Homo Sapiens.
The Ultimate Environmental Vandal.
Never mind, when it`s gone it`s gone.
Forever

Another "Oh no! We are doomed" piece of nonsense. With the obligatory give a few million bucks to some self serving, left wing bunch of nut jobs.
The sooner we have a tax on the apostles of doom rather than feeding them the better!

Wow can we get these people over to South Oz to do the same thing with the Murray mouth. It needs this treatment & quickly.

Otherwise the article sounds like an attempt to find some tax payer funded employment for the hordes of basically useless environmental scientists our universities insist on turning out each year.

The Gippsland Lakes are a very healthy ecosystem, even if different to what it was before Europeans. Lakes Entrance prawns are the sweetest you'll get anywhere, and as the article shows, there's a diversity of marine as opposed to aquatic biota. By contrast, the artificial freshwater Lake Alexandrina is stuffed, a big mulloway fishery was destroyed when they built the barrages, and ecologists want to deprive food growing irrigators of water to maintain their artificial duckpond. They claim it's naturally fresh, when Sturt wrote that it was salty, and reported that he saw a seal in the lake! What a wonderful world! George Orwell was prescient about politics in regard to socioeconomics, but he understandably failed to predict the incredible rise of environazis.

A number of issues. First, rainfall numbers are down and massively increased population pressures require increased food production. And only possible, if we use some of "OUR" fresh water to grow food.

We waste most of the storm water runoff, which is allowed to flash flood to waste. When instead it could be stored in the environment to force down the salt water table, iron out some of the peaks and troughs/water flows in the rierune system, massively improve on farm production.

Send all our waste water/treated effluent inland and use is in underground applications to support above ground, big water use agriculture. Rice, cotton, coffee, bamboo, fruit farming etc.

Finally we need to bite several bullets, one of them being nuclear power and as MSR's that'd massively reduce the price of electricity!

Which simply has to stop carrying passengers!

Like State governments, who dip the hand into the till to remove essential operating capital; and price gouging foreigners, who do far worse.

We need to go back to a mindset, which saw this as an essential service. not a government money tree, or captive market!

[And housing as a human right, not a captive market, screwed for every penny!]

With that done, then maybe we can afford, deionisation dialysis desalination and the 90% potable water and quadruple volumes for the same outlay we'd produce; and use it to at least put enough fresh into a freshwater irrigation environment. Then let the river run.

As opposed to dredging the entrance to keep it wet!

The fresh water run/routine flushes, is all that keeps this environment healthy, and maintains the fish nursery, we need to maintain fish stocks, that are maintained alone by the debri washed down with every fresh water run!

If farming doesn't then need the same water? And it wouldn't if supported by new space age deionization dialysis desalination/reassigned effluent? Then maybe the natural river flow can, once again, do the job the dredge is doing now, but with fresh water!?
Alan B.

Empirical evidence of substance proves beyond reasonable doubt the Gippsland Lakes are not healthy because that ecosystem is not producing enough small fish to feed ocean fish and other animals including whales.

I think the article is good.

However green organizations have let the damage and destruction happen.

Hopefully good sensible government will now see the consequences including under-nutrition and associated disease and early death among seafood dependent Pacific Islands people.

This is not just a Gippsland Lakes problem.
Devastated seagrass nurseries in Western Port Bay and Corner Inlet as well as in Port Phllip Bay and The Coorong in SA and worldwide are all supposed to be supplying food for migratory fish.

Fish are not immune to starvation.
Animals do not breed successfully when impacted by food shortage.
No wonder fishing restrictions have fundamentally failed to prevent ongoing and worsening depletion.
Overfishing is not the cause.

In 1980's I reported fish depletion and starvation of penguins involving mass mortality though Minister Joan Kirner at the time said no. A scientific study later revealed primary starvation due to food deprivation.

I returned again to Aus last night, shocked after feeling disgusted seeing more Pacific Islands children eating rice or potato only at almost every meal, fish maybe once weekly.
Amino acid protein deficiency is occurring in seafood dependent humans, not malnutrition due to starvation.

Loss of estuary seagrass nurseries is the problem, coupled with wrong or gagged advice.