Cubbie Station’s Queensland floodwater grab

Cotton giant Cubbie Station is taking a big share of Murray Darling Basin flows after the Queensland floods.

online artwork march 4 cubbie station

QUEENSLAND cotton giant Cubbie Station is diverting the first flush of Queensland’s floodwater into its massive 537,000 megalitres of on-farm storages, a capacity greater than Sydney Harbour.

Queensland Government streamflow gauges show upstream of Chinese-controlled Cubbie Station one million megalitres has flowed past St George on the Balonne River, since February 24.

Yet 70km downstream, below Cubbie Station, where the Balonne splits into five river channels, the sum of flows reaching gauges near the NSW border was just 103,050ML by Monday.

Satellite images show Cubbie Station, which sits between the two largest of these five channels, started diverting floodwater into its storages on February 20.

But it’s only in the past 10 days that the company, which is 51 per cent owned by China’s $30 billion textile giant Shandong Ruyi, began to divert the bulk of the big Murray Darling Basin flush into its shallow dams.

Applying moisture filters to satellite images shows the cotton property covered in a swathe of dark blue, as water is diverted off the Culgoa River into the cotton producer’s largest dams.

Meanwhile, on the southeast side of the property, water has been captured off the Balonne Minor Weir into Cubbie’s other storages.

EDITORIAL: CUBBIE’S UNKNOWN HARVEST

Just how much water the Chinese giant finally captures will take at least three weeks to assess.

Cubbie Agriculture chief executive Paul Brimblecombe said until Monday 98,000ML had been stored on farm, but he expected the Queensland Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy to announce further harvesting opportunities.

He said Cubbie was being managed in accordance with its water licence, authorised by the department.

“(We’re) absolutely within our rights,” Mr Brimblecombe said. “The (flood’s) peak is halfway through the property, travelling about 30 lineal kilometres a day. There’s a lot of water out on the floodplain.”

But as of Monday just 16,000ML had reached the Woolerbilla Rd meter on the Culgoa River, below Cubbie Station.

The massive cotton property is strategically positioned at Dirranbandi to maximise the volume of water it can harvest from the Culgoa and the other Lower Balonne river channels.

The Culgoa alone captures 35 per cent of the Lower Balonee’s flows.

All up, Cubbie Station can extract about 30 per cent of the long-term average diversions in the Lower Balonne, but that figure is much higher during floods.

Mr Brimblecombe said the water would be used to irrigate Cubbie Station’s first cotton crop since 2017-18, after drought dried up the catchment. But downstream, Lower Darling irrigator Allan Whyte said he had already been told by NSW Water there would not be enough water from the Queensland and northern NSW floods to flush out his section of the river.

“It’s just an ongoing mess,” Mr Whyte said. “These flows should be capable of contributing to the Darling and Murray system.”

Queensland Water Minister Anthony Lynham has dismissed any criticism of his state’s water management.

“The southern states seem to have reverted to the old game plan of blaming the north to divert attention from their own local water issues,” Dr Lynham said.

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“Queensland supports the basin plan, and Queensland was the first jurisdiction in the country to finalise its water resource plans and have them accredited by the Australian Government as being compliant with the basin plan.

“These water plans have rules that are built around the dry and wet cycles that naturally occur in these northern river systems.

“The irrigation entitlements and water plans also meet the MDBP’s sustainable diversion limit, which means that users can only take volumes that are proportional to what is already in the system, regardless of their maximum allocation.

NSW Water Minister Melinda Pavey said “whether Queensland’s Water Resource Plans which have been signed off by the MDBA and Commonwealth Government are fit for purpose remains to be seen”.