Heating up the rural policy climate

The last months of extreme temperatures have seen extensive coverage of its impact on rural Australia. Reports on the drought, drying rivers, algal blooms and fish kills have appeared across the media. It has also seen the re‐emergence on social media of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) program1 showing the levels of collusion, non‐compliance and lack of monitoring associated with the Murray‐Darling Basin plan. Some governments have signed up to the plan without sufficient commitment to implementation, compliance monitoring and reporting. This implementation failure coincides with the death of hundreds of thousands of native fish. Some of these Murray Cod had survived up to a 100 years of droughts and climate variation. They are now dead and the long‐term consequences of this tragedy will be visited on our future generations.