"Well, it's the story that just won't go away," Hamish Macdonald declared on The Project 13 days before last year's federal election. "The murky taxpayer-funded water buyback that's raised a lot of questions."

Fourteen months later, the story still raises a lot of questions, although not the ones Macdonald had in mind when he questioned the purchase of commercial water entitlements in the Murray-Darling Basin on Channel 10's current affairs show.