The pressure comes, at one level, from apparently arbitrary decisions made by this Commonwealth government, but the previous Coalition government was no better.

It is the ultimate in hypocrisy for the Commonwealth government to be insisting farmers give back water under a new planning scheme to save the environment, while continuing to pocket millions from water wasted by Snowy Hydro for derivative trading on the electricity market.

The Snowy Hydro chief executive recently confirmed that water was dumped into the already flooded Murray-Darling Basin, but said the authority had little choice. A real time operational diagram, however, tells a very different story.

Because of a formal agreement between NSW Office of Water and Snowy Hydro, involving an obligation to South Australia, approximately 500,000 megalitres, equivalent to one Sydney Harbour of water, must be released as soon as possible as environmental flow into the already flooded Murrumbidgee River.

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That the salt water solution is resisted, and that the Murray Darling Basin Authority insists in its new plan that even more water be taken from irrigators to keep the lakes fresh, suggests that this key institution is more influenced by politics than science.

Few understand how different ecologically the Murray Darling Basin was before European settlement and the impacts of agriculture and the construction of barrages designed to keep salt water out.

Tony Abbott, says Ms Gillard must drop the Citizen’s Assembly and take real action. But there is nothing in his $3.2 billion ‘Direct Action Plan for Climate Change and the Environment’ that will seriously address the issue.

Ross Garnaut, a key advisor to the government on climate change, suggested in his final report on climate change that the end of the beef industry would be a good thing for the Australian environment and that a switch from beef cattle to kangaroo would have multiple environmental benefits additional to reducing emissions.