Recent water erosion on the Edward River outside of Deniliquin.
A Deniliquin fisherman who long ago stepped back from advising government bodies on the Murray-Darling Basin water buybacks to focus his environmental efforts into the local fishery says consultation with the community is “wasteful”.
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Ian Fisher is an avid cod fisherman who sells handmade fishing rods that come with a guided excursion to show customers where to fish and how to gently handle Murray cod for releasing.
Mr Fisher has sat on several advisory committees as part of government consultation on water buybacks and river health for 15 years and said the “revolving door” of government staff over the years had been frustrating.
“I have to meet new staff that always change and then tell them the same thing again and again,” he said.
“I tell them that if you run too much water through this area you will destroy it, that if you use this as a channel, you will destroy the ecosystem here.
“They don’t live here and they don’t see what’s going on, so they have no idea.
“It’s just to say you’ve had community consultation, but you don’t listen to us anyway.”
Mr Fisher left the consulting environment four years ago, believing that it was being “weaponised” for political gain and having withstood intimidation by an anonymous source several years earlier.
In 2022, he organised the release of catfish into the Edward River with the help of 120 locals and said that giving ownership of the ecosystem to the community maintained a social connectivity with the river.
“But buyback will lose that connectivity.”
Mr Fisher said larger floods, such as that in 2022, changed the water course, but because they were elevated above the ground did not do similar damage.
He said water running through the system “at the wrong times” was the main cause of riverbank erosion, which resulted in red gums falling into the river.
“A flood is just up and down pretty quickly in comparison
“But to run it always with water at bank height all the time does all the damage — the banks are just going back and back and back.”
Continuous high-water flow through the Murray River at Barmah Bridge has resulted in river red gums collapsing from bank erosion.
Mr Fisher also suggested there was little ecological difference between consumptive water and environmental water.
“It’s the same water, and I don’t see the difference between running it down the river or onto rice farms.
“If you look in the rice crops here, there are lots of birds using the water and no-one told them that it wasn’t environmental water that they weren’t allowed to use.
