SA warns Canberra of legal challenge if Murray water not delivered
The SA Government has warned of a High Court battle to claim SA’s share of Murray River water if it isn’t passed on from the eastern states.
SA News
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The Marshall Government is prepared to put “a gun to the head” of Canberra over the River Murray, flagging a High Court battle if the commonwealth does not deliver 450 gigalitres of environmental water by 2024.
SA Environment Minister David Speirs said the Federal Government was legally obliged to secure the water – almost the volume of Sydney Harbour – even if it meant ditching its new ban on buying water licences from irri gators.
That ban was a policy, not law, and the water had to be obtained “one way or the other” as a crucial buffer for the Lower Lakes and Coorong in a changing climate, he said.
While Mr Speirs said he welcomed water-saving measures being planned to yield an extra 150GL (billion litres), any shortfall had to be made up by Canberra under the Murray Darling Basin Plan.
That plan had a 2750GL target for environmental water, but SA insisted on an extra 450GL by 2024. So far about 2100GL has been secured, and almost none of the extra amount SA won.
“They are legally bound to deliver the projects, or deliver water under the plan,” Mr Speirs told The Advertiser. “That’s where I say (it’s) a gun to your head last resort …”
Mr Speirs last week came under attack from state Labor, which called for a High Court challenge after revelations almost none of the 450GL had been delivered.
Now prominent Sydney lawyer Richard Beasley, SC, the senior counsel assisting the royal commission set up by the Weatherill Government to assess the state of basin plan, has also lashed out.
Mr Beasley said that SA would never see the promised 450GL because the state was being “f…ked over” by eastern states and irrigators, and the Marshall Government had been “pathetic” in failing to stop them.
He also said there was a legal limit to the quantity of water that could be bought and that if SA insisted on forced buybacks of licences it would “start a civil war”.
In a book he has written, Dead in the Water, due out next year, Mr Beasley said the river had been so badly managed it would die from the mouth up.
He added that the basin plan was unlawful, had never provided the required amount of environmental water, and the river should be managed by Indigenous Australians.
The SA Government’s 26-page response to the 764-page royal commission report by Bret Walker, SC, was “risible” and “contemptible”.
Mr Beasley reiterated the commission’s 2019 finding that Mr Speirs had failed in his ministerial duty by agreeing the water could not be taken if caused socio-economic hurt to upstream communities.
Mr Speirs said Mr Beasley was no water expert and that the commission, which reported early last year, had wasted $5m of taxpayers money.
Going back in history to judge Lower Lakes health
Clare Peddie
The health of South Australia’s Lower Lakes should be judged on their condition 80 years ago, before the Goolwa Barrages went in, a university researcher says.
Sydney University postdoctoral researcher Thomas Job has used geological records, going back thousands of years, to study the health of the Lower Lakes.
He said, since the 1940 construction of the barrages, cutting lakes Alexandrina and Albert off from the sea, they had been at greater risk of turning acidic and polluted during drought.
“Droughts leave historic fingerprints deep in the lake sediments,” Dr Job said.
“We see these fingerprints more distinctly in sediments deposited after the barrages were built.”
He argued the Murray-Darling Basin Authority should shift its baseline for the health of the lakes from 1985, when the estuary was listed as a Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention, back to some time before the barrages were built.
The barrages, which stopped seawater flowing back into the lakes, raised the risk of them drying out, allowing the sediment to become exposed to oxygen in the air.
That caused a chemical reaction that made the water more acidic.
The acid then leached metals from the sediment, polluting the remaining water. “The millennium drought from 1996 to 2010 saw historic lows in Lake Albert’s water levels,” Dr Job said. “This triggered widespread oxidation of exposed sulphide minerals, causing surface waters to become acidic.”
At the time, the authorities battled to prevent the chemical reaction by applying lime, planting vegetation and flushing the lakes.
Dr Job’s research is published in The Holocene journal.