Walker tells NSW Parliament to “hurry up” and regulate floodplain harvesting

A decade of delay has prompted Bret Walker QC to tell NSW Parliament to get on with regulating floodplain harvesting.

Flood cuts: Licensing would cut by about third the volume of water northern NSW floodplain harvesters can take.

NSW floodplain harvesting is “crying out for regulation”, according to the Sydney silk commissioned to advise the state’s Parliamentary Inquiry into the practice.

“It should be obvious from my opinion … that floodplain harvesting is an activity that nowadays is crying out for regulation,” Sydney QC Bret Walker said.

“You have to pinch yourself really to remember that it was 2004, that by an inter government agreement … it was accepted that there needed to be close attention to floodplain harvesting. It was agreed that would be implemented by 2011.”

But 10 years on Mr Walker said regulations had still not been implemented to record, license and enforce a “robust compliance and monitoring system” of floodplain harvesting.

The current NSW Coalition Government has put forward regulations on two occasions in the past 12 months to limit and license floodplain harvesting.

The Greens, Labor and Shooters Party MPs blocked the government’s regulations earlier this year, arguing floodplain harvesting was illegal and launching the current Upper House Select Committee inquiry.

However Mr Walker last week advised the committee floodplain harvesting was legal and that failure to regulate the practice was “terrible” and a “great shame”, telling the assembled MPs “I do wish you would hurry up”.

In its submission to the inquiry the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment stated that if the Government’s floodplain harvesting regulations had not been disallowed by the Upper House MPs then controls would now be in place to ensure:

ACCURATE, reliable and tamper-proof meters installed on all on-farm water storages greater than 1000 megalitres used for floodplain harvesting, supplying data in near real time.

LICENCES and water sharing rules in place to deliver significant reductions in floodplain harvesting across the northern Basin, requiring for example more than a 30 per cent cut in Gwydir valley harvesting and significant environmental benefits.

The Greens chair of the Select Committee Cate Faehrmann urged NSW Water Minister Melinda Pavey not to reintroduce the regulations until the committee had completed and tabled its final report.

But NSW Irrigators Council chief executive Claire Miller said NSW Parliament needed to get on with regulating floodplain harvesting as soon as possible.

“Claims floodplain harvesting is illegal have distracted and delayed regulation, leaving practice

to continue unrestricted and unlimited for far too long,” Ms Miller said.