Letters to the editor

What we have learnt

• Not all the Campaspe community was affected by the recent flood disaster, but it still had impacts:

— inaccessible roads;

— disruption of services;

— disruption of businesses and tourism;

— postponement of sporting events; and

— increased stress levels.

• SES volunteers came from outside the Campaspe region, which meant many had to rely on local knowledge.

• Some infrastructure was not able to cope:

— drains

— access roads such as Warren St, Ogilvie Ave and Murray Valley Hwy

— transport for food supplies.

• Community networks were able to step up operation with delivery of food and medical supplies and emergency accommodation.

• Some electronic systems still operated, such as mobile phones, computers, Facebook community page and TV coverage.

• Some businesses went out of operation due to lack of tourism, while not adversely impacted by flood damage itself.

• Some householders were told to evacuate, but some refused because flood levels had not reached the height of their properties above sea-level.

• Others were not sure how to manage evacuation because of the following concerns:

— where to go;

— what to take;

— whether their property would be looted;

— how long they would be away; and

— having nobody to look after their pets and animals.

• Schools in Echuca were closed due to accessibility issues, which adversely affected many students, especially after the COVID-19 lockdowns. Some Year 12 students had to be taken by bus to Bendigo to sit their exams. Rochester school students were taken by bus to Bendigo, where they were well looked after.

• Some properties were uninsured because they were built in flood zones. Others became uninsurable.

• Many residents/business owners have suffered stress and health issues because of disruption to their lives and businesses.

• Financial issues such as whether their homes and/or businesses are now unable to be saved.

Questions we need to ask

• Where to go now? Stay or move away?

• Will buyback schemes be put in place?

• Will insurance premiums be increased for places not in flood zones?

• Has the environment been adversely affected, such as the river systems — Murray, Campaspe, Goulburn and Broken rivers — with the softening of banks and fallen trees?

• What about allowing wave boats to again compete on the Murray?

• Will Warren St and Ogilvie Ave be upgraded to allow traffic to flow through to Echuca?

• Will the EPA allow private tips to continue to collect and store disused rubbish?

• Will Campaspe Shire’s landfill area will be able to cope with future disasters?

• Will the Victorian Government have to enact by-laws to prevent houses being built in flood zones? What about present houses?

• Who is liable for allowing present buildings to be built in flood zones? What about fire zones?

• Does a stock of portable houses need to be built and kept for future disasters?

• What about temporary housing for residents who have now lost their homes?

• Do storage facilities need to be constructed, or allocated, for future disasters with proper security arrangements in place for residents’ property?

• Who pays? Who owns the emergency housing and storage facilities?

• How adequate are temporary evacuation centres for major disaster events? Do they have adequate:

— supplies of bedding;

— kitchen equipment such as cutlery, crockery, dishwashing facilities;

— medical supplies for individual needs;

— water supplies;

— toilet and shower facilities;

— insect repellents; and

— sandbags.

• Where do we place levees? Should they be temporary or permanent? How should they be constructed?

Marilyn Jacksch,

Campaspe Community Association Inc secretary

You city people don’t speak for us in the bush

In reference to the arguments about banning duck shooting.

Let me first say, I am not a duck shooter, nor in fact a shooter of anything.

My comment regards the annoying habit of people quoting statistics like “75 per cent of all Australians are against animal culling, ducks, ‘roos, whatever, 75 per cent are for establishing forest parks, banning woodcutting, camping, etc, 75 per cent are unconcerned about effective water management of our rivers”, and so on and so forth.

The hard facts are that 69 per cent of all Australians live in major cities and 80 per cent live in the coastal zone.

These people couldn’t care less about the bush. Do your surveys by all means, but can we cut the misleading, emotive language?

Can we use the terms regulated hunting season or managed culling instead of “senseless slaughter, cowboys with guns", and so on? Can we refer to the establishment of bush areas as being reserves (selected use only for selected activities at certain times) instead of “parks” which infers playgrounds and swings and access for all?

I would dearly love to have a letter printed in a major Melbourne newspaper that says “the majority of transport infrastructure construction is happening in Melbourne, let’s put a 400 per cent tax on Melbourne users.

“Bay fishing is morally wrong and causing the innocent fish great pain — let’s ban all bay fishing!

“Most crime occurs in Melbourne. I propose a 9pm curfew for everybody!”

Ridiculous? True! But I don’t care because I don’t live there, it doesn’t affect me!

So please, in closing, try not to use that “75 per cent of all Australians” rubbish when you are talking about living in the bush.

The vast majority of those 75 per cent have never been within five metres of a duck, run into a roo in their new cars or tried to cut a bit of wood for a campfire.

Lance Carrington,

Echuca

Perrottet gets vaping, it’s time for an election promise

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet recently revealed he used vaping to help him quit smoking, joining more than one million Australians who are now living longer and healthier lives as a result.

The premier understands how beneficial vaping can be for adult smokers who just can’t quit. Now it’s time for his party to align with his view.

In NSW, smoking rates have stagnated, with 12 per cent of adults still smoking, according to the 2021 NSW Population Health Survey. Smoking rates in NSW declined by a meagre 1.8 per cent per year in the past decade. This means adult smokers are simply no longer quitting deadly cigarettes.

Current policies are no longer working, yet a product proven to be twice as effective as nicotine replacement therapies at helping smokers quit and 95 per cent safer remains almost impossible to legally access in NSW.

In 2021, the Federal Government embarked on an ill-fated voyage down the path of prohibition with a prescription-only model that banned vapes as consumer products.

While our premier may have a prescription for vaping, an overwhelming majority of NSW vapers don’t. For many, it is simply too expensive or logistically challenging to find a doctor willing to prescribe it and a pharmacy that will dispense it.

The result has been a thriving black market state-wide. Almost every corner shop will sell you an illicit dodgy disposable vape under the counter. They are not licensed. They are not regulated. They are operating away from government oversight and happily selling to young people.

This black market has only been created because vaping products are effectively banned. Meanwhile, deadly cigarettes continue to be sold legally at thousands of retail outlets across the state.

Unfortunately, the knee-jerk reaction of the Federal Government has been to propose even more restrictive policies on vaping. This will only stimulate the black market further and make the problem worse. Young people will continue to access these devices and adult smokers will still be forced to contend with the black market.

You can’t regulate the black market. The only way to eliminate it is to regulate vaping products as consumer products, as has been done in every other western country. Once legalised, regulated vapes can be sold by licensed vendors with strict age verification, and harsh penalties and loss of licence for underage sales.

In New Zealand, smoking rates declined by an unprecedented 33 per cent in just two years since vaping was regulated and legalised in August 2020. Impressive reductions in smoking rates from vaping have also been seen in the United Kingdom and United States. And an effectively regulated market has minimised youth access.

Australia’s prohibitionist policies on vaping show the Federal Government still doesn’t get it.

With the upcoming election, state parties have the chance to prove they do. The NSW Government could amend state laws and allow the legal sale of regulated vape products to smokers as strictly regulated adult consumer products.

The NSW Greens recently backed legalising vaping to reduce harms among young people.

What about the Liberal and Labor parties? The ball’s in your court.

Dr Colin Mendelsohn,

Australian Tobacco Harm Reduction Association founding chairman

The art of psychology

Psychology is a study of functions of the human mind, especially those affecting the behaviour.

There are arguments and hostilities between people, because they have firmly set minds and are unwilling to learn.

Basic codes of social and international conduct (etiquettes) should be established and adhered to.

Children should be taught how to co-exist peacefully from an early age.

Jiri Kolenaty,

Rushworth

Don’t sell your water entitlements to government

I have been an agricultural property valuer for more than 30 years. Working mostly through the irrigation districts of northern Victoria and southern NSW, I am also an accredited specialist water valuer.

Following the Federal Water Minister’s announcement about the resumption of buybacks last week, I have some free advice for irrigators.

Don’t sell your water entitlements to the government.

Most commodities have been through a period of profitability over the past few years. Asset prices have mostly strengthened appreciably.

Few irrigators will be under the severe financial pressure they were under when buybacks were last unleashed on our communities.

Those buybacks coincided with the millennium drought, and the combined impact was devastating to witness.

I hope that few farmers will be pressured by their banks to sell water assets, as they were last time.

However, if irrigators do need to cash in some water assets, they can always trade them on the open water market.

There is a highly traded, ready market for most water assets. Most classes of water are still trading at very high levels, despite the record rainfalls of 2022-23.

The government is very unlikely to be the only buyer for your water.

I have met very few irrigators who have not suffered vendor’s remorse from selling their water to the government.

When conditions improved, they could not afford to buy back water to run their farms. They often committed their farms to a downward spiral of decreasing production that few could recover from.

The benefit of selling water to another irrigator is that the water stays available for agricultural production.

The farmer who buys your water will buy seed, fertiliser, machinery and labour to grow the food and fibre critical for our national food security and ease cost of living pressure for staples such as milk, fruit, rice and milled grain products.

All this means local jobs in your town and irrigation district.

During the last round of buybacks we saw sporting teams fold, schools close, factories shut their doors and businesses disappear, right across the southern Murray-Darling Basin.

So the message is clear. If you wish to stop being an irrigator, think of your friends on the farms around you, in the town where you buy your groceries, at the school where you sent your kids and at the sporting club you love to support on the weekends.

They are the ones who will suffer if you sell your water to the government, who will take it out of production forever.

If you are ready to sell up, but you care about the future of your community, the best decision you can make is simple — don’t sell your water entitlements to the government.

David McKenzie,

Shepparton

Where do your alliances lie?

Having attended the recent Griffith Business Chamber’s meet the candidates forum, I believe that most of the audience would be unsure of where most of the candidates’ alliances would lie in the event that there was a hung parliament.

In fact, it was blatantly obvious that some of the candidates were indeed a stalking horse for an ALP/Greens NSW government following the election.

Voters should carefully consider their choice of candidate because a Labor/Green government would withdraw funding from our region, would abolish the regional health ministry and would actively support water buybacks.

When Federal Labor was elected, not only did PM Anthony Albanese withdraw funding that was earmarked for the regions by the former Coalition government, but he mocked the Nationals as he did so.

Jock Munro,

National Party Griffith branch chair

Does the Federal Government care about basin communities?

Buybacks are the worst form of water recovery, but for governments with little care factor regarding their impact on communities, they are the quickest and easiest.

I feel for my farming colleagues and their communities in southern NSW who are about to go through another round of buybacks under Water Minister Tanya Plibersek’s so-called ‘Bridging the Gap’ program.

It appears this is just her ‘foot in the door’, as Ms Plibersek willingly inflicts pain on primarily Coalition seats for nothing other than political gain. It is certainly not for environmental reasons, as the figures clearly show.

While Ms Plibersek may claim she is recovering this water in the easiest possible manner (despite being provided with various other solutions) because it is required for the environment, that is not the case.

You see, governments already hold in excess of the 2750Gl of environmental water they claim they need to recover under the basin plan, as well as the 450Gl of ‘upwater’ demanded (unfairly and unnecessarily) by the SA Government before it would sign up to the plan.

Page 55 of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority document Annual Water Take Report 2021-2022, held environmental water’ (HEW) entitlements tells us that at June 2022 this figure was 4622.5Gl. When the ‘Bridging the Gap’ 49.2Gl is recovered, they will have 4671.7Gl and a massive 5121.7Gl after ‘upwater’ recovery.

Ms Plibersek could, of course, quote this figure and correctly state that no more water needs to be recovered for our environment. But that would not suit the political purpose. She could also state the obvious fact that recovering more water is a pointless exercise because it cannot be delivered due to constraints issues. Instead, it will be stored in dams and, when released, cause large flood flows.

The indisputable facts in our basin plan debacle, which are not being aired publicly, are that environmental water authorities already hold a vast amount of water which they simply cannot deliver. While the public is led to believe the environment is struggling to recover 2750Gl, this, in fact, is a long way from the uncomfortable truth.

The basin plan, and environmental water recovery in general, has become a political debacle and governments and bureaucrats who have created the mess appear hellbent on refusing to take responsibility, instead blaming irrigators and accepting that rural communities need to be the sacrificial lambs to cover for their mistakes.

Is it any wonder our faith in politicians and their bureaucracies gets shattered when they are prepared to sacrifice the wellbeing of rural communities, and Australian food production in general, for no other purpose than to win city-based environmental votes and placate those in important SA marginal seats.

Jan Beer,

Yea

Pocock strikes again

So, "Independent" ACT Senator David Pocock wants to support Federal Labor treasurer Jim Chalmers' "modest" attack on successful/thrifty seniors' (having already paid the highest taxes, thus, saving everyday Aussie taxpayers funding many others' old-age pensions) superannuation; and whose Albanese-led Labor (supposedly the “people's”) government has cut out meals on wheels and other disadvantaged/needy seniors' funding/benefits?

Well, thanks again to you, David Pocock.

With you having already acquiesced to Albanese-led Labor's IR laws, Australia is already going back to the chaos of the 1970s Whitlam years’ wrecking of our economy, thus the Aussie working family’s security (and future generations' prospects) by radical unions, attacking (with knock-on effect) small to medium privately owned businesses.

So, very sadly, Senator Pocock, you delivered the thin edge of the radical union job/wealth-destroying wedge, precipitating the final nail in the already union-bashed — but a fraction of yesteryears’ Australian-made — manufacturing (and many another waning labour-intensive) sector’s coffin!

Now you want to help Labor hurt Australia's most successful (as well as struggling) seniors (and soon to be seniors)?

Howard Hutchins,

Chirnside Park

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