Opposition To Pipeline Unites The Bush

The Great Divide Pipeline is rapidly turning into a farce and an issue that is uniting country Victorians as never before.

We've been waiting for this - the big boilover that will demonstrate to this virulently anti-country government that enough is enough.

Yesterday's public rally at Shepparton showed up government claims of support for the proposal as lies. A lot of heat was generated to counter the hot air of the Bracks Government.
The rally destroyed claims that the Government and the Foodbowl Alliance had the support of northern Victorian farmers, irrigators and town residents to build the pipeline.

Sophie Mirabella, the federal member for Indi, went on the attack and identified trust as a major issue.

"Do you trust a Labor government that said before the election that they weren't going to pipe water from north of the Great Dividing Range to Melbourne?" she asked.

"These are the people who quite famously during a previous rally were called 'the bastards who buggered the bush', and they're continuing to try and do it."

National Party MP Peter Walsh said the pipeline was a con, and that a lot of the water Melbourne needed could be obtained by harvesting and recycling storm water.

What wasn't mentioned is that water yield in to the Goulburn system will be lower for years to come as catchment forests, burnt last summer, recover.

State Opposition leader, Ted Baillieu, accused the Premier, Steve Bracks, of being deceitful in his treatment of country Victoria, and demanded the state sign the Commonwealth Government water agreement.

"It's a pipeline of panic and a con of this community," he said.

Mr Bracks dismissed the protest as a stunt and said irrigators would not oppose the plan once they fully understood it which was bit like saying he might oppose it once he fully understood it, which he does not.

"Anyone who hears the case would have to say this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to improve the capacity for irrigators," he claimed.

That claim is based on the fact that the plan involves repairing leaking infrastructure and making more water available. However, the state government has a responsibility to carry out that critically needed work even if there is no pipeline involved.

Making the maintainence and repair of infrastructure conditional upon the theft of a region's water is administrative blackmail.

Around 1000 people attended the rally from as far afield as Eildon and the Campaspe River despite the wet and windy conditions.

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