Nationals leader and acting PM brushes off suggestions government could do more to solve Menindee Lakes crisis, saying ‘that’s Australia’

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Michael McCormack has brushed off suggestions the government could do more to solve the Murray-Darling fish-kill crisis, blaming drought that he says will soon be relieved by flooding rains because “that’s Australia”.

The acting prime minister made the comments to ABC AM on Thursday, arguing that the current dry spell is “unprecedented” in its proportions but claiming the pattern of drought and flood has characterised Australia’s climate “since the year dot”.

McCormack followed the lead of the former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, defending cotton farmers and irrigators who he said had been “copping unfortunate memes” from city folk who did not understand them.

The death of hundreds of thousands of fish near the Menindee Lakes has prompted the Greens to call for a royal commission into the management of the Murray-Darling and Labor to propose a scientific taskforce to look into the cause of the deaths.

On Monday Guardian Australia revealed the Murray-Darling Basin Authority shelved its native fish strategy six years ago and ended its sustainable rivers audit program after New South Wales pulled funding.

'It's happening again': Menindee residents devastated as fish kill conditions return Read more

But McCormack said the environmental disaster was down to the fact it “just hasn’t rained”, with some areas in the catchment receiving no rain in seven years.

“We are experiencing a very, very dry period of unprecedented proportions,” he said. “And it will rain again and when it rains it will come down in such torrents people will probably be saying ‘what are we going to do with all the water?’ That’s Australia.

“That’s the weather patterns and the climate of Australia – it’s been going on since the year dot.”

McCormack conceded the fish-kill crisis was “a terrible mess” and reiterated the government’s promise of $5m to develop a recovery strategy.

But the Nationals leader added that “until it rains and [water] flushes through the system then we’re going to be in a situation where sadly these sorts of occurrences happen”.

On Wednesday Joyce wrote in the Australian that it was “implausible and mischievous” to blame cotton-growers for fish deaths because cotton-growers such as Cubbie Station had not taken water from the river since 2017.

McCormack took up the theme, arguing that cotton, rice and other irrigated agriculture farmers had been unfairly “maligned”.

The Murray-Darling fish kill is a monumental catastrophe and also business as usual | First Dog on the Moon Read more

He said they were “copping unfortunate memes” and “dreadful things [are] said about them on social media by those people in the city for whom they have probably never been over the great sandstone curtain that is the Great Dividing Range”.

“They do not know, they do not understand regional Australia … [and] the great role our farmers play.”

Despite blaming the drought for the crisis, McCormack said the government would be open to “some tweaks” of the Murray-Darling basin plan because “as these sorts of rare events happen, you have to revisit what you’ve done in [the] past and improve upon it”.

“But we can’t make it rain – the government can’t make it rain, the opposition certainly can’t make it rain,” he said.

“Eventually it will rain, then it will rain in buckets and we’ll probably be cursing the fact we have too much rain and we have floods – that’s Australia.”

The Labor agriculture spokesman, Joel Fitzgibbon, told Guardian Australia McCormack’s comments were “embarrassing” and called on the government to back Labor’s plan for a scientific taskforce.

“It’s clear Barnaby Joyce is still calling the shots in the National party and, like Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison is letting him get away with it,” he said.

The Greens water and environment spokeswoman, Sarah Hanson-Young, accused McCormack of “trying to pretend no one is responsible for the environmental collapse in [the] Murray-Darling”.

Sarah Hanson-Young💚 (@sarahinthesen8) Deputy PM Micheal McCormack on the radio this morning confirming how out of touch this Government really is. Trying to pretend no one is responsible for the environmental collapse in Murray-Darling. 😳 Pathetic. It’s greedy cotton, corruption & climate change

On Tuesday Phillip Glyde, the chief executive of the MDBA, said authorities had been working hard over the past decade to repair the damage wrought from 100 years of over-allocation of water in the Murray-Darling basin.

Appearing on the ABC on Tuesday, he said climate change was making it more difficult to manage the system.

“We know the climate is changing,” he said. “That has equal impact on irrigators as well as environmental water holders. We can’t predict precisely where those impacts might be. So that’s another factor.”