The New South Wales government has withdrawn seven water resource plans – including for three of the state’s biggest catchments of the Barwon-Darling, the Gwydir and the Namoi rivers – after it was told by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority that they were inadequate and would be rejected.
The plans set rules on how much water can be taken from the basin system and on how water is shared between towns, agriculture and the environment.
The withdrawal of the seven plans occurred last week and was not publicised.
NSW is now more than four years late in lodging the plans, raising serious questions about the implementation of the Murray-Darling Basin plan, which is about to undergo a major review.
Rose Jackson, Labor’s water minister who took over the portfolio after the NSW election in March, said she wanted to submit revised plans and have them in place as soon as possible.
“They should never have been submitted because they were never going to get accredited,” she said of the efforts of her National party predecessor, Kevin Anderson.
“I don’t want to waste time. They were clearly submitted when everyone knew they were flawed,” she said.
The wrangling over NSW’s water resource plans has been one of the major failings of the Murray Darling Basin plan and has serious implications.
Daniel Blacker, the head of regulatory in the inspector general’s office, told Senate estimates last week that accredited water resource plans provide the “key trigger in the commonwealth legislation for us to act on a water theft offence”.
Without approved water resource plans, the only regulation of the take of water from rivers by agriculture is under state rules, known as water sharing plans. These may ultimately prove inconsistent with water resource plans and the broader basin plan.
The Murray Darling Basin Authority said NSW was reporting its water take under a bilateral agreement, but wants binding accredited plans to be in place.
NSW’s poor progress is a legacy of the previous Coalition government.
Over the last four years National party ministers regularly threatened to pull out of the basin plan and said they could not meet the deadlines. NSW was forced to withdraw almost all of its 20 water resource plans in 2021 after it failed to meet the authority’s standards.
It appears the next drafts were not much better; just four groundwater plans in NSW have been accredited. Plans for all the major rivers – the Barwon Darling, Lower Darling, Gwydir, Namoi, Macquarie, Lachlan and the Border rivers – have been withdrawn. Another nine plans are still being assessed.
During the dying days of the Coalition government in early 2023, the Nationals also moved to license the practice of floodplain harvesting despite multiple efforts by the NSW upper house to delay it until better scientific data was available on its impact.
Floodplain harvesting is the practice of capturing flows over the flat plains of western NSW using dams and levies. The practice has grown enormously as cotton has expanded over the last two decades and has been blamed by some scientists for the 20% to 30% decline in flows into some rivers.
The Guardian understands that while some plans can be remedied relatively easily, there are serious problems with the draft plans for the Barwon Darling, the Gwydir and the Namoi, which are major cotton growing areas.
The new licences issued for floodplain harvesting may result in the total amount of water being extracted for agriculture exceeding the “caps” that were agreed between the states.
A spokesperson for the Murray Darling Basin Authority said: “The plans are late, however it is important that they are of sufficient quality to meet basin plan requirements.
“Plans will not be recommended for accreditation until the authority assesses that they meet all 55 requirements of the basin plan.”
Cate Faehrmann, the water spokesperson for the Greens, said “clearly the National party’s attempt to allocate hundreds of gigalitres of floodplain harvesting entitlements to big irrigators in the northern basin has compromised the integrity of the basin plan and forced NSW to reassess its water resource plans”.
“With another drought just around the corner, the minister must use her powers to rein in floodplain harvesting by reducing the massive entitlements recently gifted to irrigators to within legal limits.”
