Community knowledge needed to minimise impact of draft Basin Plan

By JOANNE GRAINGER, QFF President

THE draft Murray Darling Basin Plan released on Monday confirms that the Condamine Balonne catchment faces a significant cutback of 100,000 megalitres to achieve the sustainable limits defined in the Plan.

The Lower Balonne is a priority area for the recovery of water but Commonwealth programs have only recovered 5000 megalitres of the target to date.

With clearly so much water yet to shift from productive irrigation use, mostly via buyback programs, QFF remains concerned about the substantial economic and social impacts in local and regional communities of these proposed cutbacks.

The draft plan also indicates that entitlements to groundwater in the Upper Condamine area will have to be cut by over 50 percent to be sustainable.

We can’t support these recommendations unless we can be assured that irrigators, industry and communities in both areas can work with the Murray Darling Basin Authority (the Authority) and State and Commonwealth officials to verify the environmental water needs that are specified in the draft Plan.

The Government will then need to focus on planning and implementing water recovery programs in both areas to minimise the impacts of cutbacks on communities.

With such a volume of water to be removed from production, the socioeconomic impact will be significant, but steps can be taken to minimise that impact.

QFF believes from our discussions with the Chairman of the Authority Craig Knowles he will champion and support this approach.

In other Queensland catchments the draft plan delivers good news. There are no cutbacks required in the Warrego, Paroo, Nebine and Moonie catchments.

Also, the Border Rivers catchment faces a relatively small cutback of 1000 megalitres now, given that a substantial 7000 megalitres has already been recovered by the Commonwealth.

However there is a twist. The draft Plan requires that an additional 143,000 megalitres must be recovered from the catchments in the northern Murray-Darling Basin in both Queensland and NSW to meet downstream environmental needs.

We currently don’t know how this ‘shared cut’ will be enforced in our Queensland catchments – and at the moment it seems to be anyone’s guess where this added impost will fall.

This creates uncertainty for all Basin communities, and this must be addressed.

There is very little comfort in the draft Plan for irrigation communities such as those in the Border Rivers and others if they still are facing more undefined significant cutbacks.

Here again there is a need for stakeholders from all of these catchments to come together with the Authority to establish why this added cut back is required and how an agreed target should be achieved.

It is confirmed as expected that sustainable development limits will not be implemented until 2019, which provides extra time to achieve the reductions required through buyback and infrastructure investment programs.

However, the targets are only proposals at this stage and can be increased or decreased up to 2019.

The Authority also proposes a review in 2015. If all goes to its plan, half of its water target will then be acquired and communities would have an environmental watering plan that is responsive to local needs, improvements in science and climate variability.

The review will then allow the Authority to assess progress of water recovery – effectively a benchmarking exercise at the halfway point to determine if it believes ‘more’ or ‘less’ water is required.

QFF supports the calls by NFF and other irrigation bodies on the need for a plan that takes adequate account of the impacts on communities.

We also need a plan which can substantiate the link between sustainable development limits and environmental, social and economic outcomes.

This additional time should allow these requirements to be met.

We do not however support their call for priority to be given to investment in infrastructure over voluntary buyback of entitlements.

Buyback programs have only been initiated in areas like the Lower Balonne where there are significant targets to be achieved, so in that way the buyback money is being directed where it needs to be Queensland does not have the large irrigation schemes that offer the opportunity for investment in scheme initiatives which will generate savings for the environment.

Most of the water to be recovered from the Lower Balonne or other areas is likely to come from individual entitlement holders, not the SunWater channels at St George nor the river and its tributaries.

We are looking for coordinated planning of buyback and infrastructure programs to minimise the impact of the loss of entitlements on farm enterprises and communities.

This can be achieved by giving irrigators the opportunity to sell some of their entitlements and also to make investments to improve productivity from their remaining allocations.

We are supportive of NFF’s call for lower sustainable development targets as we do believe that the targets in the Lower Balonne and the recovery of reserves in the Northern Basin for downstream needs will be achieved at a cost to communities and industry.

QFF is convinced however that it will not be possible to effectively implement a Basin wide plan of this nature to achieve desired environmental, social and economic outcomes without allowing local communities at the catchment and sub-catchment level to fine tune planning and implementation.

It will be important to ensure that the final plan, when approved next year, firmly recognises this approach and provides for 2015 to confirm or otherwise plan targets.