On 5 September the Weekly Times, an august rural newspaper now owned by News Corp, ran a story on its website about farmers in southern NSW throwing into a river an effigy of Minister for Water Resources David Littleproud, a conservative. It’s not what you’d normally expect from farmers, but the drought is cutting deep in the bush.
This post ultimately has its roots in expressions of outrage on Twitter in April that I discussed in a 24 April blog post titled ‘Water buybacks and pressure from social media’. Following up from what happened at that time, on 8 July the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) ‘4 Corners’ program aired its ‘Cash Splash’ episode, which elaborated on concerns raised by people on social media. As a result of this program the level of outrage visible online again spiked.
This episode of the program was criticised by the ABC's ‘Media Watch’ program not long afterward, and I took note when that happened. The main reservation the host of ‘Media Watch’ voiced was that ‘4 Corners’ hadn’t consulted widely enough. They hadn’t, for example, talked with the National Farmers’ Federation to produce material for the show. ‘Media Watch’ found, as a result, that the show had been tendentious and biased because it was unrepresentative of the broader community affected by the drought, which started in 2017.
In the middle of July I saw a tweet from a farmer from Wentworth, a town in southern NSW near Mildura, that was a retweet from a farmer named Jeremy Morton, who lives not far from there but to the east. Morton grows rice and other grains, and raises cattle and sheep, and his tweet contained an image from the Commonwealth Environmental Water Office that had been used in a presentation one of its officers had made at a community meeting in Deniliquin.
The Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder was set up, as a result of the Water Act (2007), “to manage water acquired by the Australian Government as part of a suite of national water reforms, including the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.” This description comes from the CEWO’s website.
Here is the image that went up on that July day and that appeared on Twitter because Morton snapped a photo of it with his phone. This table doesn’t make much sense unless you know what you’re looking at, so I’ll give an explanation of it in what follows.
This post ultimately has its roots in expressions of outrage on Twitter in April that I discussed in a 24 April blog post titled ‘Water buybacks and pressure from social media’. Following up from what happened at that time, on 8 July the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) ‘4 Corners’ program aired its ‘Cash Splash’ episode, which elaborated on concerns raised by people on social media. As a result of this program the level of outrage visible online again spiked.
This episode of the program was criticised by the ABC's ‘Media Watch’ program not long afterward, and I took note when that happened. The main reservation the host of ‘Media Watch’ voiced was that ‘4 Corners’ hadn’t consulted widely enough. They hadn’t, for example, talked with the National Farmers’ Federation to produce material for the show. ‘Media Watch’ found, as a result, that the show had been tendentious and biased because it was unrepresentative of the broader community affected by the drought, which started in 2017.
In the middle of July I saw a tweet from a farmer from Wentworth, a town in southern NSW near Mildura, that was a retweet from a farmer named Jeremy Morton, who lives not far from there but to the east. Morton grows rice and other grains, and raises cattle and sheep, and his tweet contained an image from the Commonwealth Environmental Water Office that had been used in a presentation one of its officers had made at a community meeting in Deniliquin.
The Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder was set up, as a result of the Water Act (2007), “to manage water acquired by the Australian Government as part of a suite of national water reforms, including the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.” This description comes from the CEWO’s website.
Here is the image that went up on that July day and that appeared on Twitter because Morton snapped a photo of it with his phone. This table doesn’t make much sense unless you know what you’re looking at, so I’ll give an explanation of it in what follows.
The table in the photo is split into two sections and it shows the total amount of water available for environmental flows that is held by different institutions in two areas. One area (the top three lines) is the NSW and Victorian Murray River. The Murray, as everyone knows, forms much of the border between the two states.
The first line in this group of three lines shows the CEWO’s holdings of environmental water, or water that is not to be allocated for irrigation but that is to be allowed to flow down the Murray to South Australia and, after there, to the sea. The second line shows the environmental water that is held by other institutions: those controlled by state governments. The final line in the group of three is the total for the two categories of environmental water. This is water that is currently held by these organisations.
The second group of three lines shows the same information but, this time, for the Southern Connected Basin, which is a larger area that comprises the first area (the NSW and Vic Murray area) as well as other rivers such as the Murrumbidgee and the Goulburn. The following image, from the website of the Murray Darling basin Authority, shows the extent of the Southern Connected Basin.
The total amount of environmental flows available for the southern reaches of the Murray-Darling river system is, according to the CEWO, 750 gigalitres or 750 billion litres. This is an amount equal to the amount of water that can fill 300,000 Olympic-size swimming pools and it is half again as much as fits in Sydney Harbour. When I spoke to Morton, he said that 15 years ago this amount of water would not have been set aside for environmental flows but would have been available to be used for irrigation.
What is striking in this table is that, even though there is a severe drought, water is being added for environmental flows due to purchases funded under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. Another thing Morton told me is that when the Commonwealth buys water from farmers the money has to be used to build infrastructure to improve the efficiency of water used on farms, so the money farmers get from the government is not just going into their bank accounts to be used on irrelevancies.
A total of 2750GL in water entitlements was committed under the whole of the federal Basin Plan toward environmental flows. This is made up of 2100GL that the federal government owns as entitlements bought from farmers, as well as 650GL contributed as a result of allocating money to the states to implement different ways of managing water and to build infrastructure. For example, work currently being undertaken at the Menindee Lakes will add 100GL to environmental flows.
A water entitlement is like a piece of property and the allocation is like the rent that derives from leasing it out to a tenant. Even if you have an entitlement, if it doesn’t rain you might not get any allocation in a given year. Just in the same way as, even if you own a property, you won’t get rent if it’s not leased to a tenant.
Water for irrigation was capped in 1995 at the level of development that applied in 1993-94. To ensure irrigation water use was at or below the cap the state governments instigated rules to limit water use such as capping announced allocations to 100 percent of entitlements (not more) and setting volumetric limits for accessing unregulated river flows which were previously unconstrained.
The following chart, which is from the Murray Darling Basin Authority's 2010-11 Annual Report, shows the cap targets for (x-axis) the years from 1997 to 2009. It shows the quantity of water for the cap targets (green line) and the actual diversions farmers made for their irrigation operations (yellow line). The y-axis scale shows volumes measured in gigalitres. You can see that, over the period in question, the amount of water diverted for agriculture has halved to comply with cap targets. The other thing that is noticeable in this chart is that diversions have equalled cap targets or have even come in under them.
Morton wrote in an email that the states erred on the side of caution when setting the rules and between 1997 and 2018 cap credits, or under-use, accrued to the tune of 19,000GL. A drier climate during this period contributed to this level of credit owing to farmers. But on 1 July this year the 19,000GL of cap credits were extinguished as the new Basin Plan water sharing rules came into force. Many of the rules that underpinned the accumulation of the 19,000GL cap credits have been carried over, Morton went on, and irrigators think that new rules are too restrictive.
A peak body for irrigators in the region, the NSW Irrigators’ Council, released a press release on Thursday 12 September about a request it had made of Littleproud not to take what it said was an additional 2000 gigalitres of water to use for environmental flows. This is in the form of limiting access to water, not the purchase of entitlements, and is viewed as a diminishing of the rights of irrigators without compensation.
The reason irrigators asked this is because the council said the federal government’s actions would harm regional communities not merely by removing water from its use on crops, but also from towns that need water for residential and other purposes. Letters about this matter have been sent to Littleproud and the relevant NSW government minister in recent weeks.
“This is extremely complex policy,” Morton wrote in an email. “It’s only now as the water sharing plans (the rule book for managing water in each river valley) are being finalised that irrigators are certain that the rules will limit water extracted for irrigation to a far greater extent than the Basin Plan intended.”
He went on: “The way the water sharing plans are written the cap credits are being claimed as planned environmental water (PEW). The plans explicitly state that PEW cannot be extracted for irrigation thus locking in the cap credits as PEW.” The problem as Morton sees it is not what happens when, as currently, there is no rain, but rather what happens when it does rain and there is abundant water in the Murray-Darling basin.
No comments:
Post a Comment