THE National Party caused a stir last month when the brought to the Senate a proposal to amend the Murray Darling Basin Plan (MDBP), and even though it was voted down, it has won plenty of support in the Swan Hill and Gannawarra Shire districts.
Swan Hill Rural City Council mayor and farmer Bill Moar and Gannawarra Shire Council deputy mayor Garner Smith are in favour of the amendment which would see the 450GL up-water target scrapped.
“The key message is that there has to be another way of getting efficient waterflow, not taking anything more from the consumptive pool,” Mr Moar said.
“Because if that leads to the escalating price of water, we’re going to lose industries, it’s as simple as that.”
Mr Moar said the 450GL target was essentially a water buyback scheme, which could be subject to rorting.
And in the municipality of Swan Hill, that 450GL would produce 1.2 billion in irrigated agriculture, which would just be the start of what could eventually be a $5 billion value chain and tens of thousands of jobs, he said.
“So to remove that from the system, it just makes no sense to us.”
Mr Moar said most of the water that has ever been bought back has been in the Southern-connected Basin, which is “why there has been so much carnage in the past”.
One of the arguments put forward from parties in opposition to the amendments was that the 450GL would be critical to environmental flows, but Mr Moar questioned the cost.
“Annually the MDBP is costing $20 billion dollars a year – all that we’re asking is to see consistent and effective results in relation to what it does for the environment.”
Garner Smith’s family also has extensive knowledge of the river system, and saw firsthand how the irrigation scheme at Gunbower National Park only delivered half of its flow targets due to communication being a top-down approach, rather than local water users being consulted.
For Mr Smith, political parties or bureaucrats who take a “chequebook approach” to water management “ignore their constituency at their peril”.
“Water can only be obtained by using public funds to buy it or by undermining the reliability of water to irrigators – which is effectively stealing it,” he said.
“2.1 million megalitres has been recovered for the MDBP, so claiming that another 450GL is critical to Murray Darling objectives is naïve.”
Mr Smith said he had not seen support among his peers in dairy farming or the Gannawarra Shire Council for the up-water target.
