Monday 10 September 2012

Surprise, surprise! Those water raiders are back in 2012 and wanting a bite of the Clarence River Catchment Area


The second submission publicly listed by the NSW Legislative Council Standing Committee on Economic Development’s Inquiry into the Adequacy of Water Storages in NSW is rather predictably a re-submission of a 1984 plan to divert up to twenty-two
per cent, or over one million megalitres annually, of freshwater from the Clarence River catchment and send it into the Murray-Darling Basin river system.

Submission number three urges consideration of additional water storage on NSW coastal rivers, identifying the Clarence River by name.

While the NSW Farmers Association mentioned in its submission a supposed ability
to recapture water from east coast rivers and, many other submissions made ambit
claims for increasing the number of dams and augmentation of existing dams.

Just as predictably, at least one accepted submission opposing water diversion from the Clarence River catchment is not publicly listed by an inquiry committee dominated by political parties not known to be sympathetic to the Clarence Valley in a ratio of four to two.

Which makes one wonder just how many other submissions saying no to Clarence River water diversion have been received, but not published, by this standing committee.

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