Labor shows it's not easy being green

AUSTRALIANS are about to be hit with the spiralling cost of Labor's unholy alliance with the Greens.

Voters - already paying well over the odds for their power, and with the price of electricity continuing to soar as Labor state governments attempt to buy the votes of inner-urban leftists - will be slugged with rising food prices as environmentalists demand the destruction of the Murray-Darling food bowl, in line with the recommendations of a report released on Friday by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. Communities and regional economies built up over the years along the banks of the Murray and its tributaries will be destroyed to comply with the authority's environmental demands and meet Labor's desire to address the stipulations of the political class that runs the party. Like the flawed climate-change reasoning that is driving the price of electricity sharply upwards, the thinking behind the Murray-Darling report is equally dodgy. Murray-Darling Basin Authority chairman Michael Taylor has already crab-walked away from his own report's estimate that only 800 to 1200 jobs would be lost, saying "a lot more work" should be encouraged. This reflects another failure by the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments to manage policy over the past three years. When the Howard government appointed the authority in 2007, it budgeted $10 billion for the process but the Labor states, notably Victoria, played politics and thwarted progress. When the Rudd government took office, however, nothing was done for a further 18 months to get the project back on track. Then the Rudd government, followed by the Gillard government, delayed the release of this report to ensure that its findings would not be known before the recent election. Like the Rudd government's grandiose $43 billion NBN - Not Bloody Necessary - broadband policy, there has been no cost-benefit analysis performed on the proposals. Opposition spokesman on the Murray Senator Simon Birmingham told The Sunday Telegraph yesterday the authority's report was a "lightweight document". "Penny Wong and company wasted time before appointing a chairman and a committee," he said. "Labor spent more on buying water and less on providing water-saving infrastructure, and now the communities are going to pay the price for this approach. "It has done nothing to ensure the safety of the nation's food-production capacity." Birmingham said he was concerned at the lack of any breakdown of figures behind the vague economic claims made in the report. "This report is based on sums done by the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics (ABARE), but the ABARE report has not been released for scrutiny," he said. More secrecy from a Labor government that promised a new regime of openness and transparency. Birmingham said the lack of back-up data made it almost impossible for people in the communities immediately affected to assess with any precision the flow-on effect from the authority's report. He was equally scathing of the report's coverage of environmental issues, noting that it dealt only with the Murray and ignored dozens of other environmental assets intric- ately linked to the watercourse. "At a minimum, given the time this draft has been in preparation, the Government should have had a response prepared that would have addressed the effect on food production," Birmingham said. Next week, the authority will have to face those who have the most to lose: front-line food producers in communities such as Shepparton, Deniliquin, Griffith and Renmark. These families, a long way from the environmentalists in Newtown or Richmond, will want to know why the Government has done so little to provide the food basket of the nation with the sort of economic security that $10 billion of infrastructure might have bought. They will want to know why the Rudd-Gillard government has not considered building a single dam, or embracing a single water-harvesting project, that might have saved some of the water that is now flowing down the Murray to evaporate in the Lower Lakes or run out to sea. They will ask why the Government has failed to understand that all the water in the Murray begins as rain, and that when it rains, as it has done this year, there is sufficient surplus rainwater to secure the nation's food-producing regions for many years - if it is harvested and stored for the drought years. Simon Birmingham says the Government's priorities have been wrong, and he's correct. Splashing out money on buybacks at the expense of delivering water-saving efficiencies makes no sense whatsoever. It's short-sighted in the extreme to force Australians to import foodstuffs when we have the land and we have the water resources - if they are sensibly husbanded - to grow what we need here. The Rudd-Gillard government's handling of the Murray-Darling water issue is yet another example of Labor's inability to manage policy. Just as Julia Gillard's new climate-change committee has only one focus - the introduction of a tax based on fixing a price for carbon emissions - so, too, has the Murray-Darling Basin Authority come up with the only option. The common thread linking both is the Labor government's passion for crawling to the Greens and obsequiously opting to give its political partners the driver's wheel in these policy areas. The authority explicitly put the environmental demands of the Murray before any other goal in the preparation of its report. In doing so, it chose to take the dark-Green view that human activity should take second place to an idealistic dream of how the world would be without pesky people. Up and down the Murray, and in the aisles of grocery stores across the nation, those pesky people should tell Labor they will not sit in the cold dark or pay through the nose for their food, merely so Greens can sleep comfortably at night. Before the last election, voters were warned that a vote for the Greens was a vote for Labor. Now the nation is paying a truly punishing price for those votes.