![]() Aboriginal people were very close to nature and that’s all unbalanced now. “All people think about now is there’s no water. “This to me is the ultimate destruction of our culture,” Gamilaraay elder Virginia Robinson says in Walgett. Gamilaraay and Yuwalaraay elders who have lived on the rivers all their lives say they have never seen conditions as bad as now, and they doubt it can ever be recovered. The loss is not just about day-to-day shortages. Traditional owners are angry at being shut out of the water conversation. They can include the use of water for personal, social, domestic and cultural purposes but an entitlement to extract water doesn’t mean there is any water to extract, or that the water is drinkable. Native title rights do not include ownership of natural waters. “In the 1990s, when NSW water reform began, it was really difficult, because we had people say “what have Aboriginal people got to do with water?” They didn’t see that we had a valid place at the table,” Yuwalaraay man Ted Fields says.Īboriginal people have some say over about a third of the country in the basin, but they hold less than 0.01% of Australia’s water diversions. The Aboriginal nations of the basin have been all but ignored, too. Astoundingly, the plan also failed to take into account climate change, despite scientific reports showing that most of the basin will become hotter and drier. “The best available science assembled for the guide to the the Basin Plan said that we needed 3,200GL to 7,600GL for the environment,” said Jamie Pittock, a professor at the Australian National University and a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists.īut ultimately only 2,750GL was allocated to the environment. But from the outset, the plan owed more to political compromise than science.
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