Wimmera - Regional News - Forests and Water, Climate and Waste - September 2006

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16/09/06 Bracks' bush ballot, Simon Mann, The Age Wimmera; September 06

14/09/06 Wimmera River decision sets alarming precedent - Environment Victoria Media Release Wimmera; September 06

13/09/06 Town reduced to bottled water, Kate Hagan, The Age Wimmera; September 06

12/09/06 Lack of accurate data on water 'could spark a rural credit crisis', -The Age , Simon Sharwood - Technology

08/09/06 Top 200 users of water hide behind secrecy provisions, - Farrah Tomazin and Mathew Murphy, The Age

Fire threat grows : Herald-Sun Wimmera; Sept 06; Mallee

05/09/06 Warning on water, fires crisis, - Geoff Strong, The Age

Bracks' bush ballot

Simon Mann
September 16, 2006, The Age

Digital Image: Frank Maiorana

TWO shires on the state's fringe, Hindmarsh and Buloke, typify the toughest of times for country Victorians. Western dustbowls in the grip of drought, both are struggling to make ends meet and are losing people to big regional towns and to Melbourne.

In Hindmarsh, the water supply is below 7 per cent capacity, but other issues also plague the shire that's been built on wheat and oilseeds and takes in the towns of Nhill, Jeparit and Rainbow, as well as Dimboola, made famous by the stage play of the same name and Essendon footballer Tim Watson.

Enterprise is being stymied by failing infrastructure, especially rail lines in disrepair, while more than 1100 trucks a night rumble through the shire's heart and the so-called "fatigue zone" half-way between Melbourne and Adelaide. This year alone five people have been killed in accidents involving trucks.

They're doing it tough in Buloke, too: from Charlton to Sea Lake. With preparations already being made to truck water to farms, this week Wycheproof's water supply was hit by algae bloom and suddenly undrinkable. Sports grounds are rock hard, farmers are flogging off stock and a decade-long drift puts Buloke at the top of Victorian municipalities for population decline: its numbers have fallen by 900, or 11.5 per cent, since 1995.

Hindmarsh lost several hundred people, too, as retirees moved to bigger towns and young people headed to the capital for training and for jobs. It's an exodus that actually keeps the unemployment rates down, disguising despair, while the respective communities band together in a bid to maintain basic services that city folk take for granted.

But for all of their hardship the bush is refusing to buckle, and according to the civic leaders of the two shires, the residents of Hindmarsh and Buloke don't appear to be queueing to give the Bracks Government a kicking come November's state election.

"I need to tell you about the people who live here. They are extremely resilient, they're not whingers," says Buloke Mayor Reid Mather. "They just wouldn't mind a bit of rain. That's all. I don't think they're blaming the State Government for that."

Says Hindmarsh Mayor Darryl Argall: "We've been struggling, sure, but the biggest problem is the drought, more so than the Government … If we can get rain and get back to what we call normal years, we believe our future is quite rosy. What we will learn out of all this is how to conserve more water and that's what the Government are doing, and I congratulate them on that."

The key to their endorsement is a relationship with country Victoria that has been carefully cultivated by the Bracks Government over the past seven years. If Steve Bracks and John Brumby sweet-talked their way into office in 1999, as history tells it, then the bush still appears to be listening.

Both mayors readily sing the praises of their local Nationals members — Hugh Delahunty in Lowan and Peter Walsh in Swan Hill — but they say the Labor Government is interacting with its country constituents like never before. That's not to say there aren't differences: neither shire supports a toxic waste dump in north-west Victoria, and the mayors reserve their right to blow hard against the project — "We'll bloody well fight that," Argall promises.

But overall they see the Government as an ally. "We've got linkages with this Government," Mather says. "Sometimes we say: 'This is serious. Get up here.' And they do. They are listening and at the end of the day I think they want the same things that we want. They want to put their money where they can get the greatest value. And we want to help them do that."

Says Argall: "I've been in local government 16 years. I'm not a member of the Labor Party, but this is the best communication I've had with any State Government … We're really in the hard times of a drought — there's just no bloody water — and we've had the Premier up here and the Deputy Premier and four or five key ministers all talking to our people and our farmers and trying to work through ways of getting us through these tough times. It's not just financial, it's social as well. There's a heap of issues."

Identifying the mood of country Victoria before polling day is necessarily fraught. The diversity of regions — and of issues — makes generalisations near impossible. In 1999, the bush bloodied Jeff Kennett's nose and delivered government to Labor. The pundits hadn't seen it coming.

Then, in 2002, the bush rewarded the Bracks Government's attentiveness by fattening the margins of its country electorates. Now, Labor dominates the big provincial cities as never before while the most marginal country electorates are actually in conservative hands.

To suggest that the task facing Ted Baillieu's Liberals is Herculean borders on understatement. To govern in their own right the Liberals need to win back 28 seats in November. The party requires a uniform swing of more than 9 per cent. Even siding with the Nationals — provided the latter can retain its seven lower house seats — Baillieu must claw back 21 seats from a government that's still riding high in the saddle.

"The conclusion you have to come to, when you start to analyse the pendulum, is that it's difficult to imagine that we are going to get any great shifts in rural and regional Victoria," says Monash University politics lecturer Paul Strangio. "The one thing we know from previous polls is there'll be elections within elections, which may throw up some surprising results, but Labor's rural and regional seats are held comfortably and it makes any challenge really tough … It's difficult to see any seismic change out there."

The Government has seemingly built its base by meeting a pledge to put money back into the regions, at the same time reinforcing a country view that the Kennett government had neglected the bush in favour of building monuments in the city. Though critics complain that non-Labor electorates have fared less well, infrastructure has been replenished in many: new police stations, hospitals and medical centres have replaced rundown facilities, while big ticket items such as the Wimmera-Mallee water pipeline have signalled Labor's long-term intent. And last year's "provincial statement" threw in extra millions worth of initiatives, prompting press comment that the Government was paving the streets of regional Victoria with gold.

Even the Government's Achilles heel, the over-hyped and massively over-budget Very Fast Train project, has started delivering an extra 400 services a week into regional Victoria. There's still a sour taste in the mouths of many country commuters, but the timing couldn't be much sweeter for the Bracks Government, which hopes reality of a better service outweighs balance-sheet concerns and the condemnation of the state's Auditor-General.

David Cunningham, a critic and member of the Bendigo line's Better Rail Action Group, says the project probably remains "a slight negative" for the Government having put in question its ability to manage major projects, but he concedes that Labor has actually re-invested in country lines in contrast to its predecessor. And the Opposition needed to be wary of its "farce rail" jibes. After all, says Cunningham, "their record was just about closing lines down".

Bendigo Mayor David Jones says the new timetables are definitely a plus but the Government erred by overselling the project. "Why didn't they just call it an upgrade?" he says. "People are ecstatic. It's much better. More services, and some a bit faster."

Nevertheless, Jones says he expects some grief at the ballot box for Labor because of its handling of the drought and because there was a natural inclination for the regions to push back against their capital city governors. People were "a bit puzzled" about why it took Melbourne so long to see the water supply disasters looming. And he believes the siting of the toxic waste dump 50 kilometres south of Mildura will rankle country voters.

"I know it's probably a perennial thing and probably nothing that this Government's done wrong, but there's almost a permanent revolution in the regional areas … there's a natural propensity for a backlash, only, where are the voters going to go? The Libs and the Nats aren't offering a great alternative at present, just whingeing about what Labor's done," he says.

But the Government has also copped flak for its $220-million plan to pump water from the Murray-Goulburn system over the Great Dividing Range to Bendigo and Ballarat. Victorian Farmers Federation president Simon Ramsay says it smacks of short-term thinking, simply to ease electoral discomfort in the big provincial centres. "I think people want to know which political party has a long-term vision about providing sustainable water management … I think we're all being challenged, political parties and agri-people about trying to provide a fair and equitable approach to water usage."

But how much will it matter on polling day? The truth is that many of Labor's regional seats look impregnable and the Opposition's best hopes would appear to lie in curtailing margins to levels that will be within its grasp in 2010.

Jacinta Allan and Bob Cameron, both Labor ministers, enjoy margins in Bendigo East and Bendigo West that are nudging 13 per cent and 16 per cent. And consecutive election triumphs, including its 2002 landslide, have fortified Labor's margins in other big regional centres: it holds Ballarat East by 7.6 per cent as well as Ballarat West (9 per cent), Geelong (8.1 per cent), Bellarine (8.2 per cent) and South Barwon (5 per cent). Traditionally a Labor stronghold, Geelong has got a tick for its long-awaited $500 million city bypass, but will it keep Geelong voters happy?

There is little doubt that November's election will be decided in the capital: in the eastern and south-eastern corridors of Melbourne. In fact, the dominance of the city is stark: 61 of Parliament's 88 seats are in the capital or on the urban fringe. Of the 27 country seats, Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong account for seven, while a further eight have big urban components.

Just 12 seats can be categorised as truly rural: seven of those are in Liberal or Nationals hands, but such is Labor's current electoral dominance that it also holds Narracan (Moe, Warragul, Walhalla) and Ripon (Ararat, Beaufort, Stawell), by handsome margins. Both were snatched in 1999 after three decades of Liberal representation. Morwell is Labor's most marginal seat, but still enjoys a 4.8 per cent buffer.

Political analyst Brian Costar, of Swinburne University, says the election looks pretty much "steady as she goes, whether in the regions or in Melbourne". "The '99 election was bizarre. Even though it was a small swing, in one sense, it happened in the right places. It didn't happen in Melbourne where the coalition only lost one or two seats. But this year is not like '99." Costar senses there are "micro-issues" in the bush that could sway votes, such as the toxic waste dump, "(but) it's in one electorate. And everybody's opposed to it except for the hapless Labor candidate, and the Labor candidate in Mildura's not going to win anyway".

He also notes the benefits of incumbency in which sitting governments can marshall huge resources to keep the opposition "barbarians" at the gate and that, in the light of the Queensland election, even big single issues such as a failing health service appeared no longer to guarantee the defeat of governments.

Paul Strangio agrees, and says Australians seem to have settled comfortably into an equilibrium in which the Coalition takes stewardship of the national economy and responsibility for security at a federal level while state Labor governments dispense health, education and other services.

Rob Spence, the chief executive of the Municipal Association of Victoria, which represents 79 local councils, says it is possible a little "gloss" is wearing off Labor. "My personal view is that this Government has done a significant amount for rural Victoria. Whether that means the communities are satisfied with what they have is an interesting question. I'm not sure."

Either way, says Spence, pressing issues remain, not least the deterioration of freight rail networks and its implications for country roads. The sale of the railways by the Kennett government without major maintenance guarantees had let down producers.

Hindmarsh Mayor Darryl Argall advocates buying back the tracks, parts of which are in such a poor state that speeds are down to just 40 km/h. With freight volumes expected to double in little more than a decade "we need a concerted effort to get a lot of that onto rail so that we don't keep getting more and more trucks".

It's a similar story in Buloke. "We've got a roads system here that we're actually struggling to keep up with," Mayor Reid Mather says. "There's a big infrastructure gap between what we need to spend as a council to maintain roads and what we can afford to spend. We would have to put up rates enormously, and that just can't happen."

How has the bush fared under the Bracks Government? The Age invites country readers to have their say. Email letters@theage.com.au, fax (03) 9601 2414 or mail Letters Editor, 250 Spencer Street, Melbourne, 3000.

Environment Victoria Media Release

Wimmera River decision sets alarming precedent

Thursday, September 14 2006: Yesterday's announcement by the Bracks Government to withhold the Wimmera River’s water allocation sets an alarming precedent for other environmental flows for rivers across the state, says Environment Victoria.

Environment Victoria Healthy Rivers Campaign Director Dr Paul Sinclair said: "We're concerned this decision may set a precedent that undermines the legal right of all environmental water entitlements across the state.’’

"The Wimmera Region is facing severe hardship, but sacrificing what’s left of the Wimmera River won't solve that crisis.

Dr Sinclair said even the small volume of water allocated to the Wimmera River would have provided significant benefits to the health of the upper reaches of the river.

"Historic legislation passed last year gave the environment the right to water for the first time in over 100 years,'' he said. ``But the Government's announcement raises serious concerns about the certainty and security of the environment’s entitlement to water".

The Victorian and Commonwealth Governments are investing over $1 billion of public money to return flows to the Snowy, Murray and Wimmera and Glenelg Rivers. Dr Sinclair said Victorians have every reason to demand that these investments are secure and deliver the promised river flows.

"The hundreds of millions of dollars of public money being invested into the Wimmera Mallee Pipeline was done so because taxpayers were promised that the bulk of the water saved would be returned to the Wimmera and Glenelg Rivers.''

``What guarantee is there that this will occur if political pressure can so easily undermine the rights of the environment to water?,’’ said Dr Sinclair.

Town reduced to bottled water

Kate Hagan, The Age
September 13, 2006 - 1:05PM

Latest related coverage

Water fight: fury over $1.5bn water recycle plan

Residents of Wycheproof in north-western Victoria are relying on bottled water to bathe, cook and drink because their water supply is contaminated.

Water authority GWM (Grampians Wimmera Mallee) Water detected an algal bloom, which is suspected to be toxic, in the town's two storages yesterday afternoon and immediately told residents not to use the local water.

GWM Water general manager corporate services Andrew Rose said local cafes handed out bottled water last night, and a tanker was due to arrive this morning for people to fill up their own containers.

"We've sent samples of the water off to laboratories to assess whether or not there is any toxic residue from the algae," he said.

The town obtains its water through a channel system from the Grampians ranges, where storages are down to 6.7 per cent after eight years of drought.

Stage-four water restrictions, which ban all water use outside the home, take effect in the region from October 1.

Mr Rose said the water quality going into the channel system was poor, and deteriorating, as a result of the big dry.

"The channels dry out every year and the first flush of water picks up all the muck," Mr Rose said.

"We try to avoid tipping the dirtiest of the waters into town storages but at some stage you have to put water in (them).

"If there's a high nutrient load and there are traces of algae in the storage already, they will feed on it very quickly and it just grows exponentially."

Mr Rose said it was possible to treat the algae with a chemical, but water could not be used for 10 days after applying it.

He said the water authority and Buloke Shire Council would put contingency plans in place once they had the test results, possibly this afternoon.

"Given the unseasonal warm weather, there's every risk it could occur in other towns as well, so we're monitoring all our storages on a regular basis," Mr Rose said.

theage.com.au

Lack of accurate data on water 'could spark a rural credit crisis'

September 12, 2006, The Age
Out of date data has put $20 billion in rural loans at risk, reports Simon Sharwood.

A LACK of high-quality spatial data describing the location and extent of Australia's water resources could spark a rural credit crisis, devalue the work of the National Water Initiative and waste the $2 billion Australian Water Fund, an industry expert claims.

David Hocking, CEO of peak industry body the Australian Spatial Information Business Association, says his members' estimates of our water resources based on actual measurements are wildly out of sync with state government assessments.

"The data on water is very, very poor," Mr Hocking says. "People can look at satellites and say there is water there and there and there. But volumetric measurements need to be taken."

Mr Hocking says lack of accurate data is disturbing because land titles no longer include water rights, which are treated as a distinct asset. For many rural properties water rights assets are more valuable than the land.

Mr Hocking worries that the poor state of water information means banks may be lending more to farmers than they should because the water assets offered as security may not exist or could be smaller than assumed.

Banks sometimes decrease the value of a loan or increase interest rates if they feel the assets securing it have fallen in value.

"We believe there are $20 billion in rural loans that could be effectively unsecured, or poorly valued until the spatial data is captured," he says. "Imagine the impact of even a small interest rate increase on many rural businesses."

The association is organising a forum to discuss the issue and is calling for the National Water Initiative to start gathering accurate spatial data about water to ensure rural properties are properly valued and that the fund's resources are well spent.

"We are calling for people to take notice," Mr Hocking says. He hopes any initiative adopts the national standards for spatial data recently created by The Spatial Information Council (ANZLIC).

Malcolm Turnbull, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister with responsibility for the water initiative, says a baseline assessment of Australia's water resources - the Australian Water Resources 2005 project - is under way.

"It will provide information on the availability, use and quality of our water resources across Australia as well as a benchmark to assess the impact of changes both in water availability and usage in future years," Mr Turnbull says.

Mr Hocking, who has attended meetings about the project, is concerned the survey may not keep to ANZLIC standards, or to widespread practices in the spatial information industry, which could blunt its effectiveness.

State IT ministers are gathering in Canberra for a meeting of the National Online and Communications Council, whose members will consider Special Minister of State Gary Nairn's proposal for a national geocoding scheme to identify each address in Australia through nationally agreed spatial data formats.

Although broadband will occupy much of the council's agenda, Mr Nairn's office tells Next the geocoding proposal is expected to be accepted with little or no debate.

That vote opens the door to provide services that Mr Nairn, a former surveyor who half-jokingly refers to himself as "Spatial" Minister of State, says will greatly enhance government decision-making.

"It is believed that 80 per cent of government decisions involve a location or 'where' factor," he said in a speech on August 29 to the Government Technology Evolution Conference.

"Imagine combining technologies such as Google Earth with other data on the natural environment and with the built or constructed environment and being able to view, analyse and make decisions based on seeing where health, education, business, or environmental issues are occurring, by combining spatial (that is, graphical ) information, with non-spatial information (for example, facts and figures)," he told the conference.

His favourite demonstration of this technique in action is Directions Plus, a service offered during Melbourne's Commonwealth Games that saw volunteers provide directions to visitors as SMS messages sent directly to mobile telephones or printed from belt-mounted printers.

"Even a destination's name and phone number for bookings, could be provided using this technology," Mr Nairn says.

Directions Plus was developed by Melbourne company Geomatic Technologies and took out the Geospatial Information Technology Association's 2006 Excellence Award.

The rude health of the company and the spatial information industry was further demonstrated by the company's directors, Adrian Lewis and Mark Judd, recently being named Ernst & Young's 2006 Southern Region Entrepreneurs of the Year in the Technology, Communications, E-Commerce and Life Sciences category.

Yet the company's sales and marketing manager, Andrew Bashfield, believes the sky is the limit, not just for his company but also for the industry. "Graphical information systems have been around for a long time," he says. "And they are one form of IT that really needs reference information to make them fly. Initiatives like the geocoding scheme, Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth mean that information is now available.

We have the base maps already available. What will come next are more buildings and streetscapes and greater realism."

Top 200 users of water hide behind secrecy provisions

Farrah Tomazin and Mathew Murphy
September 8, 2006, The Age

THE names of Victoria's biggest water users are being kept secret by the State Government before the election, as Premier Steve Bracks seeks to bolster Labor's water credentials before November's poll.

And a water taskforce headed by the Premier, which was announced yesterday, has been called a do-nothing initiative.

Water Minister John Thwaites has repeatedly refused to reveal the names of the top 200 industry water users, who use about 10 per cent of Melbourne's water supply every year.

This comes despite Mr Thwaites often citing the "top 200 water-savings program" as one of Labor's key initiatives to tackle Victoria's water crisis.

Under the program, the 200 businesses that use the most water are encouraged to save water — and according to Government figures, have so far achieved savings of 13 per cent.

However, as the shortage of supply intensifies — and Melburnians face tough new restrictions to cope with low storage levels — the Government and the state's water authorities have refused to tell Victorians who the top 200 users are, citing privacy reasons.

"Our advice from the water authorities was that for confidentiality reasons, the names of the top 200 water users could not be released," Mr Thwaites' spokesman, Geoff Fraser, said.

"But the 'Top 200' is a valuable program … This is good for Victoria and good for the environment, and the Government is now looking to extending this program to 1000 companies."

In Melbourne, 10 per cent of water use is by industry and businesses.

Sixty-two per cent is residential and 18 per cent is non-residential. Figures also show that about 11 per cent of water is leaked, stolen or used for firefighting.

Mr Bracks has declared that water is the biggest challenge confronting his Government, and Liberal leader Ted Baillieu this week said it was one of the four key policy issues of his poll campaign, together with health, education and public transport.

Mr Baillieu has accused the Premier of being caught out on the issue and panicking, having so far been negligent on water.

The Premier's taskforce will include four other senior ministers — Regional Development Minister John Brumby, Mr Thwaites, Agriculture Minister Bob Cameron and Community Services Minister Sherryl Garbutt.

Mr Bracks, who made the announcement from Birchip in Victoria's north-west, said the taskforce would identify immediate priority areas that need attention.

Before the 2002 election, he unveiled $2.6 million to help farmers struggling with dry conditions.

Yesterday, he said there would not be a cap on funding, which would be assessed as the taskforce moved around the state talking to rural communities.

"We are not limited by a cap on any funding," he said.

"We will examine our capacity to assist based on the problem. That will mean looking at projects that could be brought forward."

He announced $2.2 million towards extra financial counsellors for farmers.

Mr Baillieu said the taskforce was formed too late and the Government should have acted sooner.

"Seven years of power and now we have, what, the 700th taskforce established?" he said.

Fire threat grows

September 06, 2006 12:00am Herald-Sun

AUSTRALIA has recorded its driest August on record, increasing the chance of severe bushfires and giving little hope of an end to the crippling drought.

In Victoria, the Wimmera-Mallee is in particular trouble with the ninth year of the worst drought to strike the area since records were first kept.

Warning on water, fires crisis

Geoff Strong, The Age
September 5, 2006

VICTORIANS should prepare for even tougher water restrictions and an extreme bushfire season this summer after the failure of the state's winter rainfall, Australia's most senior weather forecaster has warned.

Geoff Love, head of the Bureau of Meteorology, said that after an exceptionally dry winter and the state's driest August on record, the prospect of good rainfall over the next few months had diminished.

And even if good spring rain occurred, dam levels would struggle to recover because of increased evaporation and absorption of water into the soil as air temperatures rose.

"If the current low rainfall and high temperatures persist, the consequences will be wide ranging, including an elevated bushfire risk this summer and escalating water shortages and restrictions," Dr Love said.