Members of irrigation review committee say NSW could end up licensing an unsustainable amount of water
Last modified on Mon 13 Dec 2021 20.14 EST
A decade of reforms to save the Murray-Darling basin could be undermined by New South Wales’ plans to license too much flood water harvesting, with insiders warning that NSW’s processes will result in irrigators being licensed to take billions of litres of flows without proper environmental assessment.
Two members of the four-person Healthy Floodplains Review committee, which hears appeals from irrigators about their proposed flood plain water entitlements, say the system is “sloppy”, “flawed” and should be reviewed immediately.
They say over the last 12 months the committee has been swamped with more than 400 appeals, involving 1,300 separate flood plain harvesting structures; the committee is overwhelmed and applications are often accompanied by poor evidence.
Irrigators, they say, are now “consultant shopping” to achieve outcomes many times larger than the initial assessment by the Natural Resources Access Regulator, which conducted an on-the-ground survey of dams and other structures used in flood plain harvesting.
The two members – a NSW Farmers Association member, Xavier Martin, and the Nature Conservation Council’s representative, Bev Smiles – have written to the head of the NSW department responsible to detail their grave concerns.
The other members of the committee are both irrigators: one is appointed by NSW Irrigators and the other independent chair is a cotton farmer.
The department disputes the members’ concerns, saying it has had two probity reviews of the committee and both have found the appeals process robust.
The NSW Irrigators’ Council said it was important to keep flood plain harvesting in perspective and that the current average annual take is 350-390 gigalitres – about 3% of northern basin inflows.
“This will be the largest removal of water from irrigators to the environment since the Basin Plan, and will be a difficult adjustment for farmers losing water access, but everyone agrees flood plain harvesting needs to be reduced, licensed and metered,” said the chief executive, Claire Miller.
The question is how to do it.
The committee members’ letters were obtained by Guardian Australia after a call for papers by the Greens in the NSW upper house.
The result, they warn, is that NSW could be licensing an unsustainable amount of water that will have long-term implications for the future health of the river system and wetlands in western NSW.
Southern basin farmers are also concerned that they will be left short on their allocations of water from the river because of the reduced flows reaching the river.
The growth in flood plain harvesting – the practice of capturing small floods as they move across plains toward the river, using giant storages, levees and channels – has been blamed for the 20% shortfall of water in the Murray-Darling river system compared with what was expected.
Over the last three decades the practice of taking this water – which can be taken for free (unlike river water which requires a licence) – has increased. Large cotton farms have laser-levelled plains and built huge shallow storages which are fed by elaborate systems to direct water into them.
Now the NSW government wants to license flood plain harvesting as required under the Murray-Darling basin plan, a move which both environmentalists and farmers agree is necessary.
But working out how much should be licensed to ensure a sustainable river has been hampered by poor data, many unlicensed structures and uncertainty about the impact of climate change.
As the first step in the licensing, the NSW Natural Resources Access Regulator sent staff to western NSW to inspect structures, with the idea being that “historical take” via structures approved by 1994 would be permitted. Other structures will need to be removed.
In recognition that farmers were already capturing water in this way, the NSW government said licences would be free, but it will effectively cap the practice in the future.
The licences are probably worth millions; conversely, if the NSW government has to buy back licences due to overallocation, it will potentially cost millions.
An indicator of the value, Smiles said, could be seen in sales of major agribusinesses in the last six months, which have included price tags of $3m to $4m for draft flood plain harvesting entitlements.
Initially, the plan was to get the licences in place by June 2021 and the NSW Natural Resources Access Regulator worked toward this deadline. But this proved too ambitious. Instead there have been a flood of appeals to the HFR committee and a parliamentary inquiry which will report this week.
Martin, who joined the committee in May as the NSW Farmers representative, wrote a scathing letter soon after joining.
He says the committee is relying on flawed information from the department and from applicants, yet is under pressure to approve applications.
“It is inappropriate to approve applications where significant evidence exists as to the inaccuracy of the information supplied,” he wrote.
For example, Martin said the remote-sensing imagery used by the committee could not adequately differentiate between irrigated and dryland fields and was in some cases causing errors of greater than 100%, leading to bigger water allocations.
He said the committee was also “dealing with returning ‘errors’ on a regular basis, which are clearly linked to lost or inadequate departmental records”.
“This has resulted in ‘consultant shopping’ and multiple submissions returning five or 10 times or more,” he said. This in turn has led to “stretch shopping” with applicants disputing the relevant rainfall measurement sites, the area from which water is harvested, the size of reservoirs and assessments of the size of the pumps installed.
He said some registrations of interest were unsigned and statutory declarations as to the truth of the information provided often simply referred to the consultant’s opinion.
He also said he had concerns with some unapproved structures being licensed even though there had been no environmental assessment of any kind.
“Despite the oft-repeated desire that the Review Committee act with “consistency” and “get it right” these goals were often in conflict and not resolved by evidence, ….including ambiguous declarations, poor photos, inconclusive site verification,” Martin said.
Smiles has expressed grave concerns about the departmental models which are used to calculate the volumes. She described them as “a black box” and warned that they could result in allocations above a safe level.
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The NSW government defended its licensing processes and said the licensing reforms were vital and long overdue.
Implementing the policy now would reduce the practice by more than 25%, or about 100 gigalitres in the northern basin, a spokesperson said.
“The committee has to date provided advice on all cases brought before it, with advice on more than 95% of cases decided on consensus. In more than 90% of cases, the committee’s recommendations align with recommendations made by the [Department of Planning, Industry and Environment],” she said.
“Fewer than 1,000 were contested by landholders. That means more than 85% of assessments were uncontested – an impressive outcome given the complexity and scale of this work over such a long time period,” she said.