A Dark Day for Murray-Darling Basin Irrigators
Contrary to the promise of previous federal Labor Water Minister Tony Burke, the new minister Tanya Plibersek has announced a further buyback of 450 gigalitres (almost one Sydney Harbour) from irrigation farmers in the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB).
This planned buyback is equivalent to over 80 per cent of an average year’s water supplied to Murray Irrigation Ltd, Australia’s largest private irrigation network, which covers 7,400 square kilometres of southern NSW around Deniliquin. This buyback amounts to 61 per cent of the water delivered last year to the huge Goulburn-Murray Irrigation District, which covers 9,950 sq kms in central Victoria around Shepparton.
The National Farmers Federation estimates that the 450-gigalitre buyback will cost $2.9 billion, based on high-security licences currently costing about $8,000 per megalitre.
Over the Top
In 2012, the Commonwealth and the Basin states (Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia) agreed to a buyback of 2,700 gigalitres (a little over five Sydney Harbours) from irrigation farming, which was to be redirected to the environment as part of a new Basin plan.
Even so, South Australia refused to sign up to the plan without an additional buyback of 450 gigalitres, even though that had not been part of the original Murray-Darling Basin Plan.
However, as former Labor Water Minister Tony Burke explained, 2,700 gigalitres was the maximum amount of water that could be delivered down the Murray River due to flow constraints in the system: that is, limits on the amount of water that a channel can carry. Hence, “for extra gigalitres of water in the system, you don’t get a significant environmental improvement,” Mr Burke said.
According to Jan Beer of the Upper Goulburn River Catchment Association, the environmental water holders (both state and Commonwealth) are currently holding far more than 2,700 gigalitres. She reports that they are holding 4,622.5 gigalitres (over nine Sydney Harbours) of water entitlements, as declared in the Murray-Darling Basin Authority’s Annual Water Take Report 2020-2021.
She warned that the extra 450 gigalitres will have to be stored in the upper-catchment storages, in the Eildon, Hume and Dartmouth reservoirs. With the huge amount of environmental water already being stored upstream in the Murray system, there is an increased risk of flooding down the Goulburn and Murray systems, such as in fact occurred in 2022. Storing an extra 450 gigalitres will further increase the risk of flooding.
“Deliverability is the elephant in the room. It is not possible to deliver that volume of water downstream under the proposed environmental-flow regime, unless they are similar to the magnitude of the 2016 and 2022 floods”, Beer said.
Destructive
Shelley Scoullar of the Basin’s community-based Speak Up campaign, says:
“We cannot deliver the full amount of environmental water that is currently held in storage, so how are we going to deliver the additional volumes that we are told will be recovered, without causing flood damage to public and private property?
“What part of this basic physics impossibility does the Minister not understand?”
Beer said that it is devastating that someone like Plibersek, with her city upbringing and no involvement in the complex water area until last year, makes decisions which decimate livelihoods and are obviously focused on achieving political mileage, not environmental benefit.
Plibersek “is taking water from the regions which produce our core staple foods such as dairy products, rice, fruit, milling wheat for bread and baker products, plus our stock fodder supplies”.
“When growing this produce declines, which is inevitable, the cost at the supermarket will continue to rise and we then have another broken Albanese Government promise, which was to address the cost of living crisis,” she said.
The Victorian Government has said it will not support the further 450-gigalitre buyback. However, it is inevitable that Plibersek will keep hounding Victoria to come on board.
Overall, under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, reducing irrigation allocations by about 30 per cent in Australia’s major food bowl will result in consumers paying a whole lot more for their food.
Changes Under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan
One Sydney Harbour is 500 gigalitres, or 200,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. Total Murray-Darling Basin reservoir storage capacity is 22,300 gigalitres, or 45 Sydney Harbours.
Until the 2012 Murray-Darling Basin Plan, half the Basin’s stored water (22.5 Sydney Harbours) was for the environment and half (22.5 Sydney Harbours) for irrigation, towns and industry.
Under the 2012 Basin Plan, an additional 5.5 Sydney Harbours (2,700 gigalitres) was to be taken in buybacks from farmers to make the total environmental allocation 28 Sydney Harbours.
Taking an additional 450 gigalitres for environmental flows will mean the environment will receive about 29 Sydney Harbours, while irrigation farming is reduced to 16 Sydney Harbours, an overall reduction of almost 30 per cent for irrigation farming.
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Originally published in News Weekly. Image: Wikimedia Commons
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