MURRAY-Darling communities are being forced to adjust to a life with a lot less water for the environment's sake, but there is still no clue yet which environmental hot spots all this saved and purchased water is supposedly protecting.
The National Irrigators Council last week called for the Murray Darling Basin Authority to come clean and publicly release the list of environmental assets which will be targeted under the new plan being drawn up to save the system.
But the authority says it hasn't determined what those assets will be, and won't be giving those details away until its draft plan is released mid year.
National Irrigators Council chief executive officer, Danny O'Brien, said the authority failed to publicly identify what the environmental assets are, what their water needs are and what environmental outcomes the authority is aiming to achieve in a response to a letter he sent in December on the issue.
He said irrigators would "lose faith in the process of restoring the environment in the MDB if they didn’t have a clear indication of what new environmental water is to be used for".
"We wrote to the MDBA seeking a list of the wetlands, lakes, forests and other assets that the MDBA will aim to protect and restore with increased environmental flows under the proposed basin plan," Mr O'Brien said.
"The vague response suggests we will not see such a list until the draft plan is released for comment in the middle of this year.
"This begs the question – does the MDBA even know what it is meant to be protecting? We are constantly told that the need to protect the environment is urgent, so surely someone has an idea of what it is that needs protecting?"
It seems at this stage, the Murray Darling Basin Authority doesn't know what is to be protected.
A spokesman told Rural Press that "there was not a lot we can say" on this issue because those assets haven't yet been determined.
The spokesman said the new water reform act provides those assets need to be in the draft plan, and that isn't due until the middle of the year.
"The fact is, we haven't determined them," he said.
Mr O'Brien said irrigators will lose water to help protect these assets therefore must be informed of what they are, their water needs, how they have been chosen and what the measures of success will be."
"The Commonwealth is in the middle of spending $3.1 billion buying up water entitlements from irrigation communities but at the moment we don’t even know what it will be used for."
In October, a draft report from the Productivity Commission investigating the water reform process criticised the Government for an "over-zealous" approach to buying water across the basin which it said might only have "limited benefit for the environment".
The paper, which was dismissed by Water Minister Penny Wong as merely an "issues paper", suggested the Government could be buying the "wrong" water because entitlements have been purchased before a major sustainability plan for the basin has been finalised.
It goes further to say the Government has been buying water with a "no-regrets" presumption that under-allocation of water for the environment was so significant and fears of purchasing the wrong water has "so far been low".
Last year Senator Wong said the Government makes no apology for purchasing water in the basin.
"I think what we see time and time again, whether it’s the CSIRO studies or the Sustainable Rivers Audit, is that this is a river system that is in poor health and it is not in the interest of communities nor of the nation for that to be allowed to continue."
Email a friend