Hopes that environment-saving water will be delivered through the Murray-Darling Basin plan are evaporating rapidly.
Just two gigalitres of a promised 450GL have been delivered so far. The federal government is set to table the much-delayed Water for the Environment Special Account (WESA) report when parliament sits in just over a week.
The Australia Institute and the Greens say further water buybacks – which were capped under the Coalition – are the only way to get the water needed to sustain the basin, but that would require legislation.
The lack of water threatens species and their habitats throughout the basin.
Water minister, Tanya Plibersek, said the government remained committed to the target despite challenges. The government was not ruling out buybacks.
The Nationals have long been on the side of the irrigators, against delivering the 450GL, and critical of buybacks, while the Liberal party always said it would deliver the plan “in full and on time”.
The $13bn plan divided states, political parties, irrigators and conservationists. It was years in the making, and adding the 450GL of environmental water to the original 2,750GL was a hard-fought concession to South Australia. The 2012 plan decreed that 450GL a year should be returned to the river system by 2024.
Meanwhile, the Murray-Darling faces ever-increasing dry periods because of climate change.
While the water is critical to the health of SA’s Coorong, Lower Lakes, and Murray mouth, it’s also crucial throughout the basin to maintain wetland refuges, avoid species loss, halt salinity and keep water flowing between the rivers, lakes and floodplains.
The 450GL was legislated, but another deal was struck by water ministers in 2018, which effectively said the water can only be recovered for the environment if no socioeconomic harm is done to river communities.
Shadow water minister, Perin Davey, called the target an “upper limit”, and said only 62GL was needed. She said this week that through “politicisation” the 450GL had “morphed into an interpreted fixed target”.
“The opposition only supports water recovery that meets the socioeconomic assessment criteria agreed by the ministerial council in 2018,” Davey’s office said in a statement.
Plibersek said the government was committed to delivering the Murray Darling Basin plan, “including the 450GL, which was the basis for SA signing up to the plan”.
“After nearly a decade only 2GL has been delivered. It shows [the Liberals and Nationals] were never serious about delivering on the plan,” she said.
“For senator Davey to claim that the 450GL is an ‘interpreted target’ is to deliberately misinterpret history.”
Greens water spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, said Plibersek was facing a “monumental task” after nine year’s of the Coalition’s “incompetence”.
“But I urge her not to wave the white flag,” she said, and called on her to lift the moratorium on voluntary buybacks to farmers who wanted to could sell their water to the environment.
Davey’s comments showed she was “either misreading the plan, doesn’t understand it, or simply doesn’t care”, Hanson-Young said.
SA deputy premier and water minister, Susan Close, said the 450GL was enshrined in the law, and necessary for the sustainability of the basin.
“It’s not optional. It’s not a luxury. It’s not trivial,” she said, adding that delivering the water was in the “true interests of all who live in the basin”.
The Australia Institute’s Kate McBride, a water expert, said the last WESA review made it clear that even in the best case scenario only 60GL would be returned under the current settings.
“We know for a fact, and we’ve known for years we’re not going to get the 450GL,” she said. “The previous government hid [the next WESA report], it’s well overdue.”
McBride said the only way it was “doable” was with buybacks, but it was unclear how that might play out politically.
“The 450GL is often painted as SA water, but fundamentally it’s for the environment,” she said.
“We always knew the basin plan was a compromise, and without the 450GL the environment is even more compromised.
“We need to recover that water to have any hope of having a healthy basin.”
The NSW Irrigators’ Council called for “collaboration and cooperation … not more of the water wars of the last decade”. Chief executive officer Claire Miller said water was already flowing to the environment, building up resilience so “ecosystems could flourish immediately it turned wet”.
“The environment already owns about 27% of water entitlements in the southern Basin,” she said.
“That’s on top of the bulk of inflows which are not diverted for any purpose.”
