Murray-Darling: State plan to give irrigators water ‘free-for-all’ could threaten wetlands

Irrigators in New South Wales are set to receive vast new licences to take water from the Murray-Darling Basin, handed out for free under a state proposal that some say will undermine the national $13 billion plan to save the country’s most important river system.

Upstream irrigators who would receive lucrative licences have broadly welcomed the plan, but ecologists say it could doom some of the country’s most important wetlands.

Environmental lawyers say the policy might be illegal and downstream graziers complain it will make irrigators rich at their expense.

Emma Carmody, a lawyer at the Environmental Defenders Office of NSW, said the policy is likely not allowed under the federal Water Act, and is the latest in a number of policies that she says could be illegal.

“I’m very alarmed because what it suggests to me is a disregard bordering on contempt for the rule of law,” she said.

Taking water out of rivers in the basin requires a licence, but currently, when that water spills out over land during floods in NSW, it has been free for the taking.

Irrigators have been allowed to build vast earthworks to funnel flood water into enormous dams without requiring licenses, or even any measurement.

Michael Egan, a cotton grower from the Macquarie Valley in the state’s central west, said he and other irrigators had used unlicensed flood water to avoid depleting their licensed allocation.

“It’s been going on ever since we’ve been irrigating,” Mr Egan said.

He is also the chairman of Macquarie Food and Fibre, which represents irrigators in the region.

Bill Johnson, a water ecologist who used to manage environmental water for the federal Murray-Darling Basin Authority, said the only limit to how much flood water irrigators in NSW could take was the size of their pumps and their dams.

“I think there has been a free-for-all when it comes to floodplain harvesting,” he said.

Those currently taking most will get biggest licensed share
Plans to regulate that water have been in the works since 2008, when it was floated by the Nathan

Rees Labor state government.

The NSW Government is now finalising the policy, and consulting with communities.

They are also now calculating how much each valley — and each irrigator — will be licensed to harvest from floodplains.

Their proposal is to hand out free licences to formalise however much irrigators have taken in the past. That means whoever managed to take the most will receive the biggest share of licences.

Those that get the new licences will be allowed to sell them to others and if there are changes to the regime, irrigators would need to be compensated for any reduction in entitlements.

The current estimates of how much water will be handed out have not yet been made public.

The plan is to give irrigators license to extract as much water as they were capable of extracting and storing in 2000, assuming an average amount of rainfall.

Those figures will be determined by how much water storage irrigators have built in each valley — something the Government has released estimates of.

Those estimates show the amount of water that could be licensed is vast.

Experts say everyone downstream should be worried
In the Gwydir Valley alone, the Government estimates there is currently more than 600 gigalitres of water storage — that is more than all the water in Sydney Harbour.

Mr Johnson said everyone downstream — all the way through South Australia and Victoria — should be worried about the amount of water that will be handed out.

“The effect of this will be the water in the Northern Basin will cease to follow down the Barwon Darling and into the Murray system,” he said.

“It won’t flow to South Australia. It will result in practically in a separation of the two systems and flows will only get down the Murray-Darling in the very biggest of the floods.”

Mr Egan insisted floodplain harvesting had no impact on the environment or downstream users.

“When there’s a lot of water around, there’s a lot of water around for everybody,” he said.

“And the floodplain harvesting just doesn’t affect that whatsoever.”

But Richard Kingsford, a water ecologist from the University of New South Wales, said taking flood water had big environmental impacts.

He said doing so shrinks the size of the floods.

“It’s only in really big floods that … Coolabah and Black Box Forest get water and once you start denying that, they will start to die,” he said.

The plan is not intended to allow any more water to be extracted than is currently — something NSW Water Minister Niall Blair and irrigators both emphasise.

“Look, this is not extra water. This is just putting a structure and framework around activities that are occurring now,” Mr Blair said.

“It also allows more transparency.”

But critics argue that since there has been no transparency over how much water is currently being taken, the Government has no ability to know when irrigators exceed that amount into the future.

The volumes of water taken from floodplains in NSW have not been measured.

Mr Kingsford said that meant irrigators might be able to get licences that allow them to take more than they have ever actually taken before.

“My big criticism of this whole business is that we’re using essentially a finger in the air, and saying, ‘well let’s guess it was this’ and allowing the potential for people to develop much more than they would have historically,” he said.

Even if the policy does achieve its aim and limit extraction to 2000 levels, Mr Kingsford says that is not a sustainable level of take.

“We’re talking about large amounts of water being extracted out of these systems and denied from the floodplains downstream,” he said.

“So we’re talking about a cumulative impact on each of these river systems right down to the bottom of the Murray-Darling Basin.”
Policy is potentially ‘legal nonsense’

If the amount of water allowed to be taken by the policy is not sustainable, then the policy would be illegal, contravening the federal Water Act, according to Ms Carmody.

“Based on my understanding, it is unlikely to be consistent with the core requirements of the Water Act,” she said.

The NSW Department of Industry and the federal Murray-Darling Basin Authority both told the ABC the new licences handed out would need to be added to “baseline” extraction totals.

That means it would be added to the amount of water authorities assumed was being extracted from the basin when the Murray-Darling plan was established.

In other words, they would end up recalibrating how much water they estimated could be sustainably taken from the system to incorporate all the floodplain harvesting that has been occurring.

“Well to me, that is a hydrological and environmental and a legal nonsense,” Ms Carmody said.

“The method by which they are proposing to incorporate it within the basin plan framework — I simply cannot see how it could be consistent with all the requirements of the Water Act.”

She said if more water was being taken from the system than was previously assumed, then more needed to be recovered too.

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Melbourne’s water supply at risk due to ‘collapse’ of forests caused by logging

Tree-felling helped trigger ‘hidden collapse’ of mountain ash forests, ecologists say

 

 

A hidden collapse meant that while the ecosystem may appear superficially intact, the lag time in recovering old-growth mountain ash forests — the linchpin in preserving mountain ash ecosystems — “means that collapse is almost inevitable”.

Even if there were no additional logging and no significant bushfires for the next 50 years, modelling by Lindenmayer and his co-author, Chloe Sato, showed the number of hollow-bearing trees in 2067 would be at best less than 10% than the number of hollow-bearing trees in 1997.

The number of hollow-bearing trees had already more than halved since 1997, the modelling showed, while numbers of greater glider had declined 65% and numbers of critically endangered Leadbeater’s possum had halved.

Guardian Australia revealed this month that the Victorian forest agency VicForests had begun logging Barjag Flat, a nationally significant hotspot for greater gliders.

Lindenmayer said if drastic measures were not immediately taken to halt or greatly reduce native logging operations in mountain ash forests, the forest may not be able to recover from the level of projected collapse in 2067 and would instead be replaced by an open acacia woodland.

Either option — a young and growing mountain ash forest or an acacia woodland — would be potentially disastrous for Melbourne’s water supply, he said.

The majority of Melbourne’s water catchments are in mountain ash forests, which are either protected in national parks or in state forests where logging is either allowed or has previously occurred.

If those forests have been damaged or are still growing, Lindenmayer said, they draw 12 megalitres more water per hectare per year than forests that are more than 100 years old.

More than 98% of the mountain ash forest in Victoria is no more than 80 years old, and most of those in key catchment areas are less than 80.

In the Upper Thomson catchment, which feeds Melbourne’s largest water supply dam, the Thomson reservoir, about 61% of the trees have been logged.

“That’s a serious issue because two-thirds of all the rainfall in that catchment falls on one-third of the area and that’s the ash forest … that’s called an own goal,” Lindenmayer said.

“The value of the water that flows into the water catchments is about 25.5 times higher than the value of the timber cut from those same catchments.”

An economic analysis published by the Threatened Species Recovery Hub found that economic contribution of the water supply to the Victorian economy was $310m, compared with $12m from the native timber industry.

“My hope is that at some stage people will wake up and say, ‘Oh my god, that’s the water supply for 4.5 million Melburnians,’” Lindenmayer said. “Is it appropriate to compromise the water supply of soon-to-be Australia’s largest city?”

He said the situation would be worsened if the federal government introduced new Regional Forestry Agreements to replace the rolled-over short-term agreements, which are due to expire in March 2020.

“The new RFAs are going to be even more disastrous because what they will do is lock in a guaranteed level of saw long supply … which isn’t really sustainable,” he said. “The RFAs don’t take into account other values like water or tourism … it’s nonsensical. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

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Study suggests Perth uses double the water of other capitals, but is that the whole story?

A Monash University study has concluded that Perth residents use twice as much water per capita as those in Melbourne and Brisbane, but the water authority says that is not the full story.
Associate Professor Jo Lindsay conducted a national survey and held focus groups to examine attitudes to water and shortages following the millennium drought, which affected most of southern Australia from 1996 to 2010.

She concluded that in Brisbane and Melbourne residents had a sense of the crisis, whereas in Perth access to water from desalination plants and ground water meant people responded less actively at a household level in reducing their consumption.

The survey found households in Perth used 340 litres per person per day, compared to 166 litres in Melbourne and 194 litres in south-east Queensland.

Dr Lindsay told ABC Radio Perth the difference might be due to Perth’s long-standing dry conditions, whereas drought had come as a shock for the eastern states.

“Perth people are very accepting of desalinated water and recycled water and recharged aquifers,” she said.

“But the downside is that there hasn’t been as much attention as there has been in the eastern states on saving water at a household level.

Does Perth really use THAT much water?

But Sue Murphy, the chief executive of Western Australia’s Water Corporation, disputed some of the figures and conclusions from the Monash study.

Ms Murphy said the research averaged water use in Perth and included business and industry use.

She said the correct per capita figure for households was 246 litres per day.

And when indoor water use was compared, Perth residents used about the same amount of water as those in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, she added.

“It’s outside the house that the difference comes in.

“That’s largely because we have larger block sizes and fewer people living in apartments. We have beach sand in the ground instead of clay in our gardens.

“Most importantly, we have usually no rain from November to March, whereas in Melbourne the wettest months of the year are March and November.

“Our wet weather is all in winter normally and that is why outside the household use is significantly higher than on the east coast.”

She said state governments from both sides of politics recognised the importance of not letting gardens die during summer.

Water and politics

Furthermore, Ms Murphy said there was evidence to suggest Perth residents were making more efforts to reduce their consumption than their eastern counterparts.

“It is absolutely true that the people in Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane use less water per capita than the people of Perth, but since the end of the millennium drought in 2010-11, water use in every one of those capital cities has gone up,” she said.

“Our water use since 2001 has come down and down.”

It was a declining consumption trend that Ms Murphy hoped to see continue.

But Dr Lindsay said her focus group studies indicated that Perth residents would be unlikely to accept aggressive water restrictions.

“There was definitely the sense when we talked to Perth residents in focus groups that anybody who wanted really strong water restrictions would have a political death wish,” she said.

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Delivery of Brisbane’s water fountains delayed

There has been millions of dollars budgeted and lots of discussion about bringing fountains back to Brisbane for several years, but to date, most of the plans have been scrapped or put on hold.

Lord mayor Graham Quirk has been talking about bringing fountains back to the CBD since he announced $2.2 million for water features and fountains in the 2015-16 budget.

The money was to fund the restoration of three fountains, including E.E. McCormick Place, Mooney Memorial Plaza and Emma Miller Place, as well as design work for a new river water feature.

Fountains were turned off and removed from the city in the early 2000s because of severe drought.

In the 2016-17 budget, more than $8.5 million was budgeted for fountains and water features over the next four years, with about $2 million in 2016-17, $2.9 million in 2017-18, $1.9 million in 2018-19 and $1.6 million in 2019-20.

In 2016 the council scrapped $5 million worth of the proposed fountains by cutting fountain plans for Dowse Lagoon (Sandgate) and Forest Lake.

In the 2017-18 budget, this figure was revised to about $2.3 million in 2017-18 and $4.2 million in 2018-19 and was to cover the fountain in the river and the return of a fountain to King George Square.

Despite years of discussion, no new fountains have been installed in Brisbane, and council has now admitted the budgeted river water feature that had been discussed since 2015 was now “on hold”.

Field services chairman Peter Matic said the council had undertaken design work for a new river water feature alongside the South Bank cultural forecourt, but it had been put on hold.

“Since this time, council has undertaken extensive design and consultation works for this project, however, all of this work has been put on hold due to changes at South Bank as a result of the Queen’s Wharf development,” he said.

“Early designs for the footbridge announced as part of the Destination Brisbane project indicated it would connect to the cultural forecourt, where the river water feature was to be located.

“The South Bank Corporation expressed concerns about other proposed adjacent locations for the water feature and works have consequently been put on hold.”

The council did deliver on its commitment to restore the three fountains in 2016, but design and construction of the new fountains is a slow process.

In August 2017 the council launched a design competition for the King George Square and the river fountain.

Opposition leader Peter Cumming said it had been two years since Cr Quirk promised the fountains but he hadn’t seen any movement.

“It took him 18 months just to announce a design contest and we haven’t heard a word since,” he said.

Cr Matic said the council would soon make an announcement about the design for the King George Square fountain, which was first announced in 2016.

“Over the past few months, council has been working through an expressions of interest process, with a large field of companies contacting council to put forward proposals to design and construct the water feature,” he said.

A revised budget for the city’s water features and fountains will be released in the 2018-19 budged due to be handed down in June.

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Blackwater affects water quality in Adelaide Hills

Water quality in the Adelaide Hills and Barossa has changed, with organic matter washed into the River Murray working its way down the system.

 

SA Water is informing customers the water’s colour and taste has changed but it is still safe to drink.

The water authority’s chief executive Roch Cheroux said the change was due to the blackwater in the river, which supplies South Australia with drinking water.

Blackwater is a natural phenomenon that occurs after heavy rain when organic matter such as leaves and wood are washed into waterways.

Mr Cheroux said the water authority was constantly changing the way it treated the water to combat the river’s changing conditions.

“The water is absolutely safe to drink,” he said.

“The water quality in the river is changing constantly and because it is changing constantly then we have to adjust our treatment.”

He said the blackwater may affect the water until February.

Mr Cheroux said Adelaide’s water also came from the river but went through several reservoirs before reaching a treatment plant.

When asked about whether the Adelaide Hills could be supplied by Adelaide’s desalination plant, which is producing only a minimal amount of water, Mr Cheroux said no.

“The desal plant can supply Adelaide’s metro but not the hills,” he said.

Earlier this month Riverland residents, who relied on untreated river water, reported their water had turned dark and smelt like sewage.

Shacks under flood

Jo, from Mount Barker, told 891 ABC she noticed on Sunday a “slight discolouration” in the water in the toilet bowl and in a four-litre bottle.

She said she had not noticed the colour change in smaller quantities, like in a glass.

“I haven’t noticed a change in taste and I drink it all the time,” she said.

Russell, from the Barossa Valley, said the region’s water currently tasted “quite metallic”.

A flood message for River Murray Shack Areas, from the Bureau of Meteorology, said the peak flow was expected across the area in late December.

“Shack areas that are likely to be impacted in coming weeks include Walker Flat and Bowhill,” the message read.

“Shack areas currently impacted are Morgan, Brenda Park, Scotts Creek and South Punyelroo, with flooding occurring to some low-lying properties.”

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