To be fair to the Minister, the buyback was never intended to include a structural adjustment component for the effected communities, this was one of the flaws in the original plan put forward by Mr Turnbull. The money paid to irrigators for their entitlements will only go through the local communities if the money is spent there. For many who sell their water, it may well be spent on another property in a different area, a superannuation package or the retirement of debt. The production will still be lost from the local economies. I fear we are unlikely to see structural adjustment included for no other reason than the urban electorate sees little value in supporting regional communities.

After watching Penny Wong dodge questions asked of her re the water buy backs on "Four Corners" Monday night I am more than ever convinced that the government has not thought out the long term effects of this water buy back. This is just one big grab to get that water to please the Greens. Quite honestly I think that "Kevin 747" could not give two hoots about the country folks in the small towns where the buy back is grabbing water. As for farmers having sufficient funds to go on and buy elsehwere - sorry, but not all will be in this situation. Many years of drought have seen some left with very little capital. This present fiasco is just a water grab with no thought of the consequnces in the future. It is time for Kevin to sit down with his colleagues and consider those of us in the MDB whose opinions on water buy back are being forgotten more than ever. Maybe Kevin and Penny need to be in my boots and watch our local infrastructure being destroyed. It will never come back again. Shame Penny shame.!

After watching ABC 4 corners the other night I am convinced that this minister doesn't have a clue.

Wong has no interest in people in towns or in the rural areas. She has an agenda to contain the wealth of predominately non labor voters. She and Garrett will manage to destroy much of rural Australia before they get the big rejection.

When our food, food safety standards and national biosecurity are outsourced to overseas suppliers, when we have no viable agricultural sector, when we lose our national food self sufficiency and pay whatever prices overseas suppliers wish to charge, when we lose the basis of our national identity by destroying the rural and agricultural sectors, when we lose the benefit of the unpaid guardianship of our rangelands and environment given to us by our farmers and others, then will the urban electorate and more importantly KRudd, arguably the worst PM we've had and a shameless control freak and media tart, get it?

If you were in the minister's shoes what would you do? Maybe there are long known reasons for the current dilemma. Many of the licences issued in years gone by were never used until the big corporates bought these properties and developed them for irrigation not as previously used for grazing. If the government returned these properties to original land use wouldn't this also result in community pressure? Remember you can't use water that doesn't exist. Deregulation may be the answer then the government could blame it on the industry and its participants.

Well I see a lot of farms going with the water buy back. but if the farmers hold out they will get nothing because they have no water anyways. Farmers may get a little for their water but they are more or less being forced away from their farms any ways.

Why do farmers always blame governments and urban areas for their situation?

The Murray Darling Basin has been a mess for years and yet nothing has been done to rectify the situation.

I found it particularly irksome to watch Heffernan and Anderson rabbit on like sage and wise old men when they were in government for over a decade...yet nothing was done. Zilch.

I didn't hear him say it, but it was while he was still a minister in our government that I heard that Graham Richardson said "the marginal areas should be depopulated". At the time of the Charleville flood the first reaction of the Queensland premier was to say that the town might have to be abandoned. To his credit within 24 hours he was taking appropriate action, but clearly all he knew of Charleville before that was that it was a long way out and marginal areas should be depopulated. Party policy. It would have been in about 1994 that I heard Michael Archer, since Dean of the Faculty of Science at the UNSW, say in an interview on the 2CR radio morning program that because of its fragile ecology Australia should shut down agriculture altogether and import its food. Professor Mary Kastalides of James Cook University was just one of the people I heard say that Australia should never have imported sheep and cattle. Since the report of Graham Richardson's comment both sides of politics and the NFF have been studiously promoting policies which move the margins in. Penny Wong's attitude seems to be that the margin should be a long way this side of Bourke. When I was a kid in primary school around 1953 I was taught that the white man had ruined the Darling river. This teaching ignored the reports of the early explorers. Then through much of the 1970s the Darling was flowing strongly again. It would have again been possible to run the steamboats.

When all the farmers are gone and you rely on that shipment of food to come it and it doesn't, what are you going to eat then? You only have to look at the adulterated food not grown to Australian Standards and you start to realize that home grown is best. Try walking around and buy Australian before it is too late.