We stopped the pipeline, now anything is possible
November 30, 2010
The only truly rural electorate to change hands from Labor to Liberal in Victoria on Saturday and with a massive swing too was Seymour. This swing was a resounding NO vote for the North-South Pipeline, that ultimate Bracks/Brumby folly which pilfered water from food producers and family farms, pushing it up and over the Great Dividing Range to a capital city that did not care to recycle or harvest its stormwater.
Nearly a billion dollars later, the pumps on the Goulburn River at Yea are silenced. In fact they have been silent since September, when I shamed Mr Brumby into turning them off as they backed up the flood waters, inundating small communities that might otherwise have stayed high and dry.
The sight of be-suited Premier Brumby shouldering sand bags for the TV cameras in Shepparton as his pipeline pumps flooded caravan parks and washed away bridges was a picture not too many people in Seymour Electorate chose to forget, or to forgive.
It has been a long campaign, this “Stop the Pipeline” or “PlugthePipe”. So many ordinary people were part of the push that finally delivered the verdict.
When Ted Baillieu joined the public rallies in the Goulburn Valley he promised that if or when he became Premier, he would stop the Pipeline. He has been a man of his word, with Coalition policy that now means that the pipe does not get turned back on unless there is a critical human needs emergency.
There are real lessons for the Federal Labor Government in this resounding regime changing victory in the seat of Seymour. The Labor held Victorian electorates of McEwen and Bendigo are in the Murray Darling Basin. Much of Seymour electorate is encompassed in the new McEwen electorate boundaries.
If the MDBA plan does not get the balance of environmental, community and economic needs right, the electors may want to punish their Labor members in the same way that the Labor member for Seymour was shown the door.
People power is much more than a slogan. It re-instated the electorate of Murray, whose irrigators can now fight on as a single voice opposing the loss of nearly half of their water. We have stopped the North-South pipeline. We have the new Victorian Government’s commitment to fix up GMW and to deliver value for money and an irrigator focussed outcome from NVIRP, not just an excuse to manufacture pseudo-savings of water to push down a pipeline to Melbourne.
We must see a decent Murray Darling Basin Authority Plan, or I will simply oppose it in parliament, and the new Victorian Government will not tolerate anything that destroys us.
Everything has changed. We have a new tomorrow. Our future is looking very bright indeed.