GMW Connections Project: 429,000ML finally delivered
Twelve years after it started, the $2.2 billion GMW Connections project has finally delivered its water savings target. But the investment has come at a cost.
THE $2.2 billion upgrade and rationalisation of Goulburn Murray Water’s irrigation network has finally met its target of recovering 429,000 megalitres of water savings.
The project has delivered 204,000ML to the Commonwealth for environmental flows under Murray Darling Basin Plan, plus 225,000ML split three ways between irrigators, the Victorian Environmental Water Holder and Melbourne’s water corporations.
Victorian Water Minister Lisa Neville said the Connections Project – the largest irrigation modernisation project in Australian history – was now complete, after suffering “significant hurdles” along the way.
The project endured complaints from irrigators over the deals on offer to modernise and rationalise irrigation channels and their connections, an ombudsman’s inquiry, restructuring of its funding and a re-set by Minister Neville in 2016.
Victorian Farmers Federation water council chairman Richard Anderson, who was engaged in the early negotiations on getting the project started, said the work of Connections Project Director Frank Fissler had been crucial in turning the project around in 2016.
“He had to deal with all the most difficult (irrigator connections), which got left to last, the people with gripes and the mistakes made early on,” Mr Anderson said.
But while the project is regarded as a legacy of former Premier John Brumby, the investment has been undermined by more than a decade of unconstrained Commonwealth and downstream irrigator buyouts.
While water usage fluctuates with seasonal conditions, overall usage has declined from about 1.6 million megalitres in the years leading up to the millennium drought to average about a million in recent years, dropping to just 511,000ML during last season’s drought.
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