How to impoverish people without really noticing

Lefty economist, Professor John Quiggin has a long and distinguished career when it comes to being wrong. For years he spent column metres arguing that the policies of John Howard would fail to bring down unemployment, and that the Government pretty much needed to give everyone a job.

When unemployment did decrease very significantly he just stopped talking about it.

Quiggin is one of the men who inspired the ShadowLands' Reverse Retard Index™ - the famously reliable means of forecasting the future by listening to people who are usually wrong, and predicting the opposite.

But now Australia has elected dickheads to office, and John Quiggin finds himself as a man for the times.

Quiggin here, discusses his strenuous efforts to avoid air travel, although the efforts are never quite so strenuous as to prevent him flying somewhere, seemingly, just about every week.

For us, the most alarming part of his post came here:

I also had meetings on water allocation in the Murray Darling Basin.

A former economic adviser to the Greens, you can bet that whatever Quiggin has to say about the Murray Darling basin, growing food is not high on his list of priorities.

Which brings us to this:

The great water buyback that is saving our most majestic river system is killing hundreds of Outback towns.

But apart from farmers, the towns that service them, and Australians who don't want to pay too much or import food and clothes, are there any real victims when it comes to shutting down agricultural water allocations in the Murray Darling basin?

Well, as a matter of fact, yes there are.