THE NSW Government will attempt to pass floodplain harvesting regulations for the third time this week after two previous disallowances by the NSW Upper House.
NSW Water Minister Melinda Pavey said three amendments made to the Water Management (General) Regulation 2018 on Friday would allow the licensing and measurement of floodplain harvesting.
But environment groups are urging members of parliament to disallow the new regulations, saying that allowing irrigators to divert floodwaters under the regulations would be a “death sentence for our rivers and wetlands”.
“Many of our rivers and wetlands are already in a perilous state and this new regulation, that will deprive them of a huge volume of precious water, will have drastic consequences,” said Nature Conservation Council of NSW chief executive Chris Gambian.
“Floodplain harvesting diverts a huge volume of water away from our rivers into private dams,” Mr Gambian said.
“Handing out new licences without proper safeguards, sustainable limits and guaranteed downstream targets will be repeating the mistake of overallocation of water that has already damaged the Murray-Darling Basin.
“Many of our wetlands, floodplain environments and lakes, and all the animals and plants they support, rely on regular flood events.
“To allow irrigators to take up to 500 per cent of a licence allocation in a single year is a recipe for disaster and will see important floodwaters stolen from the environment and downstream communities.
“We’ve seen how hard and expensive it is to undo the mistakes of overallocating water resources in the past.
“The regulations introduced by the government do not have the safeguards, limits and downstream targets to ensure that any diversion of floodwaters is sustainable.”
Ms Pavey said measuring and licensing floodplain harvesting was a key to managing the water.
“I’ve said all along, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” she said on Friday.
“The amendments made today are a significant step in bringing floodplain harvesting into a clear and enforceable regulatory framework, ensuring that floodplain harvesting remains within legal limits.”
Under Ms Pavey’s amendments to the regulations, rainfall runoff would be exempted from measurement and licensing “in certain locations, during specified times”.
The disallowance of the regulations in the Upper House last year had created “uncertainty”, Ms Pavey said.
If passed, the floodplain harvesting regulations would be the first in Australia.
