There are less than two weeks left in the draft Basin Plan consultation period. We’ve already received over 3000 submissions – most of which are already online. Have you got yours in yet? There’s still time to make a submission.
Need more info? Have more questions?
There are still a few more meetings left in the consultation period. MDBA and SEWPaC staff will be there to answer any questions you have.
Broken Hill at night. Photographer: Arthur Mostead
Tuesday 3 April 2012: public meeting in Adelaide
10:00am – 1:00pm, Adelaide Convention Centre
North Terrace, Adelaide
Wednesday 4 April 2012: public open house meeting in Hay
10:30am-12:00pm, Hay Services Club
371 Murray Street, Hay
Tuesday 10 April 2012: public open house meeting in Broken Hill – NEW VENUE
2:30pm-4:00pm, Broken Hill Civic Centre
60 Chloride Street, Broken Hill
Thursday 12 April 2012: public open house meeting in Sydney
12:00pm-2:00pm, The Barnett Long Room, Customs House
31 Alfred Street, Circular Quay
Friday 13 April 2012: public open house meeting in Melbourne
12:00pm-2:00pm, Red Rotunda Room, State Library of Victoria
231 Swanston St, Melbourne
Meetings with Aboriginal people
We are also continuing to travel to towns throughout the Basin to talk with Aboriginal people:
2-6 April
Lightning Ridge
The Riverland
Wagga/Griffith
9-13 April
Wilcannia
Bourke
Can’t get to a meeting?
Ask us your questions right here on the blog. Or send an email to engagement@mdba.gov.au. If you’d rather speak to someone directly, give us a call on 1800 230 067 (free call in Australia).
What happens next?
MDBA staff will spend weeks reading and reviewing the thousands of submissions. The submissions will then be compiled into a public report and used to revise and improve the draft Basin Plan. The public report and revised Basin Plan then goes to the Legislative and Governance Forum on the Murray-Darling Basin, who will have six weeks to provide their comments. After this, the Commonwealth Water Minister will have 12 weeks to consider the Plan. To become law, the Plan needs to be adopted and tabled in Parliament and subjected to parliamentary scrutiny.
Hello All,
Immediately after submissions closed, we heard much of over 12,000 being received. The submissions list on your website (1327 on 14 May) shows 4,735 uploaded.
What’s going on?
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
We’ve processed all ~12,000 submissions and these are currently being considered. We’re also continuing to upload to our website the submissions that we have permission to make public. Around 3,000 won’t be published based on the request of the submitter.
Thanks Jasmine. You can’t simply split it into two sub-pages; one of “campaign submissions” and the other of “non-campaign submissions”? I suspect the latter will be considerably smaller and easier to search…
You’re currently showing 3,998 submissions as uploaded from a total of “nearly 12,000″. Already it’s a pretty slow and unwieldy process to find individual submissions – I suspect that’s about to get a whole lot worse as the upload process continues.
As a suggestion, would you be able to divide submissions ...
... into “campaign” and “non-campaign” as two separate, searchable, units rather than simply lumping them all together?
Andrew Gregson
NSWIC CEO
Hi Andrew,
We know the situation isn’t ideal. With so many people sharing their view on the draft, the end result of having thousands of submissions to publish is that the system is slower than we all like.
One option – and I know it’s not a great one – is ...
... to use the site operator on Google when you search. Include site:submissions.mdba.gov.au in your Google search to make Google only search the submissions site. It’s not perfect as Google can’t crawl the individual submission pages but you’ll be able to look for particular submitters’ names and at least get a little closer to the right pages.
We’ve also included “campaign submission” after the submitter’s name to help everyone identify these before they click through to the submission itself.