A NEWS item released by ABC News Online and aired on television on Sunday 27 May has thrown another hot topic onto the fire that is the management of water in the Murray Darling Basin.
Graziers in the Macquarie Marshes are calling it “the most important piece written on the Murray Darling Basin” while Cotton Australia are saying the ABC “reported opinion as fact” and are taking the broadcaster to task over “issues of bias.”
The NSW government is preparing to make new licenses available to irrigators who capture and store water that flows across their land during floods, outside of their licensed water extraction from the rivers.
The ABC alleged that irrigators have been permitted to build large earthworks to channel flood water into huge dams without any monitoring, measuring or payment, using the unlicensed water to supplement their licensed allocation.
Macquarie Valley cotton grower Michael Egan is quoted in the ABC article as saying that “It’s been going on ever since we’ve been irrigating.”
The Macquarie Marshes Environmental Landholders (MMELA) say that the ABC story “opens an enormous can of worms.”
“It’s been going on at least since the 1970s,” MMELA member Dugald Bucknell said.
“And the Macquarie Marshes and the river system has been going backwards since the 70s.”
“It makes an absolute mockery of all the government’s previous studies and inquiries into water use as not one of them has exposed this huge body of water that has been taken.”
In the article, Bill Johnson a water ecologist who previously worked for the Murray Darling Basin Authority, called it a floodplain harvesting “free for all” where “the only limit to how much flood water irrigators in NSW could take was the size of their pumps and their dams.”
The NSW Government is in the process of finalising a policy to regulate the water and propose to distribute free licenses to those who have been taking the most.
The article’s author, national environment, science and technology reporter Michael Slezak says that “whoever managed to take the most will receive the biggest share of licenses.”
The debate has already started around the impact of taking this water with irrigators and the NSW Water Minister Niall Blair pointing out that it is “not extra water” and the proposal is to limit extraction to levels estimated to have been taken in the year 2000 and assuming an “average amount of rainfall.”
“This is just putting a structure and framework around activities that are occurring now,” Mr Blair said.
The challenge being mounted by the environmentalists interviewed for the article is around whether the impacts of these historic extractions are acceptable and why it was not included in earlier calculations used to manage water extraction.
Richard Kingsford, a water ecologist from the University of New South Wales is quoted as saying that “taking flood water had big environmental impacts” and that “doing so shrinks the size of the floods.”
“We’re talking about a cumulative impact on each of these river systems right down to the bottom of the Murray-Darling Basin.”
Another point of dispute is the allocation of “saleable property rights” to an amount of water that has never been measured or purchased.
Grazier Peter McLellan is quoted as saying that “That’s just making some people richer and richer and the rest of the communities, they’re getting poorer.”
The article also raises questions around how the extraction of flood water, regardless of the estimates used, will be included in the figures used by the Murray Darling Basin Authority to calculate the amount of water that can sustainably be taken from the system.
