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The Forum > Article Comments > Voices from the river > Comments

Voices from the river : Comments

By Will Mooney, published 21/6/2013

The irrigation and farming lobbies have fought hard to resist Federal Government buy-backs for environmental flows. It's hard to imagine them embracing the idea of dedicated allocations for Indigenous communities.

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Would you add that any water rights granted shouldn't include the right to lease out part of their allocation ? In other words, that what people get, they use and strictly no more ? Fine with me, for people to have all the water they need, but not a free gift that they can sell off.

So given that Indigenous communities have no interest in economic enterprises that they actually have to work on themselves, how is that different from the present situation ?

Just wondering,

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Friday, 21 June 2013 9:06:02 AM
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Joe, I know of one aboriginal community which has grasped the nettle and now runs what I believe is a successful commercial enterprise. It is the Murrin Bridge community at Lake Cargelligo in central New South Wales. The are making a good drop of wine which sells under the name Murrin Bridge Connections. They would make good use of any water allocation.

Reference to it can be found at http://tracker.org.au/2011/04/new-beginning-for-the-first-aboriginal-winemakers/

David
Posted by VK3AUU, Friday, 21 June 2013 3:09:49 PM
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Hi David,

Yes, provided the people are actually doing the work themselves, and not 'leasing' out their resources to others for a fee, I'm happy if they get all the water they need.

But not if some hot-shot has got government funding for some grand scheme which will end up employing bugger-all aboriginal people but make a packet for some do-nothing 'Council' or committee members who get themselves in the position to skim off the benefits, and for life.

I will always support genuine self-determination, but NEVER support parasite, phony 'self-determination', where somebody else is doing all the work - and were in reality only a handful of Aboriginal people - the usual suspects - are getting all the benefits.

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Friday, 21 June 2013 4:01:51 PM
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A little over 200 years ago, Aboriginal communities controlled their water. Even so, there were territorial disputes and changing water and land rights/boundaries.
That was then, this is now.
I believe the biggest mistake we have made thus far, has been the privatisation of water and its over allocation.
The very next boom will be the dining boom, and that will depend on the lest costly harvesting and allocation of water.
We need to get past thinking about how to benefit a few privileged individuals, and feeding just 23 millions, and reset our mindset, on how to best capture multi-billion market share in the vastly more populous emerging economies and or Asia.
Labour costs in food production average around 16%.
The real impediments are the ever rising cost of energy, transport and water. The three fundamentals in food production and our ability to compete for market share.
Also, we see that around 20% of farms, family farms, are earning 85% of the on-farm income.
Yet we see a history, where conservative thinkers, have struggled mightily, to dismantle the family farm and replace it with a vastly less productive less profitable model; arguably, just for political purpose alone.
Denmark is a smaller less well resourced country, that exports its butter and pork to the rest of the world.
Its labour cost are either comparable or higher! Meaning, labour costs are not the problem!
The reason for their success is the collaborative model or cooperative capitalism.
The very same sort of collaboration that took a basically bankrupt, war ravaged Japan, and turned it into the second largest economy in the world.
And having reached that quite amazing pinnacle, set about dismantling it with Greed is good capitalism and its handmaiden individualism.
We need to see where we have gone wrong, and reset the mindset, to tried and proven success models. i.e., cooperation and collaboration!
As for allocating water?
It shouldn't matter whether we are taking about white or black farming or innovation.
Each application for rights from a very limited resource must be measured against need/merit, and production/environmental outcomes!
Rhrosty.
Posted by Rhrosty, Sunday, 23 June 2013 11:10:29 AM
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