“Old farms, new farms, small and large are closing every week. Regional businesses and towns are in crisis,” a Victorian farmer told me. Thousands have attended protest meetings in Albury, Deniliquin and Griffith and down the Murray River to South Australia, over farmers being starved of irrigation water after only a two-year dry. This is “a man-made drought” across the Murray-Darling Basin, the farmer said. It has brought three decades of damaging rural policies to a head – infrastructure neglect, deregulation, bank finance, the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, radical free trade, to name the main culprits. At the recent NSW elections,…
