The Murray Darling Basin Plan’s ‘relaxed constraints’ strategy is simply undeliverable, unviable and cannot be achieved technically or economically. Due to natural physical chokes in all three major rivers, the Goulburn, Murrumbidgee and Murray, the channel capacity cannot deliver the proposed environmental flows without causing large overbank flows.
Tony Burke was the architect of the last minute inclusion of the extra 450GL and the ‘relaxed constraints’ scenario into the Basin Plan at a time when he obviously had no idea of its feasibility. His criticism of Minister Joyce shows his ignorance of the strategy’s ramifications on our communities and valuable food producing river plains.”
The Water for the Environment Special Acount Bill specifically states that water will be recovered in a way that meets the requirements of the Basin Plan and that there are no negative social or economic impacts on Basin communities.
The timing, frequency and prolonged duration of these proposed man-made flood flows create severe and significant flooding and associated impacts to landowners and communities along the major river systems and their tributaries.
In the Goulburn system, the difficulty of piggy-backing releases from Eildon Weir on top of high tributary flows and coinciding this with downstream flows, means government agencies have proposed a strategy of releasing water from Eildon 6-7 days prior to forecast high rainfall and high tributary flows which is fraught with danger for all who live downstream.
It is just not physically possible to achieve the target flows to SA due to run of river losses, attenuation, evaporation, Australia’s flat arid landscape and the fact that one megalitre of water at Mildura requires three megalitres to be released from Eildon.
All these factors mean environmental flood volumes sufficient to ensure “the mouth of the River Murray is open without the need for dredging in at least 95% of years”, would cause such significant flooding as to be economically unviable.
The Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder, David Papps, operates under a Good Neighbour Policy which states “a precautionary approach is taken to managing environmental water, so that there is no material impairment on landholders and other water users. In particular I have not and will not place orders that would inundate private land without the consent of the landholder.”
As well as this the federal and state governments have also openly stated that they will not intentionally inundate private property without the landowners’ consent, nor will they forcibly acquire easements.
Landowners in the Upper Goulburn River Catchment Association (UGRCA), Edwards-Wakool region and mid Murrumbidgee, are resolute in their decision not to negotiate the creation of easements on their private property as they know the proposed environmental flood flows will cause an untenable loss in productivity of their farms, significant loss of amenity, increased major flooding risk and will lead to a serious devaluation of properties.
Irrigation areas have also now lost so much water out of their systems that there is no longer the critical mass of irrigation water left, on which to base savings from on-farm efficiencies to the tune of in excess of $1.2billion.
That is, the 450GL upwater is technically unachievable.