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NSW government cops water policy blow as another setback looms
By Peter Hannam
The NSW government’s inland water strategy is under siege with the upper house rejecting its scheme to license irrigators’ extraction during floods and a federal agency dismissing its river plans.
The government’s flood plain harvesting regulations, published only a week ago, were disallowed in the Legislative Council on a vote of 21-15, as most crossbenchers aligned with Labor to reject the plans as inadequate.
A cotton farm near Bourke. The issue of how to license water take by farmers during periods of flooding remains unresolved after the NSW upper house voted to disallow the latest regulations put forward by the state government.Credit: Nick Moir
At stake were potentially billions of dollars worth of water licences as the government attempts to reconcile restrictions on water take from the Murray-Darling Basin with the many unlicensed dams and other structures that irrigators have built in recent decades to capture overland flows.
Justin Field, the independent MP who introduced the disallowance motion, said that before licences were granted “clear targets for downstream flows must be set in law to ensure that the other water licence holders, downstream communities and the environment get their fair share of these flows”.
“Without these targets, [those downstream] end up carrying the risk if the government gets the modelling or rules wrong and as we continue to see falling inflows into our catchments as a result of climate change,” he said. “That’s an unacceptable situation.”
Thursday’s rejection was the second time in eight months that the upper house had rejected proposals by Water Minister Melinda Pavey to close a loophole on irrigators’ extraction.
Ms Pavey said an “unholy alliance of the Greens and Shooters [had] simultaneously removed certainty for the environment and regional communities”.
“The NSW government spent six years and more than $15 million on collecting and analysing data from field inspections, remote sensing, metering and river flow records, ensuring the best available science informs this groundbreaking reform [for which] the regulations were first introduced last year,” she said.
Aerial surveillance of flood waters over Forbes and Parkes over the last 36 hours.
The flood plain issues are not the only water policy headache for the Berejiklian government.
The Murray-Darling Basin Authority wrapped up two days of meetings on Thursday by confirming that all of the remaining water resource plans put forward by NSW for assessment were likely to be at odds with the $13 billion Basin Plan. Four of the 20 plans have already been withdrawn.
“All proposed NSW [plans] appear to be inconsistent with Basin Plan requirements,” an authority statement, said. “Some of these inconsistencies are policy related and others are technical in nature.”
Maryanne Slattery, director of Slattery & Johnson, a consultancy specialising in water policy, said the NSW government was quietly heading for the exit.
“There’s nothing left in the Basin Plan,” she said. “NSW has effectively walked away from the plan without saying so.”
Ms Slattery said Ms Pavey would need to legislate water sharing plans that include floodplain harvesting volumes, and would need concurrence from NSW Environment Minister Matt Kean.
“In their current form, these plans are devastating for the environment and many people in the NSW Basin are hoping minister Kean will not sign off on them,” she said.
Ian Cole from Barwon-Darling at a dam for a cotton farm near Bourke that filled up after good rains last year.Credit: Nick Moir
On the disallowed regulations, Helen Dalton, a Shooters, Fishers and Farmers spokeswoman on water, said Ms Pavey had “failed to properly consult, [and] many Lower Darling and Murray groups have been sidelined”.
“When she comes to the table with guarantees around downstream water targets, we can relook at the regulations,” she said, adding her party would support a proposal by Greens MP Cate Faehrmann for an upper house inquiry into the management of floodplain harvesting.
“We absolutely need this inquiry because the NSW government are using dodgy numbers to pretend floodplain harvesting is within legal limits,” Ms Dalton said.
Ms Faehrmann said her proposed inquiry, which might be voted on next week, is aimed at giving voice to groups including First Nations people along the Darling-Baaka River and would recommend how licensing should work.
“This inquiry will examine the legality of floodplain harvesting as well as the modelling underpinning the government’s claims that licensing floodplain harvesting won’t exceed the [Murray-Darling Basin extraction cap],” she said.
Clayton Barr, Labor’s water spokesman, said the inquiry’s terms would need to be modified before his party would sign up. “We do support it in principle,” he said.
Mr Barr said the floodplain regulations were trying to reconcile the 400 gigalitres of farm storage in the northern basin in 1994 against some 1500 gigalitres now.
“We’re trying to regulate an opportunity,” Mr Barr said. “We’re locking into concrete where, historically, it’s been the luck of the draw, the luck of the weather.”
Jim Cush, chairman of the NSW Irrigators Council, said his organisation was disappointed at the disallowance. “This was a way to increase flows back into the rivers,” he said.
“Environmentalists, are they for the river or are they for politics?” Mr Cush asked, adding the disallowance was “political bloody bastardry”.
He said that, with the rivers in high flow after recent good rains, there is still time to get the rules sorted before times turn dry again. “We have two years of supply in the Lower Darling,” he said.
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