Irrigators in New South Wales have urged the federal water minister, Tanya Plibersek, to focus on the gains made under the Murray-Darling Basin plan and avoid a “war over water” at a crucial meeting on Wednesday.
NSW and Victoria are expected to ask for significant concessions to their obligations on supply and efficiency measures, after it became apparent they would not meet their commitments by the plan’s end date of 2024.
NSW is expected to ask for exemptions from its commitment to deliver the lion’s share of 605GL of water through big projects that are designed to save water through efficiency.
These included a now abandoned plan to reduce evaporation from water stored in the Menindee lakes to save 106GL and another project to make water transfers via Yanco Creek more efficient to save 35GL.
NSW is also three years late with most of its water resource plans.
Victoria is expected to seek concessions on delivering an additional 450GL, which was agreed as the price of getting South Australia to agree to the plan.
The additional water saving was being achieved mainly by on-farm projects, such as making irrigation channels more effective, but only if the projects had no socioeconomic impact on farming communities. Only 6GL has so far been recovered.
Victoria is also behind on projects to remove constraints, such as low-lying roads and bridges, which make it difficult for water authorities to release environmental water safely as human-made floods.
The basin plan states that shortfalls in 2024 would trigger further water buybacks, which effectively means farmers could face losing upwards of 760GL of water currently used for irrigation under water licences.
The NSW Irrigators Council, which represents irrigators , such as cotton farmers, said Plibersek should “recognise what has been gained, and the socioeconomic cost”.
“No one wants a ‘war over water’, because at the end of the day, no one can afford to lose,” the council said in an open letter. “We need healthy environments as much as food and fibre production.”
It said more than four Sydney Harbours of water has come out of irrigation, almost all in one decade under the plan.
However, groups such as the Wentworth Group of concerned Scientists said the targets under the Murray-Darling basin plan of returning 3,200GL to the environment through a mix of buybacks and efficiency projects was “probably” the bare minimum to restore wetlands and the river system.
The plan also did not take into account the impact of climate change on future rainfall, the groups said.
The previous commonwealth environmental water holder, David Papps, tweeted that the proposals by irrigators were a blueprint of what not to do.
A pretty good summary of what Basin Ministers ought not do at their MinCo this week. Predictable regurgitation of the Vic Govt's bodgied up economic impact figure. Doubt anyone other than NSW will swallow that nonsense. Instead, implement the Plan in full. Buy water. Do it now. https://t.co/rEtL8DUuB0
— David Papps (@david_papps55) October 10, 2022
The NSW Minister for water, Kevin Anderson, said his state could not meet its commitments on water savings through big projects (known as the SDLAM projects) and would be seeking concessions.
The state Labor opposition spokesperson, Rose Jackson, said the federal government supported the plan being implemented in full and on time.
Asked whether she would support water buybacks if she becomes minister, Jackson said she would use the remaining time to work with stakeholders to achieve NSW’s commitments under the plan. But she said there might need to be some flexibility, given the short amount of time left.
Victoria is expected to use a report by Frontier Economics it commissioned to argue that if an additional 760GL – Frontier’s estimate of the total shortfall – were to be recovered via buyback, the average annual cost in foregone production would be more than $850m a year.
“It would also result in an extra 17,500 hectares of high-value horticulture being dried off in a repeat of the millennium drought,” the report said.
Frontier said future large-scale buybacks of water entitlements would have socioeconomic impacts across the southern basin – probably focused on northern Victoria.
But Tyler Rotche, an Environment Victoria healthy rivers campaigner, said the analysis was fundamentally flawed in that it only considered the costs of reducing water consumption and returning water to the environment – without considering the costs of inaction.
