The world is turning upside down when I find myself in agreement with long-time Cubbie basher Senator Bill Heffernan.
Indeed, after years of reading metropolitan newspaper reports blaming Cubbie Station for all of the ills of the Murray Darling Basin, I thought the news that the block is on the market would be met with another rush of public sentiment saying 'buy it and shut it down'.
So it has been a pleasant surprise to see the results so far of this week's FarmOnline poll in which 67 per cent of respondents don't believe the Federal Government should buy the Cubbie group of properties.
Senator Heffernan is one of those who doesn't believe the Federal Government should buy Cubbie Station. He is right in arguing that if the Federal Government buys the three Cubbie properties for their water it will be a symbolic gesture and a waste of $450 million in taxpayers' money, because it won't do a thing to save the Murray-Darling system.
If all of Cubbie's levee banks were dropped tomorrow, the water would not even reach Bourke, let alone the giant evaporation ponds of the Menindee Lakes.
And not a drop would reach the Murray River or Adelaide - Cubbie accounts for just 0.28pc of the entire Murray Darling flow - despite what South Australian Premier Mike Rann would have the public believe with his populist game of up-stream blame shifting.
People who believe such arguments have generally spent little time on the flood plains of north-west NSW and South West Queensland. Its vastness is incredible, to the point it dwarfs the gigantic creation which is Cubbie Station.
Cubbie has to be seen to be believed and to be understood. I have been to the property a couple of times - yes, it is big and it stores an incredible amount of water, but it is also efficient and using best irrigation practices.
Its design ensures it can harvest its entitlement in overland flood water, while a huge channel running through the middle of the property allows the flood to continue on into NSW.
Rather than robbing Adelaide of water for its gardens, at most Cubbie is limiting the volume of water reaching the floodplain graziers of North West NSW.
Those graziers have argued a strong case over the years that the health of their land is being affected by Cubbie's activities, despite Cubbie providing equally strong arguments that the real culprit has been the drought.
At best flattening Cubbie's water storages would ensure more flood water passed over the grazing plains of north-west NSW, but after that, the water would just be captured and stored by irrigators further south.
The Government would then have to buy those licences as well for the environment to gain any of the water.
Ironically, this shows that Water Minister Penny Wong was not entirely wrong to let slip the opportunity to buyback some of Cubbie's licences earlier this year - it would have achieved nothing but to buffer the company's bottom line and would not have been a wise investment of taxpayers' money.
Unfortunately for Senator Wong perceptions have always played a big part in the debate about Cubbie and her inaction has not been well received.
Indeed the whole debate about Cubbie would be perceived differently if, instead of one corporation running one big property which employs hundreds of people, the land and water was used by 100 family farmers for the same purpose.
If that was the case shutting down Cubbie would be seen as killing a bush community, even though shutting down Cubbie in its corporate state would have exactly the same effect for the town of Dirranbandi.
The problem of Cubbie is such an incredibly complex situation that it cannot be simply resolved by glib populist demands to buy it out and shut it down.
It's a question of how governments, both state and federal, can somehow work together to determine how to equitably diminish the volume of flood water extracted across the whole floodplain, for minimal community and economic impact and maximum environmental gain.
And that task is almost impossible as long as water is still controlled by the States.
This time around Bill Heffernan and Nick Xenophon are exactly right.
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