You’d think as a consequence of all the reports, the expert findings and the anecdotal evidence tendered to enquiry after enquiry that there’d be some tangible evidence of improvement in this horrible statistic. In spite of the input of legal experts, volumes of evidence and the passing of legislation aimed at tackling the problem head on, there’d be some progress. But now, as a consequence of decades of vacillation the anecdotal and visual evidence is too staggeringly appealing to ignore any longer. 

As a group passionate about the sanctity of life and the maintenance of a healthy living environment with opportunity and a right to self determination we are appalled by the Federal governments neglect. We are gob smacked by the politicking, the denial and in some cases, the obdurate denial of any evidence based analysis for specious belief systems and the maintenance of the status quo.   Without any attempt to tackle the underpinning malaise within our society at large and the remoteness of the problem, the disaster escalates. The responsibility for action resting once again on remote and seemingly arbitrary exercise of powers that are designed ultimately to fail all of us in the administration of what any reasonable person would term ‘good governance’. 

And all awhile as the problem escalates, ministers use the issue as a punching bag, denying responsibility and displacing any attempt of objective analysis to do something  by cheap sloganeering, name calling and denial. 

Ultimately it seems that power rests with deep seated vested interests. Interests of groups, powerful groups who have no real interest in tackling the problem. Rather, they employ a corps of designated “ experts” who maintain a healthy lifestyle, as consultants, carers, and specialists to ensure that the problem is never solved. Ultimately, it just gets worse, and with anthropomorphic climate change, there is every indication that the issue will escalate geometrically, until as one expert proclaimed, there is ‘nothing left’. 

What can be done? For a brief week the public cries outrage, and within an electoral cycle the issue is buried again. The responsibility unresolved, unanswered. To be  palmed off to another politician and another willing corps of peck- sniffs, to do nothing. 

But last week, the high water mark of the issue came and went, the Rivers, the Upper Darling and Menindie Lakes, became a slaughterhouse for government inaction. Their response; ‘let the biota die and we’ll import replacement stocks, until the next crisis’. 

And all the while, the exploitation of resources lies unanswered, lost in a quagmire of buck passing and those sacred rites of mate-ship. The answer this time, ( tried and trusted) is to scoop up the dead, and bury them in a mass grave as landfill. A decisive move, with objective results. 

The ecological equivalent of rounding em up and incarcerating. They’re both prisoners, the fish and the indigenous Australians. They’ve got nowhere else to go, and they’re stuck in the trench we’ve dug for them. It’s a shocking stench when they die, but the clean- up is underway, and the good news is with another election, the show will pass on and the next time around the problem will have gone away. 

And we, as custodians will do nothing. Case closed.