$550m water waste: Taxpayers’ money wasted reviews, planning, and consultants

Victoria, NSW and South Australia have spent at least $550m of taxpayers’ money on failed Murray Darling Basin projects.

National Irrigators Council chief executive Zara Lowien, with her family at their Narrabri property, says “governments are drowning in their own internal processes”.

Australian taxpayers have poured more than $550m into Murray Darling Basin foodplain and environmental restoration works that federal and state governments have failed to deliver.

Complex regulations, a revolving door of state and federal water ministers, plus ballooning numbers of water bureaucrats have exacerbated project delays and costs.

Since 2019 in Victoria alone, the state government has spent at least $109m on nine Murray River floodplain restoration projects, none of which have been delivered.

Instead the vast sum has been pumped into community engagement sessions, reviews, environmental consultants reports, planning scheme amendments and cultural heritage management plans.

National Irrigators Council chief executive Zara Lowien said governments were “drowning in their own internal processes”.

“It’s like we’re treading water, despite knowing deadlines are looming,” she said.

North of the Murray, the NSW government’s water bureaucrats have squandered $133m of federal funding since 2017 on trying to negotiate agreements with landholders to flood parts of their properties to deliver environmental flows, under its Reconnecting River Country Program.

A NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy and Environment and Water spokesman said “no negotiations have begun and no agreements are in place in either the Murrumbidgee or Murray under the RRC Program”.

Despite the lack of progress, NSW Water Minister Rose Jackson cut a deal with former Federal Water Minister Tanya Plibersek last year to lift the program’s allocation to $274m.

When asked what the money was being spent on, the NSW DCCEEW spokesman said “the development of the Murrumbidgee final business case, delivery of important early works projects to facilitate flows, continued development in the Murray, including a flow notification system and securing part of the Murrumbidgee flow corridor”.

Victorian Nationals Mildura MP Jade Benham, whose electorate covers many of the Murray River floodplain projects, said it was “ludicrous” so much had been spent “without a shovel in the ground”.

“There’s so much red and green tape, the environment itself is being suffocated by it.”

Just how wasteful the water bureaucracy has become has been exposed in a NSW cabinet-in-confidence document showing how the state government costed the building of a fixed-crest weir at Wilcannia early last year.

The construction cost of the weir was put at $26.32m, including $6.8m to cover contractor management costs.

But once the NSW departmental bureaucrats got hold of the budget the cost blew out to $76.1m, after they added their own $8.87m in management costs, $4.7m for a “needs analysis”, $1.2m for community engagement, $4m for environmental assessments and $18m for contingency and escalation costs, plus a raft of other fees and studies.

The situation is no different in South Australia where the state and federal government committed $19.5m over seven years to building a new water register that is plagued with problems and errors.

As of this week the front page of the SA Water Register’s websites states: “Please be advised that mywater (register) is currently displaying some errors and/or omissions on water management authorisations’ conditions.”

Water brokers say the SA register is a mess and they are forced to resort to a helpline to trade.

SA Water Minister Susan Close’s office said “issues impacting timeframes and user experience have arisen during transition to mywater, as is common during complex digital transformation projects. Resolution of these issues is a priority”.

Even in Victoria, the Allan government has failed to deliver on a 2020 commitment to build a new Victorian water register, despite pumping $36m of taxpayers’ funds into the project.

When asked about the failure to deliver the register, Victorian Water Minister Gayle Tierney told Parliament’s Public Accounts and Estimates Committee last week that she had only been in the job for five months.

When The Weekly Times asked Ms Tierney what had happened to the $109m spent on the floodplain restoration works, her office ignored the question, simply stating “we are continuing to deliver projects which maximise environmental outcomes from the water available”.

The SA Department of Environment and Water have also spent four years and $35m developing a proposal to pipe and pump seawater into the Coorong’s hypersaline southern lagoon, in a bid to revive the RAMSAR-listed wetland.

The report concluded it would cost another $500m to install two pumping stations, power works and two pipes.

The federal and South Australian governments also committed $77.8m to the Healthy Coorong Healthy Basin (HCHB) program in 2018.

An SA government spokesman said “of the $50.3m expended to date, $25.2m has been spent on the delivery of on-ground works.

“The remainder of the funding has focused on scientific trials, modelling of the Coorong system (including environmental water, water levels, salinity and nutrients), further improving the ecological health of the Coorong and monitoring of ecological response to the River Murray flood.”

Meanwhile the number of water bureaucrats working in the federal government blew out to 414 by June 30 last year, plus another 349 in the Murray Darling Basin Authority.

A federal DCCEEW spokeswoman said: “We continue to work closely and collaboratively with states and territories to realise as many of the Basin Plan projects ahead of states and territories withdrawing any that can’t be delivered by the end of 2026.”