Senator Davey, who is based in Deniliquin, said successive Federal Governments have committed to implementing the Basin Plan with no compulsory acquisitions and the Water Act has a clause to compensate any reduction in water reliability due to changes in policy.
“The recommendations in this report, if enacted without further work, would have profound impacts on communities across the basin, with property rights and environmental assets put at risk, therefore opening the door for claims against that section of the Act,” Senator Davey said.
“The report itself makes it clear the models used cannot accurately assess low flows, floodplain harvesting restrictions, and changes to contributions from unregulated water sources, yet it is proposing to fundamentally change rules which would have major impacts across the southern and northern Murray-Darling Basin.
“It’s like a collection of thought bubbles that they couldn’t then get the models to match, so they wrote the recommendations anyway with a caveat about relying on averages.
“For example, the report recommends at the Menindee Lakes, ‘separating the upper lakes from the shared resource’ this could have a major impact on water reliability in New South Wales and Victoria, including the water already recovered for the environment and held by environmental water holders like the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder.
“The proposed changes to commence to pump rules in the northern basin would result in major changes to water availability for agriculture, all but wiping out irrigation in the New South Wales Northern Basin, and it is unclear how the New South Wales Government is proposing to compensate water holders and the communities they support.”
Senator Davey believes the NSW Government wants to hand the Commonwealth the bill for these reforms; however, the Commonwealth has said it will not consider rule changes under its water recovery plan unless it returns ‘held’ entitlements, yet these proposed rule changes won’t create held entitlements.
“The New South Wales Government needs to explain how the proposed recommendations would work in practice and what the impacts will be on communities, the economy, the environment, and indeed other states reliant on the existing water sharing agreements.
“Until those questions are settled, the Federal Government should not accept any proposal to present this as part of the water reform efforts.”
