Bundarrah Days

What a day for Victoria! Hymie and Twitter are gone.

Celebratory drinks all round at country pubs tonight.

Steve Bracks and John Thwaites are gone because they weren't up the job. They fell at the first real hurdle they faced in government - water!

They'll cite all kinds of reasons for the sudden departure but in circumstances like this there's no substitute for failure. It's no coincidence that Twitter followed Hymie out the door.

We still have to put up with a Labor government but there's reason to believe John Brumby (who should succeed Bracks as premier) will be more sympathetic to country Victoria.

With luck the river redgum country will escape the fate of being locked up in national parks, the Great Divide pipeline will be shelved and Victoria will get a new dam.

The Victorian Farmers Federation (VFF) is appalled by recommendations handed down by the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council (VEAC), in its River Red Gum Forest Investigation Report.

VFF President Simon Ramsay said that if the Victorian Government wanted a list of ambit claims and ill-thought out, impractical recommendations it could bypass VEAC and go straight to the environmental lobby, saving millions of dollars”.

“These recommendations amount to a ‘lock up and leave’ mentality which is failing both the Victorian community and the environment, with pest, weed and bushfire problems now reaching a crisis point,” Mr Ramsay said.

“The Victorian Government would be ill-advised to follow the VEAC recommendations, which suggest an increase in national parks and the systematic reduction/removal of grazing and timber harvesting from reserves,” he said.

“In the past leaseholders worked collaboratively with traditional owners, government and the community to determine the best management of forest areas. Under the VEAC recommendations this local knowledge, decision making and management will be lost to the detriment of the environment as well as the community,” he said.

“In practical terms the removal of grazing from many water frontages is impossible as the private- public boundary is situated on a floodplain and therefore cannot be fenced,” Mr Ramsay said.

“VEAC’s request for 4000 gigalitres of water to flood the River Red Gum forests is completely unrealistic,” he said.

“The VFF believes VEAC has once again failed to make a holistic and rational assessment of a complex environmental, social and economic issue. Instead it has followed predetermined outcomes and ideologies."

Victorian Water Minister John (Twitter) Thwaites says Victorian farmers must not be disadvantaged by the Federal Government's intention to legislate to take over the Murray Darling system.

"It's very easy to say what we need is just one management of the rivers and one management of the irrigation system, the problem is we've got property rights here that go back well over 100 years, now with the stroke of a constitutional pen, you can't simply remove those," he said today.

How ironic it is to hear Twitter claim to be defending farmers. All he and his government have done since being elected in in 1999 is make life difficult for farmers and landowners.

Take the native vegetation legislation, for example. Look at the eviction of the Mountain Cattlemen after 170 years, the coming eviction of the Barmah Cattlemen, the planned theft of water from the Goulburn Valley.

Read this again.....

"We've got property rights here that go back well over 100 years, now with the stroke of a constitutional pen, you can't simply remove those...."

Careful you don't choke on those words, Twitter.

To say that local communities are disappointed that the Victorian Environment Assessment Council is recommending four new National Parks in the river red gum forests would be an understatement, GISFUG spokeswoman, Audrey Dickins said today.

"We're facing the same tired old scenario of public land being locked up and mismanaged with excessive input from interfering city based green groups along with an appalling lack of management and financial resources from government," she said.

"GISFUG is concerned that the VEAC recommendations will ultimately bring about the demise of the forests we are trying to save."

Mrs Dickins said that VEAC had failed to listen to local people, to apprehend local knowledge, and had ignored a golden opportunity to work with people who rely on the land and who wished to rebuild a living working healthy forest that would be sustainable for future generations.

The VEAC recommendations, if adopted would cause a lot of stress in local communities, she said.

"It is no secret that the Red gum forests have been under great stress because of drought conditions.

"VEAC has calculated that 4000 GL of water is needed every five years during spring floods to save the trees yet the state government has announced a decision for a pipeline to take water out of the system which will go to Melbourne. It's worse than illogical - it's insane.

"There has been no thought about the damage a pipeline over the Great Divide to Melbourne will do to our environment. Does this government really care or is this just another win for Melbourne's greens?"

Mrs Dickins said that GISFUG was totally opposed to plans pipe water to Melbourne.

"Water should not be taken from Victoria's food bowl district and lost to the River Red gum and Box Wood forests.

"I urge everyone that will be affected by the VEAC recommendations or the proposed pipeline to unite and lobby against these two proposals.

"We will be targeting Labor MP's and candidates at future elections to ensure they understand there is a political cost in ignoring the concerns of
rural people."

The Victorian Assessment Council claims four new national parks and billions of litres of water are needed to save the Murray River's dying river red gum forests,.

VEAC is right about the water and wrong about the parks. Tragically, Victoria is likely to get the parks and lose the forests.

Push For The Bush believes Premier Hymie Bracks wants to divert water around the Barmah Choke, a natural obstruction on the Murray River, which supplies the forests with water.

The council released its wetlands recommendations yesterday. Chairman Duncan Malcolm said there were significant areas of riverine forests with severely stressed and dying trees, and nearly 400 "threatened and near-threatened plant and animal species."

The key question is: How is the declaration of a national park going to save this environment?

Locals in the region are not surprised by the findings. It was no secret that VEAC had been ordered to recommend the creation of at least one new national park and only last year two community representatives, Audrey Dickinson and Peter Ellard resigned their participation in the VEAC process calling it a joke and others threatened to follow their example.

Locking the forests up in new national parks is not going to protect them but it does provide the state government with an excuse to neglect them by handing the responsibility over to nature.

Victoria's existing national parks are already like museums loaded with decaying exhibits.

There will be serious local community oppoosition to the VEAC recommendations. Another fight has begun.

Meanwhile, South Gippsland locals have pointed out that the proposed site for Victoria's first desalination plant is prone to serious flooding. While Steve Bracks issued heated denials pictures of the site under water were being supplied to the media.

You can shake your head in disbelief. Environmental management in Victoria under this government is a classic balls-up.

I don't usually comment on issues unrelated to the environment and environmental politics but in the case of accused terrorist doctor, Mohammed Haneef, I'm prepared to make an exception.

Firstly, I want to point out that the Federal Government is elected and among its responsibilities is national security.

Secondly, the judiciary is not elected and contains far too many activist judges and magistrates.

The latter are now screaming injustice over the detention of Mohammed Haneef for reasons of national security but I don't think I'm being particularly cynical when I observe that that these same people would have no hesitation locking you and I up on a charge of culpable driving, for example. In other words I am saying they are legal hypocrites.

Obviously I believe in the rule of law and the importance of an independent judiciary. I also believe that sometimes a government has to take steps that might appear to work against that independence in order to protect it.

Terrorism poses a serious threat to our way of life and dealing with it is going to require extraordinary actions on a number of fronts if we are to preserve the things we value most highly.

Greg Sheridan had this to say in The Australian today. I agree with him.

"If any part of our system has performed badly here, it is the courts for refusing to implement the intention of the legislation, which is that bail should be rare in terrorism cases. This judgment of the legislature is shared by Howard and Rudd. So is the civil liberties section of the legal profession telling us not only that they are well motivated, whereas the politicians are malevolently motivated, but that they, the lawyers, understand the threat of terrorism better than the political system understands it?

Finally, Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews decided that if Haneef were to be at large he could not, in Andrews's view, pass the good character test. Andrews outlined his reasons in documents released by Haneef's lawyers. These included that Haneef was charged with a serious crime and was a known associate of people Andrews had reason to believe were engaged in criminal activity. There were also reasons Andrews could not disclose, but we know that these involved AFP investigations that showed Haneef was in frequent and elaborate contact with people at the centre of the British terrorism investigations. There is other material that, despite the best efforts of a robust media, we have not yet found out.

On the basis of this evidence, Andrews made the right decision. There is no universal human right that says everyone on the planet is entitled to a visa for Australia. Visas come with requirements, among them the character test. Given the information Andrews received, he really had no alternative.

I predict Haneef will not languish long in Villawood detention centre, nor that he will be charged for his accommodation by the Government. In many areas of the law - from apprehended violence orders to preventing people who have long since completed their sentence in corporate crimes from becoming company directors - the law has to act to protect and prevent, rather than to punish. Getting the balance right in such cases is always difficult. But I would trust our democratic political system a thousand times more than I would trust its civil liberties lawyers."

Did you ever think living in a greenhouse would be like this?

After the coldest June in 50 years July is living up to its worst behaviour with widespread snowfalls and wild winter weather.

For the first time in memory the Maroondah Highway north of Healesville has been closed due to heavy snow.

Be comforted by the thought that as your heaters warm your extremities you may be contributing to a future where your power bill will be minus a heating component.

Or you could imagine (with the approval of the Bracks Government) that it's not really cold at all, that there's no such thing as snow, that Twitter Thwaites hasn't been whiling away the hours at a ski resort on your taxes and that Victoria will never need a new dam.

SAD NEWS: We've just heard that another old stockman has ridden across the Divide.

Mountain Cattleman, Frank Ryan, of Cheshunt passed away on Saturday night at the age of 82.

Our sympathies to his family. Frank was a staunch supporter of every action taken by Mountain Cattlemen to defend their right to graze the high country and was a familiar face at most events organised by the MCAV.

He will be sadly missed. We will be posting a full obituary for Frank in the next few days.

Today's icy conditions have no doubt created a few more global warming sceptics around Victoria.

Not even using the term climate change will help the alarmists much - all that's changed is that winter has hit with a vengeance.

As I type this post the fire is blazing indoors while outside the snow is falling heavily here for the first time in seven years.

Enter the new Ice Age - for this week at least.

Great to see our mountain rivers flowing again after the drought but spare a thought for the damage done by the floods, particularly down Licola way.

Meanwhile, it's interesting to see that since it was first elected in 1999 the Bracks Government has spent more on advertising and self promotion than it would cost to repair and upgrade our leaky irrigation infrastructure.

I heard it said over the weekend that while Steve Bracks may have water on the brain his mind is not on the job. I could not but agree.

I took this picture of the Bundarrah River last Wednesday for posterity's sake just in case Bracksy is right about global warming and our rivers run dry.