The head of one of Goulburn-Murray Water’s irrigator committees has called for an “efficiency dividend’ to be introduced, as part of the review of delivery shares.
The State Government is currently holding public consultations into its review of delivery shares, which provide rights to access water infrastructure, in the Goulburn-Murray and Sunraysia irrigation districts.
Shepparton Water Services committee chairman Craig Reynolds, Congupna, said he’d like to see water which was being saved, going back to irrigators through delivery shares.
“It would top up your allocation, and it would put some value back into owning a delivery share,” Mr Reynolds said.
“Not enough people see good value in them - if you are not using any water, they are just a dead weight on your business,” Mr Reynolds said.
Water which was saved should be attached to delivery shares and be allocated at the end of the season., when accounts were finalised.
He said Shepparton had saved more water than the amount taken out of the district.
Mr Reynolds said infrastructure access fees, which recover a portion of delivery network operation and maintenance costs, also needed to be examined.
Durham Ox irrigator Chris Harrison said the review failed to address equity and fairness issues, as well as the moral justice of continuing to charge those who were not using water or who had made 10 years of payments.
G-MW should acknowledge that after 10 years low volume users had met their obligations and should no longer have to pay access fees.
“Morally, those infrastructure access fees should be decreasing, once you have paid your ten years,” Mr Harrison said.
“The situation is quite apparent – you have a lot of people struggling to pay those fees, because they don’t have water.”
Irrigators have the option of paying their infrastructure access fee yearly, or buying it out in one go, at ten times the cost of a delivery share.
But Mr Harrison said those who had paid for delivery shares for a decade would not be getting a “free-kick”, if the payment was now waived, as they had already contributed to maintenance and upgrades.
“We have lost 45 per cent of high security water and you have some people who have sold nearly all, or part, of their water, but they are still paying delivery shares,” Mr Harrison said.
Mr Harrison said it had been claimed modernisation was intended to drive charges down.
G-MW had been given $2.3billion, through the Connections project, and funding for significant water infrastructure upgrades, before that, Mr Harrison said.
“The object was to reduce the cost of delivery shares and they have failed massively, on all levels.”
Central Goulburn Water Committee chairman Peter Hacon, Tongala, said G-MW was facing a decreasing number of customers and scarcer resources.
“The delivery share is not the problem, the infrastructure access fee is the problem,” Mr Hacon said.
“We have been asking for a long time to get that fee broken down to see what’s in it.”
He said the review was driven by landholders who had sold their water but still had to pay the infrastructure access fee.
“If people who don’t want to be in the system are given a free ride, the others will be copping the lot,” Mr Hacon said.
“G-MW are a bit between a rock and a hard place.”