Lisa Neville slams northern basin floodplain harvesting

Water Minister Lisa Neville said the take of water would have significant negative impacts preventing, or threaten to prevent, water reaching critical downstream communities and Menindee Lakes.

She said she had written to Federal Water Minister Keith Pitt asking for the interim inspector-general of Murray-Darling Basin water resources and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority to examine the take of water that followed the first decent rain some areas have had for some time.

Ms Neville said she had made her expectations to Mr Pitt clear and sought an explanation.

“We need consistent application of rules across the basin to get fair outcomes — this includes for irrigators, communities and the environment,” she said.

“The plan is supposed to protect drinking water for towns and improve the health of rivers like the Goulburn — I expect all jurisdictions to do the right thing.”

Ms Neville said the “alarming decision” was made despite extremely dry conditions that had left communities on the brink of running out of water and some irrigators in the southern basin with zero allocations.

She said there were also concerns about further serious environmental impacts such as mass fish deaths.

Some irrigators in sections and tributaries of the Namoi, Peel, Gwydir and Barwon rivers were allowed to pump or divert water for three days — and up to a week in Queensland.

With no water flowing into the southern basin from the Darling system, Ms Neville said there had been increasing pressures on the Victorian river system to deliver water.

She said this had resulted in unsustainably high flows in the Goulburn River — causing river bank damage, loss of vegetation and threatening important habitat and species like the Murray River rainbowfish and several species of galaxias.

Ms Neville has led Ministerial Council discussions calling for better transparency and compliance across the basin and has taken a range of steps in Victoria such as increasing penalties for water theft and increasing transparency in the water market.

In addition, the government said it was concerned about the volume of water being held in large off-stream storages in the northern Murray-Darling Basin — and its impact on the river and other water users.

Ms Neville said Victorian irrigators and communities had already done the heavy lifting to meet the state’s obligations under the basin plan and the Victorian Government would not stand by and allow southern basin communities to be disadvantaged.