Silver lining to Water Minister's dummy spit

National Irrigators’ Council Chair Gavin McMahon said COAG’s decision last week to have state water ministers submit a “credible and balanced pathway” on the Basin Plan’s implementation by April next year, would help sharpen the political and bureaucratic focus on critical water saving targets and deadlines, looming on the horizon.

The Basin Plan’s water saving measures were discussed at last week’s COAG meeting in Canberra after recent controversy over how the additional 450 gigalitres in environmental water flows can be delivered to South Australia by 2024.

Tempers flared after SA Water Minister Ian Hunter unloaded verbal abuse at the most recent meeting of Murray Darling Basin water ministers.

Federal Agriculture and Water Resources Minister Barnaby Joyce defended his role in the controversy saying he’d only written to Mr Hunter to raise a practical discussion about alternatives to achieving the Plan’s water recovery targets, according to neutral or improved socio-economic outcomes, as per the actual legislation.

Mr McMahon conceded the COAG decision resulted from Minister Hunter’s actions at the last meeting of state and federal water ministers and was “probably an outcome that may not have been foreseen at the time”.

But he said the additional plan that must now be submitted to COAG by April 2017 would help deliver “robust discussions” around core Basin Plan outcomes for delivering its baseline target of 2750GLs in environmental water flows.

Those discussions include how to remove constraints in the river system to achieve water flows and savings targets and how to fund such projects, he said.

“All those discussions are quite large discussions and need to happen,” he said.

“As 2017 surfaces, there are a lot of critical time-frames about decision-making on different parts of the Basin Plan.

“It probably isn’t a bad thing to say, how are we actually going to achieve things like off-sets and assumptions in the model runs?

“There are a whole heap of targets that have to be met and putting a plan down as to how you’re going to achieve those targets is really important and keeps it on the agenda and everybody certainly has vision about where it’s going.

“Sometimes it’s better to do that instead of just getting to the date and saying, ‘guess what; we haven’t quite got it all so we have to make a decision on the spot’.”

Mr McMahon said water ministers and others involved in the process hadn’t been “loafing along” in actioning the Basin Plan, requiring COAG’s intervention.

But he said the NIC had stated consistently over time that the Plan was “an enormous task” that had to be delivered “in probably quite a short time-frame”.

“All sides of politics and all of the parliaments have issues they need to deal with in their own departments and their own bureaucracies and I think the enormity of what had to be done is probably as much an issue as peoples’ lethargy to get from A to B,” he said.

“But putting a plan down does help to sharpen your focus a little bit to say by this date you actually need to have this delivered.

“I think it’s a political delivery as well so the politics has to be sorted out as much as the bureaucracy.”

Mr McMahon said the Basin Plan’s triple bottom line outcome, to deliver environmental benefits without causing social and economic damage to rural and regional communities, also needed to be at the forefront of ongoing talks.

“How do you deliver these targets without massively impacting on the communities in reality?” he said.

“The constraints will play a pretty big part in getting the best outcomes environmentally and some of those constraints need to be look at and addressed.

“Can you address them; how realistic is it; and how much will it cost?

“And to be honest, very little has been done in that space, to date.”

Mr McMahon said little work had been done on system constraints to achieve the best outcomes for delivering the 2750GLs target, not only the 450GLs to SA.

He said the 450GLs was part of the Basin Plan but it was actually a different, appropriation bill.

“The Plan was for delivering 2750GLs and there was an appropriation bill for the 450GLs,” he said.

“So the question is; can you do what you wanted to do with the 2750GLs and will you get the outcomes that are desired and then what’s possible thereafter to achieve outcomes and they might be non-flow measures.

“A number of those have been put forward and again it’s a matter of what’s available.”

Last week, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Basin first ministers had asked their water ministers to report to the next COAG meeting with practical solutions and projects to implement the Basin Plan in full, while addressing impacts on communities, and ensuring any project impacts were either neutral or positive in socio-economic terms.

A statement from the COAG forum said the Murray-Darling Basin was of vital economic and environmental significance to a large part of Australia and it was “critical” the Basin Plan be implemented on time and in full.

It said Murray-Darling Basin issues would be dealt with through a regular COAG side meeting of first ministers of Basin jurisdictions.

The plan to be submitted to COAG by April 2017 must include constraints measures to address impediments to delivering environmental water and efficiency measures to recover the additional 450GLs by 2024, consistent with the Basin Plan’s legal requirement to achieve neutral or improved socio-economic outcomes.