Page 3442 - Week 11 - Thursday, 15 November 2007
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There is a lack of clear environmental targets and timelines. Together with the delays in effectively instituting the basin cap, there is a real risk that the return of environmental flows could be too late to prevent irretrievable damage to some ecosystems. One vital target that is missing is an end-of-river system target, to ensure that water entering and leaving South Australia is of adequate quality and quantity to maintain wetlands. The Greens would like to see the first whole-of-basin plan within two years.
I refer to the creation of another bureaucracy and the complexity of multiple agencies and institutions with overlapping jurisdictions. We have the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, two ministerial councils, a National Water Commission, and probably more. There is also the lack of independence of the new authority, and provisions which allow ministerial direction in setting the sustainable diversion limit and in developing the environmental water plan. There is the risk that institutional arrangements within the bills might effectively freeze reforms and delay them for many years. There is the extent to which many of the reforms are now dependent on the content of the intergovernmental agreement, with the possibility that the agreement reaching process could blow out timelines. There is the lack of Indigenous and other community consultation and engagement in the legislative process and the intergovernmental agreement.
In this act there is no recognition of traditional owner inherent rights to land and water, and there is no consistent legislative approach for Indigenous engagement and participation in natural resource management. There is also the risk that investment decisions could be strongly influenced by political considerations, as indeed has been the history of the Murray-Darling management to this date. There are also concerns about how the sustainable extraction levels are determined and whether the act effectively enacts our commitments to international conventions. Nevertheless, a wide range of stakeholders, from farmers’ organisations to environmental advocates, have welcomed the opportunity offered by the national plan to move forward on industry reform and sustainable water use. The reality of climate change requires us to act immediately, and not wait for each state’s individual water plans to run their course.
Professor Peter Cullen, in his submission to the Senate committee water inquiry and the CSIRO report Climate change and Australia’s water resources: first risk assessment and gap analysis, raises two critical issues. The first is how we manage to protect and enhance the resilience of our riverine, floodplain, wetland and estuarine ecosystems, which indicates a need for better science and more work on adaptive management. The second is whether the governance systems and water sharing arrangements are flexible enough to deal with the requirements for ecosystem survival in low flow and critical flow years, particularly with the prospect of a 40 per cent reduction in available surface water.
I think the territory could be ahead of our counterparts in the basin, as we already have integrated water planning, attempting the difficult task of calculating our groundwater and our surface water together. Unfortunately, most other jurisdictions lag in this area. The ACT calculates groundwater allocations by allocating proportional, ecologically sustainable shares of the total amount of water available each year—to the best of our knowledge—rather than volumetric limits.
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