Press Release

The State Government will need to balance the scaremongering of its water bureaucracy with the needs of the environment, its population and its food producers if the South West Regional Water Plan is ever to work.

Mr Dave Wren of Alexander Bridge, water spokesperson for the Pastoralists and Graziers’ Association said already there had been a public ‘warning’ in the latest plan, that the farming and other industries would need careful management and that household water would need to be rationed.

However the Department of Water had yet to publicly declare how much water would be reserved for the environment.

“The future public fight will be with the bureaucrats who are using this planning process to lock away water for the environment and will maintain that regional development and the production of food are secondary considerations.”

“There is another issue looming for farmers and that will be over the regulations that enable the DOW to ‘blight’ private property in the name of ‘protecting’ water resources.”

This has the potential for private held farmland to be devalued significantly and saleable only at a much lesser figure.

Mr Wren said the DOW had grown to an agency of more than 600 bureaucrats since WA entered the water reform process.

“But for all of the hundreds of millions of taxpayer funds spent at national and state level on water reform, we have yet to see real answers to many existing and future problems,” he said.