatly expanded reservoir at the Danjiang River, and transport it 1,432 km to great cities in the north, including Beijing.
• The Western Route, in the planning stage, will divert 17,000 Gl annually from the upper reaches of the Yangtze River to the Yellow River.

China is rapidly completing the first two man-made rivers of the SNWD. Ultimately it will divert 5-7 per cent of the Yangtze River Basin’s annual flow of one million gigalitres, to the arid North China Plain, and connect China’s two greatest rivers, the Yangtze and Yellow, to the Haihe and Huaihe rivers in the north. The SNWD will change China’s watersheds, by cutting across the west-to-east flow of China’s rivers.

Fittingly for such a serious project, China is not stuffing around with public-private partnerships or similar scams. The SNWD is government-funded: $22 billion has been spent as of the beginning of 2012, and another $10 billion will be spent this year. The project’s managers call 2012 the key period in the “three-year decisive battle” to get the water flowing north. Nothing like this project has been done before in China’s 5,000 years of history—or in the history of the world.

Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood said today, “China’s SNWD calls to mind the visionary projects conceived by great Australians such as Sydney Harbour Bridge builder Dr JJC Bradfield, and the recently deceased Professor Lance Endersbee, to divert the massive water volumes of northern Australia into watering the inland and drought-proofing the nation.

“For example, both Professor Endersbee’s conception of the Clarence River scheme, and an extension to the Bradfield Scheme for north Queensland, would have injected enough extra water into the Murray-Darling Basin to keep farming at full production even in drought times.

“China is showing it can be done,” he said, “so let’s finally do it here too, instead of letting green fascists and free traders shut down our existing infrastructure.”