THE 2025 Basin Plan Evaluation portrays a deliberately deceiving snapshot of the Murray-Darling Basin and ignores the real-world reality facing farmers and communities in the region.
According to Victorian Farmers’ Federation water council chair Andrew Leahy, said the Murray–Darling Basin Authority appears more focused on defending its own plan than objectively evaluating the impacts after last week’s release of the report.
“While the report declares, ‘we are better off with the Basin Plan’ and claims the Basin’s environment ‘is better now than it would have been without the Basin Plan’, it does so by measuring ‘economic growth’ against a baseline year of 2007, in the middle of the devastating Millennium Drought.”
“Farmers were forced to sell water under financial pressure from banks and rising input costs. Using this year as a reference point for ‘economic improvement’ is misleading.”
“Of course there has been some rebound since then. The real question the report refuses to ask is what economic growth could we have achieved if the Basin Plan hadn’t stripped productive water from regional economies?”
“I live in northern Victoria, and the impacts are real. Fewer farms, means fewer jobs, fewer people in our schools, and fewer kids on the footy and netball teams.”