Suddenly, unexpectedly, irrigators find themselves on the same page as the Wentworth Group. Both parties think that the draft 2011 Murray Darling Basin Plan is junk.
Irrigators pronounced the plan dead on arrival when the plan was released in November. Last week, the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists released a report on the draft plan that said much the same thing.
The Group focused on different issues, but identified the same problem: the absence of explanation around the report's key conclusions.
Tom Chesson, chief executive of the National Irrigators' Council, said that usually, his organisation found the Wentworth Group's contributions "as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike".
"But in this case, it's hard to disagree with a lot of what they say."
Wentworth Group executive director Peter Cosier abandoned the Basin planning process early in 2010, after failing to get an answer on why planning was suddenly being based around water recovery of 2750 gigalitres.
A few months earlier, the 2010 Guide to the Basin Plan had stipulated 3856 GL as the minimum needed to be recovered from consumption to sustain the health of the Basin's ecology.
Nearly a year on, and the draft plan still fails to identify the basis of the 2750 GL figure, Wentworth Group environmental engineer Tim Stubbs told Rural Press.
"We need confidence in that figure," Mr Stubbs said. "This change needs to be peer-reviewed, because we don't understand how it was arrived at."
At the same time, the draft Plan fails to say what volume of water is needed to sustain the Basin in robust ecological health.
The Wentworth Group is also dissatisfied with the plan's explanation that "constraints" in the water delivery system, like bridges and valves, make it difficult to deliver more than 2750 GL of environmental flows each year.
While the draft plan listed some of these constraints, the Group points out that there is no effort to look at the feasibility and costs of redesigning parts of the system that would constrain water delivery.
Climate change is absent from the draft plan, an "extraordinary" omission in the Wentworth Group's view.
CSIRO modelling suggests that climate change is likely to result in significant reductions in rainfall and runoff in south-eastern Australia over the next 20 years.
"Yet the draft plan ignores these effects even though it is intended to guide water use in the basin over much of the same time period."
The Group is also sceptical that 2750 GL will be adequate to keep open the mouth of the River Murray so that the two million tonnes of salt that annually accumulates in the Basin can be washed away.
According to the draft Plan, 2750 GL should keep the mouth open nine years out of 10.
According to the Wentworth Group, this "statistical description of probability" is not supported by any evidence that it will sustain the health of ecological communities around the Murray mouth, or adequately flush salt from the system.
Mr Stubbs said the modelling process developed by the Murray Darling Basin Authority is robust, but in this case the models have been used to justify pre-determined figures of doubtful origins. "Garbage in, garbage out," he said.
The Wentworth Group is calling for a range of modelling scenarios to be produced, to show a full range of consequences - environmental, economic and social - of different water recovery scenarios.
The Group wants the current planning process to be halted, and complete re-think initiated.
'Are we really addressing the issues and making this reform work if people are reacting the way they are?" Mr Stubbs said.
"Clearly the approach to date hasn't worked. We've got people taking immoveable positions, bad science being put to Parliament, and huge chunks of taxpayers money going out the door."
Tom Chesson agrees that "everyone needs to take a deep breath", but thinks the planning process can't be halted, because the government needs to work out how to use the water it has accumulated - 2.1 million megalitres, in the NICs estimate.
"They need a plan for that water. They don't know when, how or what they are going to water. They can't step out of the planning process midway; there's too much at stake."
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