Coorong project South Australian Government has been accused of inflating the cost

The South Australian Government has been accused of inflating the cost of a Coorong project, which could help offset buying more irrigators’ water.

Pumping and circulating seawater through the degarded and hypersaline Coorong could offset the need to buy more water from Murray Darling Basin irrigators.

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

Liberal MP for Barker Tony Pasin, whose electorate extends from Renmark to the Southern Coorong, said the project could revive the Coorong’s southern lagoon, reducing the need to strip irrigators of more water to try and lift Murray River mouth’s flows to revive the wetland.

But Mr Pasin accused the South Australian Labor Government of stalling the project and deliberately inflating the cost to $500m in a bid to “kill it”.

“It would create an environmental outcome at the source, that would mean you no longer have to acquire such significant amounts of water (off irrigators) and the vicissitudes of getting it to the Coorong,” Mr Pasin said.

SA Murray Bridge mayor Wayne Thorley said the project had widespread support from locals, ecologists and the Ngarrindjeri traditional owners, but had stagnated.

He said the $500m price tag was “an extremely large amount to pump water 2kms across the sand dunes that separated the Coorong from the sea”.

“Half a billion (dollars) sounds like an extraordinary amount to put in two pumping stations, power works and two pipes,” Mr Thorley said. “I think it’s around $100m.”

SA DEW’s Healthy Coorong, Healthy Basin infrastructure feasibility report provides scant detail on the $500m costing, simply stating the project consists of pumping seawater from the Southern Ocean into the Coorong South Lagoon opposite Fat Cattle Point and pumping it out again north of Parnka Point - creating a circulation effect.

The Coorong circulation option - pumping seawater into the Southern lagoon and then hypersaline water out again further north-west.

DEW was unable to respond to The Weekly Times request for comment by deadline.

But last October Nationals Senator Perin Davey asked acting SA DEW chief executive Ben Bruce: “If you can address the Southern Lagoon issues without needing it to come from the Murray, would that not be an offset to buying irrigators’ water?”

Mr Bruce said: “It may be, potentially, but we don’t know the answer to that yet. That’s why we commissioned the study.”

South Australian Murray Irrigators chair Caren Martin told the same Senate inquiry into the Governments Water Amendment (Restoring Our Rivers) Bill last October she agreed the Coorong works could be put forward as a potential offset project.