Callide groundwater – an overallocated resource

PROPOSALS to cut groundwater entitlements in the Callide Valley by nearly 50 percent were rejected at a meeting attended by 130 irrigators and families last week in Biloela.
The Department of Environment and Resource Management called the meeting to discuss the proposed cuts as part of the ten-year review of the Fitzroy Water Resource Plan.
Questions from the floor of the meeting focused on how the Department proposed to determine cuts to individual entitlements and what they could expect to extract from the aquifer from season to season.
There were also questions about the sharing of the cuts in different areas of the valley and whether the Department had an option to consider the prospect of improved water availability into the future as has occurred over the last twelve months.
Presentations by the Departmental officers used groundwater monitoring reports from various parts of the valley to show a significant decline in bore levels over a 40 year period in most areas.
It was explained that there was insufficient groundwater available for in excess of 37,000 megalitres per annum of current entitlements.
To address the overallocation, the draft plan proposes to cut the total volume of entitlements in the valley to 19,000 megalitres per annum.
Of this, 12,700 megalitres is proposed to come from allocation in the Callide water supply scheme run by SunWater and the remaining 6300 mega litres for areas outside the SunWater scheme in the upper Callide area (around Thangool), Prospect Creek and the lower Callide valley (around Jambin and Goovigen).
It is planned that the new entitlements in each of the areas would be defined sufficiently to allow them to be tradable.
QFF was in attendance at the meeting and while there seemed to be some recognition of the longer term overallocation problem in the valley, irrigators did not accept proposals by the Department to cut individual entitlements by applying a ‘history of use’ approach for each farm over the period 1997 to 2007 and using the best five years to estimate tradable allocations.
From the questions raised at the meeting irrigators need a better understanding about not just what long term entitlement they will be left with but how this entitlement will perform under different seasonal conditions.
There is also some concern about how to treat farms that to date have not used their entitlements. Should these sleeper licences receive an allocation or should preference be given to maintaining the water supplies of existing irrigators? What about unsuspecting irrigators that have purchased a sleeper within the last few years for the purposes of planned development?
It is not surprising that the meeting concluded by calling upon the Department to leave the Callide water management as it is – that is not to introduce new tradable entitlements but to continue to seasonally allocate access under existing management rules geared to address an overallocated resource.
Departmental officers did not really fully answer why this approach would not be acceptable under nationally agreed water planning and management ground rules. The benefits of having tradable water entitlements over the existing water entitlements also were not clear to the meeting.
The National Water Initiative agreed by the Council of Australian Governments explicitly requires the separation of water entitlements from land, the introduction of water trading and that overallocation problems are addressed. The National Water Commission that monitors implementation of the Agreement has also specifically targeted groundwater allocation for attention.
Callide irrigators need time to work with the Department to get answers to their questions.
However, under the existing water resource planning process their questions about cuts to individual entitlements and what they could expect to extract from the aquifer from season to season would only be answered in the resource operations plan, which follows after the completion of the water resource plan.
The impacts of the overallocation issue and how this plan deals with the situation are serious so it is important that the Department provide time during the development of the water resource plan to address irrigators’ questions and, if necessary, include sufficient direction in the draft plan to give irrigators some confidence of outcomes from the planning process.
QFF will work with members and irrigator representatives to achieve this outcome. In particular, the issues raised need to be fully covered in the submissions on the draft plan due on April 4.