IN SHORT

• Mayor Doug Curran attended a Riverina and Murray Joint Organisation meeting in Wentworth last week alongside the General Manager and Councillor Blumer, with the Murray Darling Basin Plan review dominating proceedings and prompting the mayor to urge Griffith residents to complete a submission and engage directly with the process. 
• Mayor Curran has also acknowledged the retirement of Sussan Ley from the Farrer electorate, describing her as a representative who always had her constituents at heart regardless of political affiliation

Griffith Mayor Doug Curran has opened his latest message to the community with a Leonardo da Vinci quote that cuts to the heart of everything this region is built on. "Water is the driving force of all nature." In a city whose agricultural identity, economic output and long-term viability are inseparable from access to water, that is not a philosophical observation. It is a statement of operational fact that every farmer, irrigator, business owner and resident in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area understands in their bones.

Last week Mayor Curran travelled to Wentworth with Griffith's General Manager and Councillor Blumer to attend a meeting of the Riverina and Murray Joint Organisation, known as RAMJO. The meeting was heavily focused on the Murray Darling Basin Plan review, a process that will shape water policy across the basin for the years ahead and that has enormous direct implications for communities like Griffith whose prosperity is built on irrigation agriculture.

By the mayor's account it was a very good meeting. But it also underlined something that tends to get lost in the machinery of policy reviews conducted by bureaucracies and politicians: that community engagement is not a box to tick but a genuine opportunity to shape outcomes that will affect people's lives and livelihoods for a generation. 

"Please, please find out more, complete a submission and be a part of the review," Mayor Curran said. "This will be one of the most important reviews for Griffith's future."

That is not hyperbole. The Murray Darling Basin Plan review is examining water use, environmental flows, buybacks and allocation arrangements across the most productive agricultural river system in Australia. The voices that carry weight in that process are not only those of government agencies and environmental lobby groups. They are also the voices of the communities that actually live and work in the basin, irrigate from its rivers, run businesses that depend on the agricultural output it supports and have watched previous iterations of the plan play out in ways that have not always reflected local knowledge or local need. If you have a view on how water in the Murrumbidgee system should be managed, now is the time to put it on the record. The MDBA's review consultation process is open to public submissions and the link is available through the BCB app story.

The mayor also used his message to acknowledge the retirement of Sussan Ley from the seat of Farrer, a federal electorate that covers a vast swathe of southern and western New South Wales including Griffith. Ley, who served as a federal minister across multiple portfolios and was most recently Deputy Liberal Leader, has represented Farrer for more than two decades. Mayor Curran's assessment was characteristically measured and generous across political lines. 

"Regardless of your politics, it cannot be said that Sussan did not always have her constituents at heart," he said. 

Ley's retirement triggers a by-election for Farrer that will be watched closely across the western region. Mayor Curran is right that water will enter the by-election debate, and so it should. The seat covers much of the Murray Darling Basin. The views of whoever wins it on water policy, irrigation entitlements and the Basin Plan review will matter directly to Griffith and to every farming and irrigating community in the electorate. The by-election represents a moment for the region to make clear what it needs from its federal representative and what it expects on the issues that define the area's economic future.