Broken Hill's Mayor has joined other angry community leaders in calling for an inquiry into the operation of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. The call from Darriea Turley comes after alarming revelations on the ABC's Four Corners program about billions of litres of water earmarked for the environment, which have instead been used to irrigate cotton farms in northern New South Wales. "Absolutely outraged, we suspected it, but every time we raised it every politician would push back on us," Ms Turley said. "That is the thing that really is the outrage, that no politician wanted to stand up for Broken Hill." Many people living along the Murray-Darling river system are feeling angry, cheated and left behind after the Four Corners program which aired on Monday night. Two years ago Broken Hill residents started to notice a bad smell from their water and some reported suffering from skin conditions as their main supply from the Darling River flows in the Menindee Lakes dried up. "Watching the show, and seeing the amount of water [upstream irrigators] had stored when we had no water in town, it was heartbreaking," resident Joanie Sanders said. Broken Hill Mayor Darriea Turley has demanded a royal commission into the issue. Her calls were echoed by grazier Kate McBride of Tolarno Station in western New South Wales who featured in the report. "Last year we had eight months of absolutely no water; we couldn't pump to our stock in some places," Ms McBride said. "It's everything to us and we had it completely taken away. "We've got a couple of things we want. One of them is a royal commission … a lot of people are looking to have a royal commission into what is going on. "The other thing is also separating the ministries of Agriculture and Water because there is clear favouritism and I guess a conflict of intertest in some cases between these two ministries." Ms McBride's parents, Rob and Katherine, agree. "We have been having meetings, or trying to have meetings with the [New South Wales] Department of Primary industries, which Gavin Hanlon heads, for a number of years now," Katharine McBride said. "We have invited him up to Tolarno Station probably 10 or 20 times. He came out once back in 2016 when we had no water in our river and we were screaming blue murder, and he promised to come back within the month — 14 months on we haven't seen hide nor hair of him." "Our main concern with the [Four Corners] story is not the small number of irrigators who are alleged to be doing the wrong thing — it is the allegations of improper and unethical behaviour by senior bureaucrats within the New South Wales Government. We don't know how high this goes. "We need a royal commission to fully explore all of the issues and all of the conduct of New South Wales government to really understand how they are contravening their commitment to the act and the Murray-Darling Basin Plan." She believed in the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, which she said supported a healthy environment and healthy communities. "What we need to ensure is that state governments are not eroding the plan and that the Basin Plan is implemented in full," she said. "The Murray-Darling Basin Plan was supposed to give us certainty that there would be a healthy river for our future generations. "We can't maintain our communities and our businesses when we can't even make sure that there will be water for our family and animals to drink." Broken Hill resident Don Stewart feels politicians and public servants have seriously failed their constituents. "Things aren't right and the politicians don't care,'' he said. "The dereliction of the bureaucrats who stopped pressing the guy who was investigated for water, people just don't do their job and the get away with it."

• published: 30 Jul 2017
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