Reviving Lower Darling means taking more water from other parts of basin

IMAGES of bloated Murray cod being dragged from the stagnant waters of the Lower Darling River have sparked outrage and demands for action from every corner of the nation.

Fish kill: Dead cod in the Lower Darling River. Picture: Office of Jeremy Buckingham MLC

IMAGES of bloated Murray cod being dragged from the stagnant waters of the Lower Darling River have sparked outrage and demands for action from every corner of the nation.

Everyone is looking for someone to blame, but the underlying causes of the fish kill are myriad and the solutions divisive.

It’s easy to just blame cotton growers, current government policy or the Murray Darling Basin Authority. And it’s not hard to see why some are wondering why Menindee Lakes water is being used to prop up South Australia’s Lower Lakes, while the Darling dies during drought.

Environmentalists and irrigators accuse the NSW Government and MDBA of squandering water, of rapidly draining the Menindee Lakes, rather than holding water back for the future.

But it’s more complicated than that. Evaporation losses from the Menindee Lakes average 420GL a year. Given they only hold 1731GL, it’s a huge loss that governments and the basin authority want to avoid by getting water down the Darling to store more efficiently in Lake Victoria and to meet their flow obligations to South Australia.

It’s this inefficiency that prompted the NSW Government to propose reconfiguring Menindee’s four lakes, so that just two are used for storage, saving up to 106 gigalitres and retaining a reserve of just 80GL.

But that 80GL Menindee reserve is not enough to maintain the Darling’s flows during droughts, let alone supply Lower Darling irrigators, who after years of negotiation are yet to strike a deal on a Commonwealth buyout.

So the Commonwealth, NSW and the other basin states must decide if they want to deliver 106GL towards the basin plan target or reserve more water in Menindee to maintain the health of the Lower Darling during drought. They can’t do both.

The latest fish kill is a natural event, where decaying blue-green algae has drained the water of oxygen. But what’s not natural is the frequency of these events.

The NSW National Party has to stop pandering to irrigator mates in the northern basin, to ensure more of the flood pulses travelling down the Darling’s tributaries reach its lower reaches and anabranch.

Native fish population need to be revived. And the Lower Darling’s irrigators bought out and the bunds they have built across the river removed.

And perhaps in all this a compromise has to be reached, where a decent reserve is left in the upper Menindee Lakes for the Lower Darling during drought.

● Peter Hunt is The Weekly Times senior reporter