AN ENVIRONMENTAL advocate has called on the Victorian Government to get serious about its Basin Plan commitments and avoid pushing for any extension to the deadline by which it must recover water for the environment.
Environment Victoria Healthy Rivers campaigner Tyler Rotche said any delays would have a “big impact” on river ecology and questioned the validity of one government report which suggested an extension of deadlines may result in more environmental outcomes.
Basin state water ministers meet federal Water Minister Tanya Plibersek next week to discuss the progress of the Basin Plan as it nears its 2024 deadline.
It is anticipated Victoria and NSW, responsible for the majority of water recovery projects, will push for a change in the deadline, to allow more time to recover the total 2750GL of water required to be returned to the environment.
Victorian Water Minister Harriet Shing recently told Guardian Australia independent reviews had indicated 2024 was “not a realistic deadline” for all aspects of the Basin Plan.
But Mr Rotche dismissed one such report, The Frontier Economics Report, as a “fundamentally flawed” summary of water recovery in the state.
“The target in the (Basin) Plan is less than half of what the environment needs,” Mr Rotche said.
He said the report only considered “the costs of reducing water consumption and returning water to the environment – without considering the costs of inaction”.
“It’s better than a back of the envelope calculation,” he said. “But it’s not the sort of detailed research you’d expect 10 years into the Basin Plan.”
The report, prepared for the Department of Environment, Land and Water, suggested that as of April 2022, about 2106.4 GL of environmental water had been recovered across the Murray-Darling Basin.
It noted infrastructure projects (known as SDLAM) may achieve 94 per cent of the total target (2750 GL) but an extension of timelines would increase the likelihood of a “greater proportion of the environmental outcomes of constraints removal to be achieved”.
It also suggested buybacks of 372.3GL of high-reliability water used in agriculture would “necessitate an additional 8700 hectares of high-value horticulture being dried off”.
It went on to note that if an additional 760GL were bought back, the cost to foregone production would exceed $850 million per year and equate to the loss of all perennial horticultural plantings in Mildura, Merbein, Red Cliffs, Robinvale and Nyah Irrigation Districts in 2021.
Ms Plibersek said the report did not include evidence on the beneficial outcomes of water recovery, according to a report in The Weekly Times.
“This includes the socio-economic benefits from improved river health and water quality for a broad range of water users, including communities along the river,” she said.
Mr Rotche said “better research” indicated farmers who sold water spent money locally and “the majority only sold some of their share and stayed in farming”.
