THE minister’s new Murray-Darling Basin Plan will cost Australians and won’t fix the environment.
The minister is proposing more time to complete complex projects and suggest new ideas as requested by the basin states which is supported by National Irrigators’ Council, but in doing so, removes key protections for regional communities and industries that were designed to limit the socio-economic impacts of the reform.
This new Plan, if agreed by Parliament, will create a giant hole in Australia’s economy, reducing jobs on farms, in our Basin communities and at our ports and processing plants, which will cost Australians and risk our future food security.
A further 450 gigalitres will create a significant deficit in agricultural production in our food bowl. That loss of national income is in addition to the funds needed to buy the water and compensation payments as proposed.
But we are yet to see the government’s assessment of these costs and how that will flow through to everyday Australians.
Basin communities wanted win-win solutions, that can deliver real environmental outcomes without the socio-economic impacts of direct entitlement buybacks. This new plan ignores these considerations and seeks only to buy another 450 gigalitres of water.
The minister has ignored any opportunity to include projects that deliver specific environmental outcomes as a way to achieve enhanced environmental outcomes, such as a basin-wide irrigation pump fish screening and improved fish passage, which we know is needed to improve native fish populations.
These fish-friendly programs work, they’ve implemented them in the northern basin as part of the toolkit but the bill proposed still doesn’t enable these options, focusing only on water entitlements not environmental outcomes.
Without a basin-wide complementary program like the northern toolkit, environmental outcomes expected under the basin plan won’t be achieved.
These aren’t the only gaps in the new plan, we can only hope the minister is willing to continue to work through these issues to deliver a better Murray-Darling Basin Plan that achieves real outcomes without the socio-economic impacts of the past repeated.
Jeremy Morton
National Irrigators Council chair
