LEON BYNER: Riverland locals have the chance to attend a public meeting today about the draft Murray-Darling Basin Plan and the meeting’s going to be at the Greek Orthodox Community Hall [in Renmark] and, again, you may not know where that is and you might think ‘Leon, why are we talking about this?’ Well, we’ve just been talking about our food bowl, our suppliers… they are very important people to not only this state but the rest of the country and to the world because I would love to see Australia and this state be a major, major, major food bowl to the rest of the world and, if we do things right, that’s precisely what we can do.
…
LEON BYNER: … I’ve got Simon Birmingham from the Liberals. Simon, do you support what Nick [Xenophon] is doing?
SIMON BIRMINGHAM: Oh, well, look, in terms of making sure we have preventative measures to deal with floods coming downstream, absolutely. I’m just on the road towards Renmark at present, Leon, and yesterday I was down around Lake Albert. Frankly, there’s some urgent works that need to happen there to make sure that we can environmentally take advantage of the floods that are coming downstream as well so there’s a lot of work that State and Federal Governments should be getting on with to prevent any damage upstream in terms of flooding if that does eventuate and to make sure we make the most of the water that comes through the system and fix the really high salinity levels in Lake Albert that are crippling farmers there who are still, after three years of good flows, unable to use the water in Lake Albert for any type of productive purposes.
LEON BYNER: Yeah.
[ends]