by Elena Garcia
After a blue green algal bloom deprived the water of oxygen and left a million dead fish along a 40km section of the Darling River at Menindee Lakes, and as the massive NSW drought leaves rural communities like Walgett, wildlife, graziers and stock running out of water, politicians and bureaucracies are holding endless inquiries to appear to be dealing with the crisis. However they have been very slow to implement recommendations, and there are few moves to get more water into the river system or to deal with the mismanagement that is letting the river dry out.
Meanwhile Federal Drought Envoy Barnaby Joyce is rubbishing claims that corruption within the Murray Darling Basin Authority is to blame. “It’s not corruption. That’s a load of garbage,” he told 2GB’s Steve Price on January 11. “What we have is a massive drought. This is one of the worst on record.”
Joyce denied claims from locals that big irrigators up north are being given unfair access to water, leaving none for those down river. Instead he blamed a combination of two factors- that cool weather killed the algal bloom in the drought-reduced water, taking oxygen out of the water and killing the fish. And “bad management” which he said released water from Menindee Lakes for Adelaide use, to flow out the barrages.
Political consensus- we need water to fix the rivers
Joyce suggested three possible ways to fix the situation at the Menindee Lakes. 1: get god to make it rain 2: leave the water in the lakes, rather than sent down to Adelaide 3: build infrastructure to pipe northern floodwater out West to Augathella.
Federal Agriculture and Water Minister David Littleproud also blamed the drought for the fish kill. He convened a meeting on January 15 of State and Federal environmental and water stakeholders working under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan to find a solution, and then followed up on January 23 with setting up a “fair dinkum” inquiry by an independent panel into this “natural event”. He told ABC RN’s Fran Kelly that the inquiry was NOT open to findings of mismanagement but that it was looking at how “within current parameters” we can better manage our river systems. Littleproud repeatedly asserted that human consumption and environmental water get first priority at water flows, and only then does water go to irrigation allocations, but could not answer why Walgett is now drinking bottled water while cotton is still being irrigated, or why so many Murray cod that survived over 50 years of droughts just died as part of the million fish deaths.
The interim report will be presented on February 20. Meanwhile severe heatwave conditions are continuing in the Menindee region with temperatures continuing in the high 40s, and blue green algal blooms and fish kills are continuing.
The NSW Government has purchased 16 aerators as part of a suite of new strategies to try and prevent future mass fish deaths in the Murray-Darling basin, to be placed in the Darling River to help restore oxygen to waterways. The solar-powered devices are running through the night. "They are a bandaid solution - we admit that - (but) nothing will stop this fish kill unless we get proper river flows and levels in our dams back to normal," NSW Minister for Regional Water Niall Blair said on January 15. "We are looking at doing everything we can to try and limit the damage."
The machines and increasing water flows were among the potential solutions discussed at the meeting in Canberra on January 15. Littleproud wants $5 million of Murray-Darling basin funds for a strategy to look after native fish. Blair said he would consider the $5 million payment depending on what it funded, but the critical issue was water, not cash. "We need water to be able to address this issue, we can't buy our way out of it," Blair said. "We do have our re-stocking programs, we'll be assisting with the clean-up, but we just need water … to go down the system to try and address some of these water quality issues."
Murray-Darling Basin Authority chief executive Phillip Glyde said in some circumstances adding water may help protect key refuges for native fish. "This includes the use of available environmental water allocations and the use of consumptive water on route," he said in a recent statement. River managers, environmental water holders and fisheries scientists also discussed relocating critical species of fish to healthier habitats and are "exploring new technologies". But Glyde conceded the relocation option was challenging due to biosecurity issues and fish stress.
After the January 15 meeting he spoke to ABC TV and urged people living along the Darling River to remember 20 per cent extra water will come down the river in future years under the basin plan.
"It's a hard ask to get people to just accept that help is on its way, because it is so slow in coming, but it is on its way, and I urge everybody to stay the course."
Federal Labor leader Bill Shorten wrote and asked Prime Minister Scott Morrison to provide bipartisan support for an emergency scientific taskforce. But Morrison and his deputy Michael McCormack both argued that federal and state water managers were already using expert advice to determine the health of the river system.
On January 21 the ABC reported that Shorten requested the independent Australian Academy of Science assemble a group of experts to prepare an independent report on the cause of the fish kill, and whether water diversions and water management practices, "have caused or exacerbated the scale of this disaster". The Australian Academy of Science will hand its report to Labor, who will make the document public during the first parliamentary sitting week this year. Shorten also asked the group to investigate whether chemical or fertiliser use contributed to the deaths, and what steps could be taken to improve the health of Australia's largest river system, along with advice on the impact of climate change on water flows into the Murray-Darling Basin. The academy says it will approach experts in a range of fields to take part. The president of the Australian Academy of Science, Professor John Shine, said "Science is critical to support decision making in creating and maintaining a healthy river system in Australia." "A commitment to using science from independent expert sources to inform policy decisions is crucial for effective decision making in Australia."
In response, Littleproud pointed to the findings of the Northern Basin Review, which analysed the science around water flows. He said there was little point doing another investigation and efforts should be focused on funding an environmental management strategy. “The fish kills we’re seeing are terrible. Data reveals there have been 600 freshwater fish kills in NSW since 1980, and we should expect more next week.” “The reality is we’re in serious drought and the system needs rain.” “We're doing ... everything we can.”
On January 13 Prime Minister Morrison tried to argue that despite the "devastating ecological event", the Government had been "operating in accordance with scientific evidence" provided back in 2012. A leaked 2012 memo from Fisheries NSW contradicts this claim:
“There appears to have been no consideration of any scientific information on the impact of extraction or changes to the environment that have been detailed in the last decade... Overall, the median flows at Wilcannia have been reduced by 73%... The flow classes do not take such information into account. As a result Fisheries NSW is concerned that the proposed ten year draft plan does not include sufficient rules to ensure environmental outcomes in low and medium flows that will ensure the maintenance and recovery of the endangered aquatic ecological community of the Lower Darling Catchment.
Fisheries NSW recommends the inclusion of a review clause to allow low and medium flow rules to be reviewed during the life of the plan, where the Department or another party is able to demonstrate that additional water is required to protect and recover these aquatic ecological values. '
The Barwon-Darling River System is considered by Fisheries NSW as a key fish asset.”
The NSW Labor Opposition has also called for an independent taskforce, run by scientists, to examine the cause of the fish kill. They want the inquiry to determine why the Liberals and Nationals sought "changes to water rules that reduced river flows and allowed the over-extraction of water by lobbyist irrigators who were National Party donors", while ignoring warnings from the Wentworth Group of Scientists and local communities.
John Quiggin, professor of economics at the University of Queensland, wrote in The Guardian on January 22: “A multitude of actions Joyce took as minister [for water], from blocking water buybacks to cutting the allocation of water to the environment, were so damaging as to seem deliberately designed to destroy the fragile ecosystems of the Murray-Darling Basin, and to produce outcomes like those we see today. His successor, David Littleproud, has been no better.
Joyce’s policies were reinforced by the NSW Primary Industry department, also run by National Party ministers. As has been shown in a series of shocking reports on large-scale water theft, the department has been either acquiescent or complicit in undermining the basin plan. Many of the worst cases have involved large-scale cotton producers. It is, however, a mistake to focus on particular crops and industries when the problem is one of systemic mismanagement.
An equally serious development is the politicisation of the Murray Darling Basin Authority, established to manage the basin plan, but now little more than an advocate for the destructive policy agenda of the LNP. As well as supporting cuts in environmental allocations, the MDBA permitted systematic mismanagement by the New South Wales government. In February, the MDBA rejected a declaration by leading scientists and economists expressing concern that funds allocated to infrastructure projects were being wasted while failing to meet our international obligations to preserve wetlands.”
A report by the Australia Institute released on January 19 found that the fish kill crisis on the Lower Darling is largely due to the decisions by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, on instruction from the New South Wales government. It says the reasons for those decisions appear to be about building the case for the new Broken Hill pipeline and the Menindee Lakes project, which will see the lakes shrink and “save” water by reducing evaporation.
“It is clear what has caused the Darling River fish kill – mismanagement and repeated policy failure,” said Maryanne Slattery, senior water researcher with the Australia Institute and a former MDBA employee with expertise in analysing river data. “To blame the fish kill on the drought is a cop-out, it is because water releases were made from the lakes when this simply shouldn’t have happened.” “It’s time to stop passing the buck.”
“Drought and high temperatures are a factor, but a key issue is that smaller flow events now rarely reach Menindee.” “Large floods still occur, but smaller flows to regularly replenish the system have largely stopped.”
Since the recent fish kills, Slattery has closely analysed the inflows and outflows from Menindee Lakes and how the lakes have been managed compared with previous years. “The lakes were drained in late 2016 and 2017, with a total of 819GL released from Menindee Lakes, almost the equivalent of two Sydney harbours,” she said. “This is not a natural phenomenon, but a management decision.”“Such releases have been made in the past, but in recent times inflows from the northern basin to refill the lakes have declined significantly.”
Nor were they drained to meet South Australia’s needs, as the NSW minister for primary industries and regional water, Niall Blair, has suggested, Slattery said. “Releases were made from Menindee Lakes in excess of South Australia’s requirements,” she said. “In fact, parts of South Australia were recovering from flooding and months of wet weather at that time.”
Instead, “Long-standing practice by the MDBA is to prioritise releases from Menindee Lakes above other storages to minimise evaporation,” she said. “However, causing an ecological disaster to avoid evaporation can hardly be described as good environmental management, particularly when downstream areas were in flood.”
“A possible part of the answer is that the lakes were drained to justify the Menindee Lakes water-saving project, related changes to the basin plan and the related Broken Hill pipeline project,” she said. “These are opposed locally and have proceeded with minimal transparency around business cases, cultural and environmental impacts. They are easier to justify if the lakes are empty and Broken Hill appears at risk of running out of water.”
The Australia Institute report called for a full inquiry, such as a royal commission, and much greater transparency on decision making by the MDBA. “There is very little transparency around exactly why the lakes were drained by the MDBA with the consent of the BOC and state governments,” she said.
The Broken Hill pipeline
NSW Labor confirmed that it would seek to overturn the plan - supported by all basin state governments and the Morrison government – to effectively dry up the Menindee Lakes System and build a pipeline to the Murray River to supply Broken Hill- and two new mines- with water.
Such a move, as part of the Sustainable Diversion Limits projects, would "further reduce water flows in the lower Darling River and destroy fish breeding grounds in the Darling River", Labor said, adding it had "committed to abandon this plan to prevent further ecological destruction". Blair responded that the SDL project at Menindee, which aims to save 105 gigalitres a water a year, must proceed. "They don't understand what it would mean [to cancel it]," Blair says, of the NSW Labor stance. "You would blow up the [Murray-Darling Basin] Plan."
Unmentioned alternatives
On January 28 Victorian Independent MP for Mildura Ali Cupper presented an alternative 3 point plan to save the lakes: closing the 96,000 hectare Cubbie Station and its rights to 400 gigalitres of water, equivalent to all the water licences downstream in north-west NSW and four times what drying up the Menindee Lakes would save; banning flood plain harvesting; and giving farmers incentives to grow crops better suited to arid climates. The plan was put together after consultation with community stakeholders including farmers, scientists, local government leaders and water bureaucrats. She said decommissioning Menindee Lakes would “make an ecological disaster worse” and severely affect farmers on the lower Darling.
It’s not the first time alternatives like these have been presented. In 2006, a meeting of western NSW mayors, chaired by local state Labor MP Peter Black, voted for the Commonwealth to buy Cubbie Station. Instead it was sold to a Chinese-led consortium. Fast-forward 12 years and Barnaby Joyce confirmed in an interview with The Australian that the deal he negotiated to buy water rights off Webster meant that some of the five lakes making up the Menindee storage system would be permanently "decommissioned". Joyce said letting the lakes dry out would save the water for irrigators in the cotton communities of Dirranbandi and St George, in southern Queensland, and Bourke, Wee Waa and Moree in northern NSW. This was "a much better alternative than having to withdraw water entitlements from large cotton producers like Chinese-owned Cubbie Station, the biggest user of water in Australia" said Joyce. Not least because most of the effective water controls and regulation do not apply, or are not complied with, in the Upper Darling Basin, according to the November 2017 Matthews Report, commissioned by the NSW government after the corruption allegations aired by Four Corners. According to the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, up to 75% of surface water extractions by irrigators in the Northern Basin are not even metered.
Helen Vivian reported in the SMH on 11 March 2018:
“In 2012 the NSW government increased water entitlements and allowed upstream users to draw water from the river even during low flow periods. The Barwon-Darling water-sharing plan has been contentious from the day it was introduced and serious allegations were raised last month about the conduct of the then minister for primary industries, Katrina Hodgkinson, for unilaterally altering the plan after it was finalised by her department.”
“In July 2017 the ABC Four Corners program ''Pumped'' revealed astounding malpractice and alleged corruption, which is currently being investigated by the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). Some of these allegedly corrupt transactions hide behind a veil of incompetence. Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on water "buybacks", where the government has paid twice the going rate for water which effectively does not exist, except during heavy rainfall and peak water conditions. The first of these was the purchase of $34 million of supplementary water rights, described locally as "empty buckets of water", sold to the federal government during the Millennium drought in 2008 by Tandou Station, 100 kilometres south-east of Broken Hill and just south of the Menindee Lakes. A further water sale to the federal government was made last year by the same station, $78 million for their entire 21,900-megalitre water right and for business readjustment. As was reported last month, that deal - personally negotiated by Barnaby Joyce - was at more than twice the market price for water. That’s $112 million of taxpayer funds to one station, Tandou.”
“Webster Limited has owned Tandou since 2015. The company also owns several large cotton properties upstream at Bourke and Moree. Webster, a Tasmanian company, is also one of Australia’s biggest water traders. Its shareholders include Australian Food and Fibre, which is controlled by the Robinson family, a major donor to the National Party. The outcome from this $112 million investment of taxpayer funds is that Webster will decommission the irrigated horticultural enterprise at Tandou and return the property to dry-land farming. They will take all the promised jobs and economic activity with them to their northern NSW holdings, where they get to intercept the water before it enters the Darling River. This is the real kicker - the $112 million water "buyback" will do nothing to benefit the river or water users downstream.” Floodplain harvesting
Intercepting water before it enters the river is called floodplain harvesting. Michael Slezak ABC, 28 May 2018: “Taking water out of rivers in the basin requires a licence, but currently, when that water spills out over land during floods in NSW, it has been free for the taking. Irrigators have been allowed to build vast earthworks to funnel flood water into enormous dams without requiring licenses, or even any measurement.”
Bill Johnson, a water ecologist who used to manage environmental water for the federal Murray-Darling Basin Authority, said the only limit to how much flood water irrigators in NSW could take was the size of their pumps and their dams.
Mid-year 2018 the NSW Government was finalising legitimising floodplain harvesting, consulting with communities, and calculating how much each irrigator will be licensed to harvest from floodplains. Their proposal is to hand out free licences to formalise however much irrigators have taken in the past. That means whoever managed to take the most will receive the biggest share of licences. They will be able to sell them to others and be compensated for any reduction in entitlements. The plan is to give irrigators license to extract as much water as they were capable of extracting and storing in 2000, assuming an average amount of rainfall.
"The effect of this will be the water in the Northern Basin will cease to follow down the Barwon Darling and into the Murray system," said Bill Johnson. "It won't flow to South Australia. It will result in practically in a separation of the two systems and flows will only get down the Murray-Darling in the very biggest of the floods."”
“Richard Kingsford, a water ecologist from the University of New South Wales, said taking flood water had big environmental impacts. He said doing so shrinks the size of the floods, which badly impacts crucial fish and waterbird breeding wetlands like Menindee Lakes and the Macquarie Marshes. Our wetlands are protected under the Ramsar Convention on wetlands, to which Australia is a signatory.
Both NSW Water Minister Niall Blair and irrigators emphasise the plan is not intended to allow any more water to be extracted than is currently. "Look, this is not extra water. This is just putting a structure and framework around activities that are occurring now," said Blair. "It also allows more transparency."
But since the volumes of water taken from floodplains in NSW have not been measured, there has been no transparency over how much water is currently being taken, and the Government has no ability to know when irrigators exceed that amount into the future.
“The NSW Department of Industry and the federal Murray-Darling Basin Authority both told the ABC the new licences handed out would need to be added to "baseline" extraction totals and be added to the amount of water authorities assumed was being extracted from the basin when the Murray-Darling plan was established. In other words, they would end up recalibrating how much water they estimated could be sustainably taken from the system to incorporate all the floodplain harvesting that has been occurring unofficially.
"Well to me, that is a hydrological and environmental and a legal nonsense," said EDO NSW water law expert Emma Carmody. "The method by which they are proposing to incorporate it within the basin plan framework — I simply cannot see how it could be consistent with all the requirements of the Water Act." She said if more water was being taken from the system than was previously assumed, then more needed to be recovered too.”
"Why would they give them property rights for … something you can't measure or they haven't measured?" said Peter McClellan, a grazier on the Macquarie Marshes. "That's just making some people richer and richer and the rest of the communities, they're getting poorer. I think it's just a disgrace."
So Tandou sold its downstream water allocation back to the MDBA for a huge profit and will now simply move its industries to its properties upstream and get a free licence to harvest floodwater to replace it.
Helen Vivian, SMH on 11 March 2018: “We now know that [the Webster/Tandou Station windfall] was not an isolated case. Last month, Fairfax’s Peter Hannam revealed details of a $17 million purchase in March 2017, at twice the market price for water, from the Tulla Pastoral Company, owned by Geoff Dunsdon, in the Warrego River in southern Queensland. This was also empty buckets of water – or "goanna water" as they call it further north.”
“Some will say it’s the drought causing problems in the lower Darling. But there have also been floods and generous flows throughout this period. In June 2016, approximately 60,000 megalitres of water per day was measured flowing down the Macintyre River at Boggabilla, in the Darling River catchment on the border of NSW and Queensland. The Macintyre forms the northern boundary of Joyce’s New England electorate. By December 2016, the Menindee Lakes were at 89 per cent capacity. Just four months later they were down to 45 per cent, presumably a good deal of this water flowing to Tandou Station, a few kilometres south of the lakes. Very little if any of the water from the floods in early 2017 reached the Menindee Lakes. It was allocated and distributed to upstream irrigators. The recent frequent drying of the Darling River is a man-made situation. Fifty-six years passed between the "no-flow events" of 1945 and 2001. Now they are an almost annual occurrence and the length of time during which the river ceases to flow has doubled.”
“The Wentworth-Broken Hill pipeline is a vital element in what increasingly looks like a plan to sacrifice the Lower Darling to the interests of the cotton industry upstream. Less than 48 hours after the screening of the ABC expose, the Berejiklian government ordered an "urgent overview" to be conducted by the former head of the National Water Commission, Ken Matthews. Mr Matthews found in an interim report released this week that the state's water enforcement measures "have been ineffectual and require significant and urgent improvement."
Coincidentally, the Wentworth-Broken Hill pipeline will also ensure secure water supply for two new mines, Perilya Mines and Hawsons Iron Project.
What no politician has mentioned was that after 5 years and $13 billion of public money spent on the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, there is less water in the river than ever before, and more water in the private water storages of a handful of National Party donors. And no-one is mentioning the possible solution of pumping water back out of these storages and back into the river, even though billions of litres have been illegally pumped out of the river by a handful of corporate thieves or funnelled away from getting into the rivers at all by illegal diversion works, often paid for by public money from grants such as Queensland’s Healthy Headwaters scheme, with virtually no checking of the projects during or after completion.
To ensure there is enough water to get it all the way down the river despite evaporation and absorption en route, it is a relatively simple process to coordinate simultaneous private dam pump-outs, and to add releases from public dams if necessary to ensure enough water to get the necessary flows as far as they need to go. Brewarrina local Phillip O’Connor stated on January 19 that Copeton Dam has 202,602ML in storage, with 16,073ML released that day, and Burrendong Dam has 154,778ML in storage, and that 17,087ML is passing Dubbo that day, but because there is no embargo on it it’s not getting through to the Barwon-Darling. He said if both dams released 34,060ML each for ten days without it getting harvested that would be 346,000ML down the Darling from the Northern Basin.
He said that the Commonwealth Environmental Waterhole released an environmental flow of 26,000ML last year and it “got right through” 2000km.
All that is required is the political will to save the river.
Instead the state and federal governments, with no meaningful public consultation, prefer to close down the Menindee Lakes that provide the water supply for the Broken Hill rural community and are a key wetland in the Basin freshwater ecosystem. The Menindee Lakes are another Ramsar-protected important fish breeding and waterbird habitat, with over 30 species of waterbirds recorded on the main lakes, including threatened species such as freckled duck and migratory waders. The lakes are listed in the Directory of Important Wetlands in Australia.
The decision also strips out the water that is the heart of the Barkandji native title claim. The Barkandji were granted native title in 2015 in the largest native title case in the history of New South Wales. Within it lie the towns of Broken Hill, Wilcannia and Menindee. The success of the native title claim relied heavily on evidence of the continuous occupation of the Barkandji around the Barka.
“My aunties, uncles, elders and our ancestors before them, lived and fished and camped on the Darling River for over 40,000 years,” Barkandji Elder “Badger” Bates said. Now 400km of it run through the native title claim area” After an 18 year battle to achieve native title, his people are watching the Barka (Darling river) dry up.
“Without the river, us Barkandji people, we are nothing. We’ve got no land, no name, nothing. This is our lifeblood, this is our mother,” Bates laments in a letter read in NSW parliament by MP. Jeremy Buckingham.
“Irrigators in both the Northern and Southern Basins support the reconfiguration of Menindee Lakes because this would allow them to use more water. The current NSW policy is that Northern irrigators are not permitted to extract water when the Lakes fall below 18 months’ supply for Broken Hill’s water. This reduces their water extraction and therefore production for the sake of a town up to 2,000km away. Southern irrigators also support changes to Menindee Lakes because the claimed water savings from the proposed reconfiguration have been reallocated under the Basin Plan to increase the Sustainable Diversion Limits (SDLs) in the Murrumbidgee and Goulburn Valleys, which allows southern irrigators to use more water.” (Trickle Out Effect- Drying up money and water in the Lower Darling, Australia Institute September 2018)
Former head of the NSW Farmers' Association and ex-chair of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority committee overseeing the Barwon-Darling River, Mal Peters, wrote in The Land on Jan 20:
“People in the Murray Darling Basin are sick and tired of water reform and do not have the energy to line up again, but the recent fish kill in Menindee has sparked a huge reaction from the Australian public, meaning politicians will have to act.
In 1991 exactly the same thing happened and special low flow rules were established to prevent a repeat, followed in 2007 by an allocation of nearly $13 billion, but Australian taxpayers now question if their dollars have been wasted.
Drought has certainly been the catalyst to the fish kill, but poor government actions have made the problem worse. The basin plan was a difficult balance between agriculture and the environment, but governments now trying to compromise the compromise have delivered an unacceptable environmental disaster.
Irrigation is important to the Australian economy and any reform has to be scientifically based, not at the whim of politicians or environmentalists. I observed first-hand in my role as chairman of the Northern Basin advisory committee of the Murray Darling Basin Authority (MDBA), far too many corners cut and political interference. I also observed a NSW government who played ducks and drakes with the process, and a Queensland government who closed its eyes to indiscretions.
The Menindee Lakes have provided water to Broken Hill for more than half a century, during times when the lakes became low there were embargoes placed on irrigators pumping water to top the lake up.
The NSW government decided to spend $500 million of taxpayers money to build a pipeline 270 kilometres from the Murray River to supply water to Broken Hill. There was a claim draining Menindee would save about 400 meg in evaporation.
There has been no consideration of the farmers who grew grapes around Menindee or the people affected in the town as the water in the lake had been let go by both the NSW government and the MDBA leading to an inevitable fish kill.
Further government mistakes occurred with changes to the Barwon Darling water sharing plan which will allow pumping of low flows, the inability to shepherd taxpayer environmental water downstream and the MDBA modelling. They insist using 120 year averaging, saying it is scientifically defendable, but ignore the reality that if you remove the six major floods, then one in three years the river could be dry.
The South Australian royal commission will report next month, blowing the lid off some of the problems. Sadly federal officials were stopped from appearing, which in itself raised worrying questions.
It is important the incoming Federal Government calls a royal commission to examine MDBA, federal agriculture and water department staff, to expose the full extent of government problems, and lead to implementation of a balanced plan between agriculture and the environment.”
Nobbling the Water Act
The new set of water pumping rules in the Barwon-Darling introduced by the NSW Government have been a boon for the industry. The rules, which came in after extensive lobbying by irrigators, allowed them even more access to water than before 2012 when the Murray-Darling Basin Plan was signed. Four Corners “Pumped” went into this in detail. The big pumps which used to only be allowed to be used in high water level and flood events, can now be used any time. Brewarrina local Tom Taylor talking about a Webster farm: “We were actually fishing there and your lines were flowing back up the river and we could hear the diesels running and it was the cotton, and the river was flowing the wrong way.”
Professor Richard Kingsford, Director, Centre for Ecosystem Science UNSW, says even buybacks - water bought by the government to save the environment - can now be pumped.
“What we're seeing is quite clearly that environmental water bought by taxpayers is going through pumps into storages to grow cotton, and to me that is the biggest problem that we've currently got in the way the Barwon-Darling is managed, and it really goes against the whole tenet of the plan....The whole idea of water for the environment was that water would come down these river systems and make its way right down to the end. You know, it would be there for Aboriginal kids to play in at Wilcannia. It would be there for the environment down at Menindee lakes. And we don't know where that water's going? and we don't know what's happening to that water? It just seems bizarre, and particularly when there are so many major players that are potentially exploiting the system.”
In an interview on ABC PM on January 11 this year he said the fish kill is a sign that too much water has been removed from the system. The cap agreements, the Basin Plan- NSW and QLD don’t abide by them, and there is no enforcer. According to him there is no way under the Water Act to punish states that aren’t performing well, and a Royal Commission is needed instead of repeated inquiries. We need to look at past recommendations and implement and review results, he said, and it is a problem that we hear more from irrigators than from traditional owners.
Historical river flows Historically the lower Murray never ran dry until Europeans started pumping out of it for irrigation. Fish ecologist Dr Mallen-Cooper worked for 35 years on the Murray-Darling, other Australian rivers, and the Mekong River. From data he published in the scientific journal Ecohydrology, he reported that: “Under natural conditions, the Murray River was low in late summer. 1000-2000ML/day flow per day was typical. Diversion by irrigation pumps quickly reached this capacity. In 1889 NSW Parliament reported that pumps on could divert more than 1800ML/day and predicted there could be periods of no flow downstream.
This was 12 years before the first zero-flow event and 33 years before the first dam or weir on the Murray! Up to this point there were no confirmed reports of the river not flowing. All the photographs and newspaper reports of the Murray River with no flow come from three years (1901,1915 and 1923) and from three locations, and these were all downstream of major irrigation areas that were busy pumping out water during droughts. The fact that irrigation was the cause of the almost dry river bed we know from photographs was well reported in newspapers and government documents at the time, so much so that in 1915 the governments of the day agreed to a schedule of irrigation pumping so downstream settlements could get water. Sure enough, when they stopped pumping the water out, the river flowed downstream again. It is only with the passage of time that these became known as natural events.
Why is this important? Because the transformation of the Murray from a naturally flowing river to a series of pools has had a catastrophic impact on river health and biodiversity.”
“The lack of flowing water is not a natural condition that fish and other aquatic animals are adapted to. Those conditions are extreme, possibly once-in-1000 year events. All early descriptions of the river, reaffirmed by computer modelling, showed that the natural state was to have permanent flowing sections, even in the worst possible drought, with a pulse of flow along the entire river every single spring, which is the heartbeat of the river. Fast forward to 2017 and much of the Murray River in South Australia and NSW has been relegated to a series of small lakes, rather than a flowing river, simulating extreme one-in-1000 year conditions every day.”
“These pools are created by weirs that continuously back water up along 700 kilometres of the lower river channel between Mildura and Blanchetown in SA. The weirs were part of a 1920s program to enable paddle steamers to transport goods up and down the river, but although the steamers were taken over by rail transport, the weirs remained. They now hold back small lakes, or weir-pools, which support houseboat tourism and help pumping for domestic and agricultural water. The environmental cost of these weir-pools is devastating, but in the discussion of flows and river health, this is overlooked.”
Professor Fran Sheldon, of the Griffith University Australian Rivers Institute, confirms this man-made catastrophic impact. Writing for The Conversation on January 16, 2019, she said:
“The deaths of millions of fish in the lower Darling River system over the past few weeks should come as no surprise. Quite apart from specific warnings given to the NSW government by their own specialists in 2013, scientists have been warning of devastation since the 1990s. Put simply, ecological evidence shows the Barwon-Darling River is not meant to dry out to disconnected pools – even during drought conditions. Water diversions have disrupted the natural balance of wetlands that support massive ecosystems.
Unless we allow flows to resume, we’re in danger of seeing one of the worst environmental catastrophes in Australia.
The Barwon-Darling River is a “dryland river”, which means it is naturally prone to periods of extensive low flow punctuated by periods of flooding. However, the presence of certain iconic river animals within its channels tell us that a dry river bed is not normal for this system. The murray cod, dead versions of which have recently bought graziers to tears and politicians to retch, are the sentinels of permanent deep waterholes and river channels – you just don’t find them in rivers that dry out regularly. ...This extensive drying event will cause regional extinction of a whole raft of riverine species and impact others, such as the rakali. We are witnessing an ecosystem in collapse.”
Catastrophic drying
We can see the effects of permanent drying around the world. The most famous example is the drying of the Aral Sea in Central Asia. Once the world’s fourth largest inland lake, it was reduced to less than 10% of its original volume after years of water extraction for irrigation. ...Its draining has been described as the world’s worst environmental disaster.”
The basin that once held the Aral Sea.
So, what does the Aral Sea and its major tributaries and the Darling River system with its tributary rivers have in common? Quite a lot, actually. They both have limited access to the outside world: the Aral Sea basin has no outflow to the sea, and while the Darling River system connects to the River Murray at times of high flow, most of its water is held within a vast network of wetlands and floodplain channels. Both are semi-arid. More worryingly, both have more the 50% of their average inflows extracted for irrigation.
...All the main tributaries of the Darling River have floodplain wetland complexes in their lower reaches (such as the Gwydir Wetlands, Macquarie Marshes and Narran Lakes). When the rivers flow they absorb the water from upstream, filling before releasing water downstream to the next wetland complex; the wetlands acting like a series of tipping buckets. Regular river flows are essential for these sponge-like wetlands.”
“While high flows will still make it through the Barwon-Darling, filling the floodplains and wetlands, and connecting to the River Murray, the low and medium flow events have disappeared. Instead, these are captured in the upper sections of the basin in artificial water storages and used in irrigation.
This has essentially dried the wetlands and floodplains at the ends of the tributaries. Any water not diverted for irrigation is now absorbed by the continually parched upstream wetlands, leaving the lower reaches vulnerable when drought hits. By continually keeping the Barwon-Darling in a state of low (or no) flow, with its natural wetlands dry, we have reduced its ability to cope with extended drought.
While droughts are a natural part of this system and its river animals have adapted, they can’t adjust to continual high water caused in some areas by water diversions – and they certainly can’t survive long-term drying.”
“... unless we find a way to restore more of the low and medium flows to this system we are likely witnessing Australia’s worst environmental disaster.”
Shane Wright SMH Jan 17/19: “In the face of criticism from those fishermen, farmers and locals, the Morrison government has effectively said "let's hope for rain" and "it's the drought".
The problem with that argument is that it may very well be exposed by a South Australian royal commission into the Murray-Darling and its management. In less than a fortnight, the royal commission started by then SA Premier Jay Weatherill is due to report. The evidence to it, particularly about the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, has been compelling. And the findings may be as politically toxic as those rotting fish in the Darling.
In his final address, senior counsel assisting the royal commission Richard Beasley did not hold back in his criticisms of the MDBA and its political masters who are scattered across the federal, NSW, Queensland, SA and Victorian spheres.
Describing issues of "maladministration" and "unlawfulness", Beasley sheeted home blame to those in charge: "The implementation of the [Murray-Darling] basin plan has been marred by maladministration. By that I mean mismanagement by those in charge of the task in the basin authority, its executives and its board, and the consequent mismanagement of huge amounts of public funds," he said. "The responsibility for that maladministration and mismanagement falls on both past and current executives of the MDBA and its board." The commission heard evidence of how problems setting the amount of water put aside for the environment started under the Rudd government and have continued ever since. That includes the past six years of oversight by the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government.
The Coalition, particularly the National Party, was always more interested in modernising the irrigation systems across the Murray-Darling rather than buying allocations direct from willing sellers.
A draft report from the Productivity Commission found the government's preferred process has been extremely expensive – upgrading irrigation pipes and drains is twice the cost of buying water on the open market. While the PC found the upgrade irrigation system process has "lessened" the socio-economic costs of directing water to the environment, it too was just as damning as Beasley to the royal commission. It noted that the evidence so far was that while the process had provided "a number of private benefits for irrigators" this had failed to sustain regional farming communities.”
SMH editorial Jan 10/2019: “For more than a decade, irrigators and environmentalists have argued about the technical details of how much water it is safe to extract from the million-square-kilometre region that accounts for 41 per cent of the nation's farm produce and 100 nationally significant wetlands.”
“... Since the Howard government launched a National Water Initiative in 2007, bureaucratic doublespeak or when that fails outright theft and deception have thwarted plans to protect the basin. It has got worse since the Nationals, the allies of the irrigation lobby, took power both federally and in NSW.
The irrigation lobby bowdlerised scientific reports on water extraction targets and killed off the National Water Commission, the independent body supposed to set them. A Productivity Commission draft report last year said that the Murray Darling Basin Authority, which now manages the scheme for the government and ensures compliance, is conflicted.
The NSW government which has shared responsibility in the area has simply turned a blind eye when farmers with ties to the Nationals flouted the fairly modest targets that have been set for increased environmental flows. The Ombudsman has criticised the NSW Department of Primary Industry for gutting its enforcement department and telling inspectors not to cause trouble. The perception that a few huge irrigators with political connections have been allowed to rort the system has undermined faith in the whole exercise.”
Where is the water?
Adam Kay, CEO of Cotton Australia, opinion piece in SMH: “How do water allocations work? Farmers buy water licences/entitlements and state governments allocate water annually to irrigators based on the amount of water available in the system. The licences gives growers access to a set amount of the total water allocated by authorities for farming, after water for the environment and critical human needs has been prioritised. Farmers with a water licence can use the water they extract for whatever they like. It’s not a cotton license, it’s a water license.”
“During a drought, the amount of water for farmers significantly drops, as allocations are reduced. The water available is prioritised for critical human needs and the environment first. If there’s no water available, there’s no irrigated cotton grown (unless farmers irrigate using water they stored when there was a high water allocation).”
“Let’s be very clear on this point regarding illegal behaviour and water theft: the cotton industry has zero tolerance of law-breaking. It believes offenders should face the full force of the law. If people are known to be doing the wrong thing, they should be reported to relevant state authorities, and those concerns should be thoroughly investigated.”
Corruption:
There has been increasing media coverage of corruption and fraud within the Murray Darling Plan. ABC 4 Corners program “Pumped”, screened on July 24 2017, exposed that far from saving the river, the implementation of the plan has helped create a financial windfall for a select few. Corruption and fraud has been a part of the process from the beginning, to ensure that big irrigators who are also National Party donors have been the beneficiaries of the extra environmental water being returned to the river. Water speculation has been encouraged.
From ABC 4 Corners”Pumped”:
• “These storages are owned by a company called Webster Limited. On this one farm, they have five of them, holding a combined 30-billion-litres of water drawn from the Barwon-Darling. There used to be a host of smaller irrigators up and down this river system. But since the Murray-Darling Basin Plan was signed, there's been huge consolidation. Now, just two big players own 70 per cent of the water in this river. One of them - Webster Ltd - now owns more water than anyone else in this country outside the federal government. It's a portfolio worth about $300 million. Webster is chaired by corporate raider Chris Corrigan, famous for busting waterfront unions 20 years ago. The company - which trades on the securities exchange - plans to grow cotton in a good year and to make even more money in drought by selling its water at a profit to farmers willing to pay.”
The other major player in the Murray Darling now is Peter Harris, the powerful irrigator who owns Clyde Cotton, whose family's properties and water licences are worth at least $150 million.
• From “Pumped”: “Former Murray-Darling Basin Authority official Bill Johnson, is showing us where Webster pumps its water. “These big pumps were always used to take the medium and the high flows. The low flows, you were only allowed to use a pump about this big, 150 mls. The volume that they could take is much less. The rules were changed in the Barwon-Darling, so that those low flows could be extracted using these pumps.” Now, even when the river runs low, Webster can use these pumps to take millions of litres of water. BILL JOHNSON: “In the Barwon-Darling, that water is pumped out and stored and used to grow irrigated crops. It is a subversion of the intent of the basin plan, of the water act and the basin plan. It undermines, that undercuts the whole intent of the basin plan.” MAL PETERS: “The rules were that in a huge flow that was the only time these big pumps could be used. Well, the rule changes meant that in a low-flow, when there wasn't much water running down the river, they could kick those big pumps up. Keeping in mind that you've got rural communities downstream. Farmers who need stock and domestic water. They won't be able to access it.”
The rules also allowed water rights to be traded up and down the river. They meant downriver licenses could be bought up and the water taken out upriver, removing the flow between upriver and downriver that kept the river alive, and stopping the access to river water for households, stock and the environment that is the first priority of the Murray Darling Plan. STUART LE LIEVRE, GRAZIER 'YATHONGA': “The major irrigators have taken it. There's no Darling extraction limits anymore. There's no limit on pump sizes.”
• ROB MCBRIDE, GRAZIER, 'TOLARNO' STATION: “We put up with droughts for hundreds of years in this western division. That's just life living here, but that's not what happened. We're fighting man-made disaster, not a natural disaster and that was the difference. It's changed. You can take water licences from further down the catchment and you drag it up to the top, everything is changing so rapidly. People are profiteering. People want to get water in their hands because if you get water in your hands that's big money. It's the biggest water grab in Australia's history and they're just moving, the goalposts are moving further up the catchment”
• Head of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority PHILLIP GLYDE: “It's not just the metering, it's the measurement, the recording, the compliance activities, the enforcement activities are all vital, absolutely vital to having faith in the basin plan. As water becomes more valuable, people will want to know that it is being used fairly.” LINTON BESSER: “Jamie Morgan has grave concerns that in fact water is not being used fairly. Until last year, Jamie Morgan was the state's top investigator charged with enforcing the NSW water laws.” JAMIE MORGAN, FORMER MANAGER, DEPARTMENT OF PRIMARY INDUSTRIES STRATEGIC INVESTIGATIONS UNIT: “It was clear to me and my team that in that area, it was an area that needed significant compliance attention. It was clear that not just one property was involved, that there was basically an entire river system that was seriously lacking accountability, and compliance with the water legislation of New South Wales.” LINTON BESSER: “Four years ago, Jamie Morgan set up the Strategic Investigations Unit inside the NSW Department of Primary Industries. It was the Department's response to two scathing reports which found it had failed to properly investigate and prosecute illegal water works as far back as 2003. JAMIE MORGAN: The team was put together basically to address the serious non-compliance and designed to bring a uniform approach with highly trained officers across the state.” LINTON BESSER: “For more than a year Jamie's team investigated hundreds of cases all over NSW. Where they found really alarming problems, though, was in the Barwon-Darling. Jamie Morgan's team took a close look at this cotton farm called Burren Downs at Mungindi near the Queensland border. They found the meter attached to this pump wasn't working even as it drew millions of litres of water through this channel and into a vast private dam. His report to the department said the meter, ' … has been tampered with'. And that, 'in total it appears that 1.191GL has been taken … in contravention of the WMA [Water Management Act].' That's more than one billion litres of water. The irrigator in the spotlight was cotton-farmer Anthony Barlow. Anthony Barlow had been pumping during a ban set up to ensure water got down the river to give Broken Hill its drinking supply. In his formal interview with investigators, he claimed the then NSW minister for water, Kevin Humphries, had given a room full of irrigators permission to pump.”
• “Another target of state investigators was this massive irrigation farm. It's called Miralwyn about 50 kilometres east of Brewarrina. It's owned by the same powerful irrigator who owns Clyde Cotton, Peter Harris, whose family's properties and water licences are worth at least $150 million.” “The investigators produced a report on what they found. When they looked inside the water meters, they saw cables were unplugged suggesting, '… possible meter tampering …' And, '… possible pumping outside of required river heights …' Under NSW law when a meter isn't working, irrigators must keep a detailed logbook, which the farm manager insisted he'd done. It turned out Harris's manager had been lying - there was no logbook.” CEO of the Environmental Defender's Office SUE HIGGINSON: “The system relies on compliance with having meters that are fully functioning and adhere to a particular standard, or the maintenance of log books. So, if they're not working, or they're not being complied with, those requirements, then that's an illegal act, and a very significant one at that.”
• “Jack Harris also runs the Clyde Cotton property Rumleigh upstream of Phil O'Connor's place at Brewarrina. Last year, Phil O'Connor saw these pipes pulling huge volumes of water out of the river when pumping wasn't allowed: “And we come 'round and had a look and there was one of these pumps running, yeah. And we just recorded the time and the date when it was.” The problem was, the official river heights published that day showed there wasn't enough water to be legally pumping. Phil O'Connor passed the video on to a NSW Government investigator.”
• “LINTON BESSER: “Another Harris property that came to the attention of authorities at Hay was owned by Ron Harris with his brother Peter Harris. Ron Harris pleaded guilty four years ago to meter-tampering, using a sophisticated technique to jam the meter. NSW investigators inspecting Miralwyn also found this water channel dug on Harris property through Crown land. This is a public road coming through this country, and it used to travel straight across here, and up to that major intersection there. But in about 2015, this giant irrigation channel was built and what's had to happen is they have rerouted the road to get around this giant culvert. It was work done by the Harris family, and the allegation is it was all done without any approval.” “SUE HIGGINSON: “Two thousand, five hundred and thirty-one megalitres was actually extracted.” LINTON BESSER: “CEO of the Environmental Defender's Office, Sue Higginson, has been investigating Peter Harris' farms since last year under instruction from the Australian Conservation Foundation. Last year, she used freedom of information laws to obtain data which appears to show huge volumes of water have been taken beyond what Peter Harris' properties are allowed.” SUE HIGGINSON: “From the information that we obtained, it would certainly appear on the face of that information that there has been a significant over extraction of water from the system. The volume of water over extracted was five times that amount that is, that was legally permissible.” LINTON BESSER: “The figures indicate those farms pumped at least a billion litres of water more than was allowed. It was the same year Broken Hill almost ran out of water because not enough water was getting down the Darling River.” JAMIE MORGAN: “We were there to conduct a full investigation, in relation to all our specs of water management on the property. So, we would look at their dams. We'd look at where the water was going. And we'd inspect all their works. In the northwest, the meters I looked at, I didn't see one that actually worked. We had cables unplugged, batteries removed, impellers missing. Basically, they were in a state of disrepair. So, it was my desire to run a proactive operation out in that area and inspect every single river pump at times by boat down the river, identifying where all the extraction points are, confirming that they're complying with their licence, and if they weren't, taking action to bring them into compliance.” LINTON BESSER: “How did the operation go?” JAMIE MORGAN: “It was never approved.” LINTON BESSER: “Why not?” JAMIE MORGAN: “I have no idea.” LINTON BESSER: “At about the same time that the investigations unit made its request to proceed, Jamie Morgan says the hierarchy went cold on compliance, moving it out of the department and his staff numbers began to fall.” JAMIE MORGAN: “I think that it was clear that there was no appetite for compliance anymore. It was odd timing in my view. It was only when we went to the northwest of the state, where we found significant problems, that our team was very quickly disbanded after that. Our briefings weren't being answered. And to this day, no one has actually addressed those issues in that area.”
Political influence
• “Helen Vivian reported in the SMH on 11 March 2018: “In 2012 the NSW government increased water entitlements and allowed upstream users to draw water from the river even during low flow periods. The Barwon-Darling water-sharing plan has been contentious from the day it was introduced and serious allegations were raised in February 2018 about the conduct of the then minister for primary industries, Katrina Hodgkinson, for unilaterally altering the plan after it was finalised by her department.” Ms Hodgkinson retired on Monday July 31 2017, only a week after the Four Corners program ''Pumped'' aired on July 24.
• Andrew Clennell reported in The Daily Telegraph on August 2, 2017 that NSW Nationals Primary Industries Minister Niall Blair was pushing Cabinet colleagues to change irrigation laws to retrospectively justify a decision by his department to give Brewarrina cotton farmer Peter Harris, a major political donor and cotton farmer, more rights over the Barwon-Darling River, by altering an element of the Barwon-Darling Water Sharing Plan. It came after his department in 2016 overruled what it called “minor” error in the law to grant him extra irrigation rights. “A department briefing, seen by The Daily Telegraph, said the error was impacting on “some users wishing to trade between river sections covered by the plan”. The briefing was written shortly after Mr Harris was given extra rights. Mr Harris gave $10,000 to the National Party prior to the 2011 election in combined personal donations and those made by his company.” “The revelations come as several inquiries have been launched into the alleged water theft on an industrial scale of precious resources across the basin. The Daily Telegraph can also now reveal that the now retiring Nationals MP and ex water minister Katrina Hodgkinson changed laws to benefit irrigators after lobbying. Ms Hodgkinson shocked her peers when she announced on Monday July 31 2017 that she was quitting parliament. A 2016 briefing from the Department of Industry seen by The Daily Telegraph recommends Mr Blair amend the Water Sharing Plan “to remove an error” months after the same department approved Mr Harris’s application to move pumps to get more water. That’s despite such a move being prevented by the same “error” in the Barwon-Darling plan’s water regulations.” “A Freedom of Information application by the Environmental Defender’s Office into Mr Harris’s applications shows he applied to trade rights to move pumps to another section of the Barwon-Darling River.” “The Daily Telegraph has obtained another document showing that the retiring Ms Hodgkinson changed the water sharing plan to benefit irrigators after lobbying. She was water minister at the time. In a 2012 letter to lobbyist and cotton farmer Ian Cole, Ms Hodgkinson wrote: “Following consideration of a number of WSP (water sharing plan) matter raised with me, I requested the Office of Water to make several amendments which I believe now present a fair and equitable outcome for all.”
• “Kerry Brewster, The Guardian, reported on Tuesday 28 Aug 2018: One of Australia’s most successful cotton irrigators and Queensland’s former cotton farmer of the year, John Norman, 43, was charged on Tuesday with conspiring to defraud the commonwealth of more than $20m, with six counts of fraud involving commonwealth funds allocated for water efficiency projects under the Murray-Darling basin plan. The chief financial officer for Norman Farming, was also charged with four counts of fraud relating to his alleged involvement in the lodgment of fraudulent claims. Norman owns an 18,000-hectare cotton aggregate outside Goondiwindi, near the New South Wales border. Police would allege fraudulent activity across six projects between 2010 and 2017. “Between 2010 and 2017 Norman reportedly received up to $31m in grants under Queensland’s Healthy Headwaters scheme. The money was provided for water efficiency projects to help the nation’s ailing river system, but under the conditions set by Queensland’s Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy there was virtually no checking of the projects during, or after completion. John Norman’s immediate neighbours said they were relieved charges had been laid. “It’s been a long time since I first went to authorities with my concerns,” said dry-land cropper Chris Lamey, who gave evidence about Norman Farming’s alleged fraud to South Australia’s royal commission. Lamey and other neighbours have accused the irrigator of illegally constructing more than 50km of levees and banks on his massive farming operation. They say the levees have caught and diverted large volumes of floodwaters from the McIntyre river into Norman Farming’s expanded on-farm storage dams.” Over the past six years Norman was awarded more commonwealth funds than any other Queensland irrigator, approximately a sixth of the program’s expenditure. He received funding approval for 10 out of the 15 Healthy Headwaters projects he applied for. The charges “will also throw the spotlight on the Queensland government’s failure in administering a key plank of the $13bn Murray-Darling basin plan, how it withheld critical information about the alleged crimes, and how it raises queries as to whether it lied about its own investigation.... The plan for the basin is funded by the commonwealth and administered by state governments. But allegations that the $150m Healthy Headwaters Water Use Efficiency projects in Queensland, part of the MDB plan, lacked any genuinely independent checks on projects, means it may have been left open to corruption. “It’s been a loosey-goosey slush fund helping irrigators get richer,” according to Chris Lamey, a dry-land farmer who’s seeking compensation from Norman, his neighbour. “It’s achieved the opposite of what was intended. There’s a lot of water not getting into NSW now and it’s backed up in dams next door to me.” When a 2016 flood that should have drained away banked up on his property for eight weeks, he hired a helicopter to see what was going on. That’s when the penny dropped. He realised his property, with its $1.5m in drowned crops, was part of a large water-catching operation. “John Norman had turned my property into a dam – or a ‘surge’, as irrigators call it – taking the banked-up flood waters off slowly and channelling them to big dams on inland properties far from the McIntyre river. It’s a lie that the projects have saved any water for the river system.” Lamey says he contacted his then-newly elected federal member, David Littleproud, in 2017, urging him to stop the commonwealth grants to Norman Farming and find out how the money was being spent. He says he didn’t hear back from him.””
The local MP David Littleproud quickly became Federal agriculture minister after Barnaby Joyce was forced to resign. Littleproud’s wife is second cousin to the irrigator. Littleproud has denied any personal conflict, saying the awarding of Healthy Headwaters grants was a state responsibility.
As Detective superintendent Michael Dowie said on the day of the raids, analysis of existing material showed “possible significant fraud against the Healthy Headwaters program”.
Queensland’s department of natural resources and mines is believed to have received that evidence as early as April 2016.
The Queensland minister for natural resources, mines and energy, Anthony Lynham, declined to answer questions about when his department had handed the whistleblower’s evidence to police; why major works continued on Norman Farming properties until 2018; or why it delayed telling the federal government about the investigation.
The federal department of agriculture was kept in the dark for months. Local employees and contractors report being questioned by police by August 2016, but, according to Paul Morris, a senior official in the department of agriculture, Canberra only knew about the investigation in November 2016.”
“During 2017, some of the country’s highest political figures, including the former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce and Queensland’s Anthony Lynham, along with top federal and state bureaucrats, reassured Lamey that nothing was amiss with the Healthy Headwaters program.”
“The following year the Queensland government continued its deception, reassuring the department of agriculture about the integrity of the scheme’s administration. Lynham also falsely claimed the scheme had been externally audited, writing to Lamey to assure him the department “was serious about ensuring correct application of grant funds” and that a “recent external audit of the Healthy Headwaters payment claim procedures had found no material concerns”.
But the audit was not external.”
“The word audit has been used very loosely,” according to Maryanne Slattery, a former financial auditor and former director in the Murray-Darling basin authority, now the senior water researcher for the Australia Institute. She left the authority in 2017 because of her concerns about the way the plan had been administered, accusing it of manipulating data on the amount of environmental water being recovered to back its claim that the “basin plan is being delivered on time and in full”. “There wasn’t a site visit. There was no interest in testing the allegations.”
“The Healthy Headwaters program has been “a sitting duck for corruption”, according to Slattery. She questions why the federal government allowed Queensland to outsource much of the administration of multimillion-dollar works. Irrigators can calculate for themselves the value of projects “assessed under self-assessable codes”, while other projects require only the signature of an independent expert, paid for by the irrigator, as verification of the works and water savings. “This appears to be the wrong way to run a water-saving program. There’s no real checking of projects and no one seems willing or able to understand what the Healthy Headwater monies are spent on or how much water is actually being saved – if any.””
• “Slattery also told the Guardian on July 11 2018 that an experimental satellite imaging project she developed and ran in 2016 while at the MDBA to track environmental flows was effectively shelved after it pointed to widespread water theft by irrigators in the Barwon-Darling. ““Almost immediately it was clear from the hydrograph that there were unexpected decreases in river flows. The satellite imagery showed water in irrigation channels including during periods of a river embargo and other times when it was illegal to pump; dams filling and emptying; watering of paddocks, paddocks greening and then browning off.” This was cross-checked with other data including areas under production, estimated water use per hectare and the water being traded. “That information indicated that … the estimated extractions exceeded our estimations of the total possible account balance,” Slattery said. Slattery said the MDBA was also receiving reports from the public of water being illegally pumped or diverted. Yet when she presented the findings to the MDBA’s senior executive team they were highly critical that the project had been undertaken. She said her boss, the executive director of river management, David Dreverman, urged her to finalise the report before “they shut us down.” Slattery said she was later told that the project was not being pursued to “avoid upsetting NSW”.”
• The senior bureaucrat in charge of water in NSW was Gavin Hanlon, Deputy Director General Water, DPI, NSW. Last year he set up a secretive group with irrigator lobbyists to discuss the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. Patrick Begley SMH, 16 September 2017: “ABC's Four Corners program aired in July recordings of Mr Hanlon offering to provide irrigation lobbyists campaigning against the conservation plan with access to classified documents via an online Dropbox account. The offer was made to irrigator bodies which met with select DPI staff by teleconference on at least four occasions, on Mr Hanlon's invitation. Recordings of one of these teleconferences showed the NSW government had considered opting out of the plan, which governs water use in NSW, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and the ACT. The program also revealed Mr Hanlon had resisted calls from investigators in his department to approve a major operation to target water siphoning after they discovered billions of litres has been illegally pumped.” “Opposition water spokesman Chris Minns had referred Mr Hanlon and former water minister Kevin Humphries to the Independent Commission Against Corruption in July 2017. A cotton grower investigated over diverting water during an embargo meant to replenish Broken Hill's drinking water supplies had claimed Mr Humphries gave him permission. Mr Humphries did not respond to Four Corners' request for comment.
Countering corruption: transparency, monitoring and an independent regulator
The NSW government has held six inquiries, the Labor Party state and federal are calling for new inquiries, the Greens are calling for a Royal Commission. Meanwhile the South Australian Royal Commission into water will present its damning report by the end of January and the battle is if and when that report will be made public, particularly with the NSW election coming up in March and the federal election in May. This is despite the Federal government going to court in a stunt that prevented anyone employed by the Murray Darling Basin Authority appearing before the SA government's royal commission.
“On September 11 2017, Ken Matthews' interim report, the inquiry commissioned by the NSW Government, after the ABC's July 24 2017 Four Corners program, found the state's water compliance and enforcement "have been ineffectual and require significant and urgent improvement."
His key findings were: The overall standard of NSW compliance and enforcement work has been poor, Arrangement for metering, monitoring and measurements of water extraction in the Barwon-Darling river system are below the standards required, Certain individual cases of alleged non-compliance have remained unresolved for far too long, A lack of transparency in the system is undermining public confidence.
NSW Regional Water Minister Niall Blair said the report was "both confronting and significant for the Government".
Misconduct procedures were launched against deputy director-general of water at the NSW Department of Industry, Gavin Hanlon, who was secretly recorded promising to share internal government documents with irrigation lobbyists, and Hanlon was stood down. Four days later he resigned.
Ken Matthews said a "systemic fix" was needed because "the industry's social licence to irrigate is at stake". “No change is not an option" he said, and recommended a far-reaching reform package, including:
Establishing a new NSW Natural Resources Access Regulator, which would operate at arm's length from the department and make decisions on the handling of alleged serious offences, Introducing a "no-metering, no pumping" rule, to ensure all irrigators install pumps and scrap self-reporting mechanisms like log books, Enabling the public to easily access all details of individual's water entitlements, licence conditions and water trading activities.
Blair said he had already asked the Department to look into setting up an independent regulator and he would make it a top priority to ensure all large users in NSW install water meters within 12 months. He said a taskforce had also been set up to investigate allegations of water theft and licence breaches.
On 26 November 2018, Barwon-Darling River cotton farmer Anthony Barlow pleaded guilty to all three offences alleged against him by WaterNSW involving one offence of pumping during an embargo and two offences of pumping while metering equipment was not working, according to a statement by the water agency, following a lengthy investigation after a ABC Four Corners program in July 2017 reported misuse involving potentially billions of litres at the family's Mungindi property near the NSW-Queensland border. The hearing for the sentencing of Mr Barlow will be in February 2019. The total maximum penalty for each offence is $247,500.
Another leading irrigator, Peter Harris, is fighting separate charges of water theft, with his case due next year. Niall Blair, Minister for Regional Water, said “No one is above the law and anyone who thinks they can illegally take our most precious resource will be held to account," Blair said, announcing that the government had finally set up the Natural Resources Access Regulator (NRAR) and would implement stronger metering regulations from December. The Environmental Defenders Office NSW said it had worked for years to draw attention to non-compliance but its concerns and those of its clients were ignored by the government until the media exposed it, and that the courts were likely to set the penalties in the case to deter others from water fraud. Jeremy Buckingham, then-Greens water spokesman, also welcomed the guilty plea by a big irrigator. “It is good to see an actual prosecution take place for water theft, given that the NSW Ombudsman found that water compliance and enforcement was effectively stopped for many years under this government, he said.
The federal government has paid about $5 billion to irrigators to build dams and other on-farm water efficiency measures on condition that they return water to the environment. The Productivity Commission notes in its draft report that cancelling buybacks has resulted in more than doubling the cost of water savings. More than 4000 big irrigators have taken up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per farm, with little auditing to see if there is any environmental benefit. And the refusal up until this fish kill disaster to include flood harvesting in the national water tally means that the more money is spent on dams and diversions, the less water is getting into the rivers to be counted in the first place.
It took the death of a million fish to get floodplain monitoring officially agreed to.
On January 15 Phillip Glyde, Chief Executive of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority since January 2016, told an ABC radio interview that for the first time floodplain harvesting will be brought into the plan accounting system to be accounted for and regulated, and that this will happen mid to later this year, a year after the NSW public consultation on the issue. However as they are simply creating and granting free licenses to farmers who have set up floodplain harvesting to legalise what they catch, all that the new accounting will do is simply increase and legalise the amount of water allowed to be kept out of the rivers.
Officials are quick to claim the fish are killed by a toxic algal bloom but locals say the primary cause of the catastrophe is poor water management and irrigation agriculture. The drought and algal bloom are secondary stressors on a system which has failed to use water specially allocated to protect the foundations of the river’s aquatic ecosystems.
The NSW Irrigators Council would have us believe it is all about the drought. It isn’t. It about taking too much water upstream so there is not enough for downstream users, and the fish,” says Professor Quentin Grafton, UNESCO Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance.
“Droughts would have contributed to the blue green algae outbreak,” says Richard Kingsford, Director of the Centre for Ecosystem Science at the University of NSW, “But the river droughts are happening more often and they’re more intense as a result of the irrigation industry in the Darling diverting water from the river over the last 10 to 20 years.”
Joyce is popular with irrigators for replacing water buybacks with paying subsidies to irrigators for efficiency. It pays off for him as so many of them are in his electorate. There is a present freeze on water buybacks. But the emphasis on increasing efficiency in irrigation pushed by Joyce and his National Party cronies also means there is less run-off getting back into the rivers, and so even less water in the rivers. Former Director of the National Farmers’ Federation, Mal Peters, claims Joyce tilted the Murray-Darling Basin Authority towards irrigation interests over the environment when he was agriculture minister. Whether the present ecological catastrophe is enough to tip it back to the original intent of the Water Act to keep the Murray Darling river system alive is up to communities speaking up, to get their voices heard as well as the corporate irrigators do, and their interests factored in.
Joyce insists on giving economic and social needs priority over environmental; reversing the entire intention of the Water Act to save the living river system itself. And this change of emphasis has become part of the Plan. Littleproud trumpets “his” achievement of the first management agreement between all Basin governments on December 14 2018. "For the first time since Federation, all the basin states and the Commonwealth have agreed on the management of the Murray-Darling Basin system," Mr Littleproud said. Delivery of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan was secured with state and federal governments agreeing to terms about how up to 450 gigalitres of environmental water will be returned to rivers, “provided it does not have a negative socio-economic impact on river communities, based on criteria agreed to by the states”.
The criteria are yet to be released, but will allow up to 450 gigalitres to be returned to the environment, in addition to the original 2750 gigalitres under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.
Victorian Water Minister Lisa Neville said the same socio-economic test would apply across all states: "We will each be applying the same criteria to every single proposal and every single project to ensure that only those projects that are neutral or provide better socio-economic outcomes will be approved through this process," Ms Neville said. "That does give certainty to communities to know that we've got their backs, we want to make sure that they are thriving businesses and thriving communities and we are also delivering for the environment."
Joyce and Littleproud may have outsmarted themselves. Officially there can be no trade-offs between environmental objectives and socio-economic ones, as the environmental objectives of the Act are subordinate to Australia’s international environmental treaty obligations. We are committed to Ramsar, a 1971 treaty to preserve wetlands. Joyce has put in a lot of effort to convince rural communities that scientists and environmentalists are their enemies and that environmental flows are “green tape”, and to get community members like Shelley Scoullar, from community group Speak UP, to protest that environmental water could not be delivered “at the detriment of communities”.
However the continuing massive fish kills have brought home to river and rural communities that unless we keep “environmental water” running down the river system, the river will die, and bring down all those who depend on it in the process. Politicians keep saying we need more water in the river, just as they keep denying that their creation of management problems are making the situation so much worse. It is increasingly obvious that a Royal Commission into the management of the MDBA and their political masters is crucial, as well as implementing the recommendations of the NSW Ken Matthews Report and the SA Royal Commission, to successfully implementing a strong, independent, transparent and fair management and monitoring of where water is going, and enforcing that enough water stays in the river to keep our river and the communities, wetlands and floodplains that depend on it alive and thriving, even in drought.
The MDBA is “a fraud on the environment”, South Australian Royal Commission lawyers declared. The Water Act 2007 recognised that too much water is being extracted from the river system and aimed to reset the balance between the amount required for human consumption and the amount needed to sustain the environment. By 2011, however, the MDBA seems to have turned the Act on its head with the support of National Party figures including irrigator electorate MPs like David Littleproud and in particular Barnaby Joyce, who seems to be a negotiator almost everywhere a fat profit or a blind eye is being offered to big irrigators. Particularly big irrigators who donate money to the National Party.
The 2017 SA Royal Commission is due to report in a few weeks, but it was limited by the states and MDBA’s refusal to cooperate. Unimpressed, Counsel Assisting, Richard Beasley S.C, noted in his summing up for the Commissioner, Brett Walker S.C., that the state governments’ submissions were,
“..either totally unhelpful or not particularly helpful.”
However this didn’t stop the Royal Commission from being provided with a wealth of expert scientific testimony and submissions from public whistleblowers.
“Systematic mismanagement, cover up and maladministration has undermined the proper implementation of the Murray Darling Basin Plan”, Maryanne Slattery, ex-MDBA. “Implementing the Plan for political expediency, without transparency or accountability by the Murray Darling Basin Authority, has resulted in a fraud of a Basin Plan. It has benefited big irrigators, at the expense of everyone else, including Aboriginal people, regional communities, floodplain graziers, small irrigators and the environment.”
Participants Quentin Grafton, Emma Carmody (EDO NSW water law expert ), Matthew Colloff and John Williams wrote in Policy Forum:
“The Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission, established in South Australia to investigate the operations and effectiveness of the Basin Plan, will report next month. But its Senior Counsel, Richard Beasley SC, has already concluded: “The implementation of the Basin Plan has been marred by maladministration. By that I mean mismanagement by those in charge of the task in the Basin Authority, its executives and its board, and the consequent mismanagement of huge amounts of public funds.”
Limits on water extraction, water quality measures, and the legal extraction of environmental water are currently governed by Basin state laws.
The legal regime in New South Wales has failed the Darling, Lower Darling, and Menindee Lakes on all three counts. Under the state’s laws, relevant water quality provisions are largely non-binding and poorly implemented while embargos on the pumping of environmental water may only be imposed at the discretion of the Minister (which rarely occurs).
...And this has happened before. Ecologists who investigated the 2004 fish kill on the Lower Darling River recommended improved water quality monitoring and adequate storage at Menindee Lakes for downstream releases so as to improve water quality. Yet the agencies responsible failed to act on this advice.”
“Those in charge of water management in the Basin were told what would happen as far back as 2010, and that the problem would get worse unless less water was extracted from rivers. They were also told what they should do to stop it from happening. As certain parts of the Basin Plan come into force, jurisdiction over some of the causes identified above will shift to the Commonwealth. However, without some changes, it won’t get better.
So what is the solution? For a start, the Water Act 2007 should be amended to improve governance arrangements and reduce the possibility of conflicts of interest undermining the lawful management of Basin water resources.
Next, the Basin Plan should also be amended to increase recovery of water for the environment, augment actual stream flows, and buffer against the impacts of climate change. Full accounting of where water goes in the Basin, including return flows from farmers’ fields, must occur, while controversial changes to the management of the Menindee Lakes need to be reconsidered and any water infrastructure projects that are claimed to deliver the equivalent of increased stream flows should be subject to rigorous cost-benefit analysis to ensure they deliver a net positive public benefit. ‘Water resource plans’ for each catchment, which come into force within the next year or so, must also include rules to maintain sufficient flows and water quality, and to protect environmental water from legal pumping.”
The Productivity Commission 5 year report on the Murray Darling Plan came out last August and recommended the restructure of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority to separate its service delivery and regulatory functions into two institutions. They recommended the Australian Government establish the Murray-Darling Basin Corporation as the agent of Basin Governments, and the Basin Plan Regulator as an independent Commonwealth Statutory Authority by 2021, and the Australian Government should ensure that it will be both effective and adequately resourced to do its job. But without specifics on establishing independence from political pressure, or a way to enforce the Water Act on corporate-irrigator-controlled state governments, rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic is not doing anything to avoid the iceberg.
Big irrigators with big party donations have recruited politicians of all persuasions, in the name of protecting rural Australia Up to 75% of surface water extractions by irrigators in the Northern Basin, home to the electorates of Joyce and Littleproud, are not even metered. Compliance inspectors have been cut back and blocked from acting, and monitoring and audit programs have been cut. The NSW Minister for Water claims metering will happen over the next year, but without independent monitors and inspectors this can’t be verified.
“The conflict around the Basin Plan is typically presented as agriculture versus the environment, or upstream states versus downstream states. While such framing helps politicians and advocacy groups champion their respective constituents, it distracts from the more important point – that Aboriginal people, graziers, downstream water users, communities, small irrigators and the environment are being sacrificed for the profits of ever more powerful irrigation corporations.
...The problem is not that there are big agribusinesses flourishing under the Basin Plan, but the inability or unwillingness of governments and their bureaucrats to ensure that those with power are not prioritized at the expense of the wider community interest. The problem is that Webster’s management can talk directly to senior department staff at any time, while the native title owners are offered token consultation. The problem is that Webster is given compensation but every other property owner is not.” (Trickle Out Effect- Drying up money and water in the Lower Darling, Australia Institute September 2018)
The problem is every government politician with the power and responsibility to make changes denies the mismanagement and corruption that exists and claims the problem is “just” the drought. It is up to our communities to demand our rivers be saved and to make this the key election issue in both the upcoming NSW and Federal elections.
Elena Garcia, Grazier, Maranoa electorate
