The Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) has put its full support behind a proposed legislative change to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.

Federal Water Minister, Tanya Plibersek is seeking to remove limits on the water buybacks and remove social and economic protections, a move that will strip the life blood from our communities and environment.  

The implementation of the Basin Plan is littered with reports that clearly demonstrate the catastrophic impacts that water buybacks have on communities, their broader environment and our farmers that rely on water.

The amendments, aptly titled ‘Restoring our Rivers’, come 10 years after the Basin Plan’s push to ‘save the rivers’. Legislative changes to the plan have been unobtainable when faults in the plan are pointed out, but appear relatively easy when political ambitions are the driving force.

I did think that ‘Restoring the Rivers’ might be a program to rectify the damage that saving the rivers has fuelled. For example, banks eroding to silt under the rush to deliver higher and higher flows through the natural constraints of our inland delta, or the washing away of beaches and sand bars above the Barmah Millewa Choke. Or does the blame still lay with that cheeky sand slug, Australia’s very own Loch Ness monster! All jokes aside, there are protections within the 2007 Water Act to address some of these issues, but for whatever reason, the will is lacking. 

The Authority’s advocacy for increasing water recovery is hardly surprising with the single-minded focus of ‘ on time and in full’. The Authority has been the arbiter of truth, with them holding the reins on running the rivers (to the SA border), implementing the plan, reviewing their own work, setting the terms of reference for independent reviews of their own work, managing community concerns and even running defence for the lower lakes. 

Despite the plan’s original intent to recover 2,750GL, over 4,600GL is currently held in environmental accounts. 83 per cent of buybacks have come from the southern connected system. It is important to note that environmental water is a class of licence, for most of the time it is not water ‘saving’ the Murray. Also, the ‘environment’ that the government and the MDBA seek to save in a small percentage of the whole basin environment. The Authority cannot even deliver the water they held, as there is so much water now attempting to move downstream on the Murray that it exceeds the natural constraints formed some 40,000 years ago. 

Look out for the constraint’s relaxation projects, as the Murray becomes the whipping boys for big business’s permanent plantings and Australia’s only freshwater estuary! 

I sat this week with a Californian, who had been touring the basin. By the end of our night, it was nice to hear that someone with a passionate water interest from the other side of the world can see the compounding factors that is driving this runaway train.  

I’ll leave you with the back page of a book written in the early 2000s, the same people politicians and the MDBA have ignored for more than 20 years. Did they have a crystal ball or just wisdom? 

High and Dry authored by Patrick J. Byrne, Neil Eagle, John O’Brien and Daryl McDonald. 

High and Dry
How free trade in water will cripple Australian agriculture

Key points on water policy.

1. Measured per capita, Australia is the third most water rich nation on earth.

2. Water is not a private good but a mixed good, with many public good characteristics. Its price curve is inelastic.

3. Both FAO and World Bank research strongly argues that the primary allocation of water between sectors has to be done by governments and that it cannot be done by markets.

4. Trading water from low to high value agriculture is a flawed concept:

• Australia needs low value products to provide low cost, quality food to both domestic consumers and export markets;
• Over investment in high value products turns today’s high value products into tomorrow’s low value products;
• Farmers already act on market forces to shift to high value agriculture. They don’t need water trading to achieve increased output;
• Most permanent water trade is to managed investment schemes (MIS) that are driven by government tax breaks, not market forces;
• Open water trade will see MIS, water barons, cities, industry and environmental users drive up the price of water; and most policy makers don’t understand the nature of agricultural water rights. There are 24 different water entitlements in the Murray-Darling Basin alone.

5. Permanent water trade must be restricted to within irrigation regions, to avoid stranding of assets and collapse of regional economies.

6. The science on the health of the Murray River is so poor that a federal inquiry recommended that there be no allocation of environmental water until the necessary research is thoroughly completed.

7. The National Water Commission must include experts on irrigation agriculture, so that the National Water Initiative can be properly and professionally overhauled.

8. Governments must build new reservoirs.

This article appeared in The Koondrook and Barham Bridge Newspaper, 5 October 2023.