NSW water inquiry heats up

Committee members heard presentations from Southern Riverina Irrigators, SunRice, Murray Irrigation Ltd and the Deniliquin business chamber.

Southern Riverina Irrigators chief executive officer Sophie Baldwin told the inquiry the Murray-Darling Basin Plan was never meant to strip away productive water and send rural areas into ruin.

In her submission to the inquiry, she said while there are arguments about the basin plan the most basic problem was that the 450 Gl simply cannot be delivered to South Australia via the Murray River because this volume would not physically fit down the river due to natural constraints.

Ms Baldwin said the volume could not be delivered without extensive and repeated flooding causing billions of dollars of infrastructure, livestock and crop losses, if the Murray-Darling Basin Authority gets it wrong.

In its submission, the Ricegrowers Association told the committee between 2008-09 and 2018-19 the industry had contributed $400 million/year into rice growing communities, and provided 400 jobs across the Riverina.

“Over this time, the industry has also been recognised as one of the Riverina’s major enterprises and key economic drivers,” the submission said.

“The primary purpose of the Water Amendment (Restoring Our Rivers) Act 2023 is to strip even more water from irrigators. As a result, this Act will fundamentally change the nature of rice production in the Riverina, and that’s assuming our industry is able to survive at all.”

A group of seven professors criticised the quality of studies which claimed that buybacks would severely impact rural communities.

Sarah Wheeler, Quentin Grafton, Jeff Connor, John Quiggin, Lin Crase, Alec Zuo and Darla Hatton MacDonald said many socio-economic studies were of low quality and overstated the negative impact of buybacks.

“The belief that water recovery will ‘decimate’ local communities is fuelled by various consultancy studies using inferior techniques such as input-output modelling,” the professors said.

“As such, this has led to our call for higher standards in economic work commissioned by the government, supported by our recent research.

“Current ongoing work — both academic and by the MDBA — has sought to further understand the causal impact of water recovery programs and socio-economic outcomes in regional MDB communities. This work will be released later in the year.”

Murray Irrigation Ltd said the biggest single impact of the repealing of limits to the cap on Commonwealth water purchases, was that it has opened the door to large scale buybacks.

“MIL and its shareholders do not support, and will not assist with large-scale buybacks in our footprint,” the MIL submission said.

“We already know that large-scale environmental water recovery is bad for farming businesses and communities that depend on them.

“Our average customer delivery has halved; from 1200 Gl in 1995 to around 600 Gl today.

“Despite this reduction in demand, our $1 billion asset base continues to require regular maintenance and replacement. Remaining water users have been required to pay these fixed costs of water delivery.

“Noting our stance on buybacks, the key risk of Restoring Our Rivers is that while we’re expecting more water recovery, we have no way of understanding what the final total volume from our footprint will be.

“As average customer delivery has halved, local irrigation-dependent industries (for example, dairy and rice), have also declined.

“Between 2001 and 2016, the population of the Wakool region — in the western part of our footprint — declined by 45.6 per cent,” the MIL submission said.

National Parks Association chief executive officer Gary Dunnett claimed in his submission that as agriculture, industries and communities have grown over time, water use has increased.

“There is increasing need for producers to show their sustainability credentials,” Mr Dunnett said.

“The Farm Institute’s recent insights journal identified the growing prevalence of sustainability measures — and the differing approaches taken by different countries.

“Note that the majority of agricultural production in the basin is an export. The increasing focus on sustainability by other counties has the potential to impact sustainable outcomes for agriculture in regional NSW, by creating potential barriers to agricultural trade and unintended consequences for productivity, markets and the environment.

“The issue of achieving sustainability in agrifood systems has become increasingly urgent, yet policymakers and key stakeholders have yet to agree on ways to achieve this goal.”

The committee held hearings at both Deniliquin and Griffith.

No date has been set for the committee’s final report to parliament.