Irrigation lobby groups and councils were among the organisations making the trip to Canberra last week to have their say on the changes to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.
The many different voices all said the same thing to the Senate Standing Committee on Environment and Communications Legislation — that the Water Amendment [Restoring Our Rivers] Bill 2023 will irreparably damage farmers and rural communities.
The legislation has passed the House of Representatives and will be debated in the Senate this week.
The Senate hearings into the changes to the basin plan come as a Productivity Commission report says the legislation doesn’t go far enough, urging the Federal Government to step up its water recovery efforts including staged voluntary buybacks.
Those opposing the basin plan changes say it is these buybacks that will sound the death knell for the bush.
Goulburn Murray Irrigation District Water Leadership Forum co-chairs David McKenzie and Suzanna Sheed, together with members Rob Priestly and Linda Nieuwenhuizen, travelled to Canberra to give evidence to the Senate inquiry.
“Our leadership group has been advocating for years against the use of further buybacks to achieve water recovery targets in the southern Murray-Darling Basin,” Mr. McKenzie said.
”The focus needs to shift to the northern basin.
“We are at crunch time in the basin plan, and it is overdue that someone calls out the recalcitrance of NSW, and the protection racket involving floodplain harvesting in the northern basin.
“The current bill will effectively legislate that protection racket into law forever and mean the death of the Darling River.”
Mr McKenzie said they told the senators that there have been very significant negative impacts because of previous buybacks across our regions.
“Report after report has verified this, including the Sefton panel of which I was a member.
“My understanding is that there hasn’t been a single study that hasn’t detected what they call ‘distributional impacts’, that is, negative socio-economic impacts. It is unequivocal, every study has detected this.”
Mr Priestly told senators that a report from consultants Slattery and Johnson found that although the southern basin accounts for 63 per cent of the Sustainable Diversion Limits, it has contributed 82 per cent of the water recovered to date.
“If any attempt was to be made to deal with the dire environmental issues along the Darling River then further water recovery should also be sought from the northern basin.”
In arguing that water recovery should be distributed more fairly across the basin, Mr Priestly said “we are able to recover water in the northern basin for a river that is desperate for the flow, and it will then get to South Australia”.
“It’s there in black and white. That is saying it’s capable of delivering up to something in the order of 300 gigalitres. I think it’s something that should be seriously considered. We’re going to kill two birds with one stone: save the Darling and deal with South Australia’s issues.”
Ms Sheed reminded the committee that the basin plan was a major piece of environmental and economic reform and that people from all over the world were watching to see how the project could be delivered and its impacts.
However, the rush to complete on time was “not allowing for the flexibility and the change that is occurring along the way, the knowledge that’s being acquired, the science that’s being acquired”.
She told the inquiry there are other strategic projects which could be worked on in the years ahead to deliver more water recovery rather than using the harsh instrument of buybacks of water from irrigation communities.
The Victorian Government has “done what it needed to do and it’s just on the cusp of finishing. Others haven’t,” Ms Sheed said.
“Referencing the recent report of the Inspector General for Water Compliance, she pointed out that NSW had not pulled its weight and failed to meet many of the milestones required of it under the basin plan, thereby creating an unequal and unfair advantage.