Murray-Darling Basin Plan failing, must be put on hold, experts say

BILLIONS of dollars for the Murray-Darling Basin Plan must be put on hold because the historic plan is wasting money and failing to improve the system, a group of the nation’s top water experts will warn today.

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• Read the Declaration here

BILLIONS of dollars for the Murray-Darling Basin Plan must be put on hold because it is wasting money and failing to improve the system, a group of the nation’s top water experts will warn today.

In an extraordinary intervention, 12 prominent scientists and economists will launch a joint declaration at the University of Adelaide.

They say that as it stands, the plan — agreed to in 2012 by all the basin states — will fail to meet key objectives, such as keeping the Murray Mouth open 90 per cent of the time.

The group, which includes Richard Davis, former Chief Science Adviser to the National Water Commission, are calling on all the authorities involved to:

STOP irrigation subsidies for water recovery. Billions of dollars have been spent with “very little evidence” of improved flows, they say.

AUDIT the plan, the money spent, the water recovered, and the environmental outcomes. The group says as much as 75 per cent of diversions in the northern basin may not be metered.

SET up an independent body to monitor the plan and its effects.

Declaration Convenor Quentin Grafton, Economics Professor at the Australian National University, said the declaration was about fixing “what is going wrong in the basin”.

“This is not about politics or about playing the ‘blame game’,” he said.

“It is about saying water reform is not delivering what it said it would for the basin, its environment or its people — and saying how we solve it.

“Amazingly, despite allocating half a billion dollars in 2007 to upgrade water meters in the basin, as much as 75 per cent of all surface water diversions in the northern part of the basin may not be metered.

The Murray Mouth, where the river water hits the Coorong.

“This makes no sense. Taxpayers, the basin and its people deserve much better.”

Professor Sarah Wheeler, from the University of Adelaide’s Centre for Global Food and Resources, said that despite $6 billion being spent and billions more in the pipeline, the plan’s goals are not being achieved.

She told The Advertiser it was 2.5 times more expensive to build irrigation infrastructure than it would be to just buy the water back.

“We are now 77 per cent of the way through environmental recovery of the full amount that they say will give us a sustainable basin,” she said.

“We are not seeing the environmental outcomes at this stage that you would think we should be seeing.

“We’ve spent $6 billion. There’s $4 billion more in water recovery. It’s an important time to stop, consider where we are ... we think potentially we’re on the wrong path and we need to stop.”

She said the experts in the group had spent decades working on water reform and there was a growing sense of discontent with the process. “Enough is enough,” she said.

Profs Grafton and Wheeler are set to publish their research into water recovery in the Annual Review of Resource Economics.

The declaration comes as the deadline looms for legislation that could overturn part of the plan, a move that Federal Water Minister David Littleproud says could disrupt the entire plan.

State Water Minister Ian Hunter says that without guarantees from the upstream states that the full 3200 gigalitres in the plan will be delivered, there should be no negotiation on other elements.