Australia needs to be prepared for drought

My last rant was about fire climate management, and now I am going to jump over to drought management.

Or should I say the lack thereof?

Once again we see our beautiful Australia living up to Dorothea Mackellar's epic poem and even though there's been rain the past week or so, drought is very much on the doorstep of many of our rural communities.

And we have a group of very often ill-informed do-gooders and bleeding hearts who do not want to see water management dealt with.

In my opinion, we will have many more floods and many more droughts - same old, same old - but we kowtow to Greenism that holds back dam development and genuine off stream water storage.

Why do we not stand up and say: "There has to be a better way for Australia to hang onto the water when it falls rather than allowing it to spew into the great Southern Ocean".

During the horrid drought of the late 2010s I approached a water minister with an idea - simplistic maybe, but no less something that could happen - and not only did I get laughed at but I was also cast aside.

So here, readers, you decide if this is a hook worth baiting.

The proposal I had was to allow farmers and graziers to clear out the dry parched and barren waterways where the rivers run from the Great Dividing Range to the magnificent west.

During this aforementioned drought, rivers were dry, creeks and billabongs were cracked - there was no wildlife suffering because they had already perished.

So, why not give fuel subsidies or diesel fuel allocations to the landholders, managers, river dwellers, small community operatives - just simply anyone with a blade, bucket or dozer - to give their time to strengthen their patch?

It wasn't like bushies had anything else much to do and no one wants idle hands.

First response was the Greens would never allow it. To that I responded 'who is running the show?'.

I have to declare I very rarely ask a question like that of a politician without having a fair idea of the answer anyway, but I was cast aside. However, I was not about to accept that, so I continued to push my point.

I explained it would be classified as desilting.

The silt build-up over many years of floods has filled up many of our waterways - even waterholes in creeks and rivers in my lifetime have shallowed.

So, why couldn't we do this when it would recreate millions of megalitres, even gigalitres, of natural storage when the next floods come. Still, I was laughed at, and then along came the next floods and the moment was lost.

But, my question is, why can we still not do this?