Water management options for urban and rural Australia
Australian Water Reform – The Murray-Darling Basin Plan
Tuesday 7 December
Professor Barry Hart
Director of Water Science Pty Ltd
Emeritus Professor at Monash University
Barry Hart is a member of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and Director of an environmental consulting company, Water Science Pty Ltd.
Professor Hart has established an international reputation in the fields of ecological risk assessment, environmental flow decision-making – particularly using Bayesian Network models, water quality and catchment management and environmental chemistry. He has published over 175 refereed papers and 12 books, and is on the editorial board of 5 international journals.
He is well known for his sustained efforts in developing knowledge-based decision making processes in natural resource management in Australia and south-east Asia, particularly with the Mekong River Commission.
Professor Hart is currently President and Board Chair of Greening Australia (Victoria). He also chairs a host of other committees and taskforces:
- Commonwealth Environmental Water Scientific Advisory Committee
- Gippsland Lakes & Catchment Taskforce
- Yarra Coordinating Committee
- Science Advisory Committee for the Victorian Strategy on Healthy Rivers, Estuaries and Wetlands (VSHREW)
- Department of Sustainability and Environment's Environmental Flows Technical Audit Panel
- Melbourne Water’s Waterways Advisory Committee
- the Fitzroy River Basin Scientific Advisory Committee
[SLIDE: Outline]
I want to spend a little time on the program that the Academy has run on water management, which I think has had a phenomenal number of great speakers. But I want to spend most of my time on the water reform that I am involved in—I am sure you all have heard about it, if you have read any newspapers over the last few months—the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.
Then I also want to spend a little bit of time reflecting on where we go from here; the challenges that I see ahead, both in terms of getting the Basin Plan finally completed and accepted—that is both a technical and political exercise—and also in implementing it, which is going to have its own set of challenges.
[SLIDE: Academy's Water Series]
I am really impressed with the Academy's water series speakers. I have listed them in the slide, next to my headings: from the broader statements on water reform to some of the broad challenges spoken about by Don Blackmore and Andrew Campbell; and then going from some of the really top urban issues on to groundwater, cultural water—which is quite an interesting challenge for us in the Basin Plan, many aspects of agriculture, and a little bit on water information, which I think we will hear much more about in the next little while.
[SLIDE: Murray-Darling Basin]
I am focused on the grey area in the slide, the Murray-Darling Basin.
[SLIDE: Importance of Basin]
Why is Australia concerned about the Basin? It is certainly very large, covering one-seventh of Australia. There are a lot of people there and it feeds a lot more people in terms of agricultural produce. It has very significant environmental values—that is one of the things that has been driving this attempt to rebalance the distribution of water. It is very significant as far as irrigated agriculture is concerned and it is a pretty big export earner.
[SLIDE: Why the worry?]
How did the Water Act 2007 ever eventuate?
The bottom line is that there is pretty serious environmental degradation. It has been written about and talked about for a long, long time.
This is a graph of the various catchment areas using the data that came out about four years ago. There will be a new version available early in 2011. This is really rating the condition of the rivers. I don't have time to go into the details of the rating system but, in essence, it is in terms of fish, hydrology and macroinvertebrates.
You can see that the rating system really only leaves the Paroo, which is the purple area, in good condition. The other areas are anywhere from 'poor' to 'stuffed'—that's a technical term I use quite often!
[SLIDE: Why the worry? Indicators of environmental problems]
So why the worry? I will just run through a couple of broad indicators of this overall environmental problem. One of the things I will keep stressing—and this is one of the major differences of the Federal Water Act—is that the Murray-Darling Basin Authority is required to take up a whole of catchment view, a Basin view, versus a state or territory view.
[SLIDE: Water bird numbers]
This graph goes for about 20 years, from about 1983. These are some surveys that Richard Kingsford from the University of New South Wales has been doing. He has been doing flyovers over eastern Australia. It is pretty obvious that even though the last, let's say, 10 years have been drought conditions, the water bird populations have diminished enormously. My dotted line there just indicates what potentially could occur into the future.
[SLIDE: Native Fish]
There is quite good evidence that native fish populations are now very significantly reduced over pre-European populations. There is no question that there is a dominance of introduced species. In the slow-moving rivers, carp make up an enormous amount, 80-90 per cent of the biomass—not necessarily the number but the biomass. They are big. In other areas, where there is some good cold water coming out of the bottom of dams, are trout.
[SLIDE: River red gum decline]
It is rather hard to show the degradation, particularly down the whole of the Murray. This is a slide that Ralph MacNally from Monash lent me. It is of the Barmah-Millewa Forest, with the Murray through the middle. It shows the choke, a natural constriction in the river which basically spreads the water into this forest area. It has always been wet, which is one of the reasons why it has never been cleared for agricultural use.
This work is done from satellite imagery, and it shows a decline or stabilisation or recovery in that particular forest system.
[SLIDE: End of system flows]
You will have read huge amounts about the Coorong, the lower lakes and the Murray mouth, and how it has been dredged for the last few years. The dredge is decommissioned at the moment, strangely. There has been a huge reduction in end of system flows. Certainly the pre-European estimates are that it was around 12,500 gigalitres per year. Currently, long-term, it is a bit less than half of that. Over the last few years, from 2000 to 2008, it has been next to nothing. I think for at least four of those years it was absolutely zilch.
The effects are that the Murray mouth hasn't been open, or it has been opened a lot, lot less. Again, you have probably seen reports that the southern part of the Coorong, furthest away from the mouth opening, has become hypersaline. It is up around about three or four times sea water. So that means that the ecology has been incredibly changed, particularly the sea grasses, which are the food source for a lot of the water birds.
The lower lakes have had significantly reduced water levels, exposing sediments that really haven't been exposed for yonks, and they have got quite a lot of sulfate in them. That oxidisation process has produced acid generation. The South Australian government spent millions of dollars trying to accommodate that with things like lime.
The other really important part about the mouth opening is that in the whole of the Murray-Darling Basin—and since we have changed vegetation we've changed the agricultural pursuit—there is a lot more salt being generated, particularly in Victoria, some in South Australia and a bit in New South Wales. There are a lot of salt interception system areas where there is an old wetland that is used just as an evaporation pond.
Unless we transport that salt, over the longer term—in a hundred years’ time or so—the environment will undergo a major change and so will agriculture.
[SLIDE: Why the degradation?]
Why has this degradation occurred over time? We are obviously focused on water—lack of water. But it is also combined with a range of other insults, if you like, on the environmental component, such as habitat degradation and the draining of wetlands. There are estimates that at least 50-60 per cent of the original wetlands of the Murray-Darling Basin are now in agricultural land clearing, pollution and so forth.
[SLIDE: Growth in diversions]
Here is a very simple graph showing a period of time since the 1930s. The Y-axis is basically the amount of water that is used for irrigation. You can see the graph has pretty much gone upwards, certainly since the 1950s. The latter period is obviously because of the drought.
This reflects back on the whole policy and development process. The point being that the period with the light blue covering was actually a period of reasonably above-average inflows. That was where a lot of the planning was done for new irrigation schemes. So, if we are not taking a longer-term look we end up with some rather difficult decisions.
[SLIDE: Major water storages]
There are lots and lots of water storages, as shown on this slide.
[SLIDE: Flow generation]
I have changed my view on a lot of the things that I thought about the catchment. A lot of people in the Coorong and lower lakes really believe that the great majority of their problems are caused by Cubbie Station in Queensland, and it is not true. Those in Queensland reckon that they are putting too much water down to the southern states, and the same in Victoria. This slide really shows that almost all of the input comes in from the Australian Alps, and most of it comes in in Victoria—shown in the bluish patches down the bottom.
[SLIDE: Summary]
So the Murray contains most of the water. Let me just give you a summary of the broad situation. On the left of the slide is the long-term model without development. So if we took all the dams and all the irrigation out, then this is broadly what we would have had. There are about 30,000-odd gigalitres, which is a big number, but about 60 per cent was used within the catchments and about 40 per cent, 12,500 gigalitres, went out to sea.
The right of the slide shows the current situation: with all of the current developments, the irrigation schemes, the dams, weirs and the like—about 60 per cent is in the environment and the split is still the same. The lighter blue shows what is used within the system itself, wetlands, evaporation and so on. About 5000 gigalitres are going out the mouth. The other is consumptive use, about 10,000-odd gigalitres.
What we have done, which is a major change, is that we have taken as consumptive use not just what has been taken out in dams or pumped out of rivers for irrigation per se, or for some of the country towns—that is a very, very small amount—but we have also tried to include farm dams and plantation forestry, which are also taking water.
So, if you think about it, there are two basic ways in which water is extracted from the system. One is from irrigation, and the other is from interceptions. So we have put that into the equation, which I think will end up being quite a challenge to the states.
[SLIDE: 'Business as usual' will see:]
The conclusion is that 'business as usual' isn't really an option. That is what parliament did a few years ago in putting up the Basin Plan. You are going to end up with a decline in the Basin's productive base; a lack of security for water users; we believe there will be a continuing decline in the environment; reduced water quality—there will be increased salinity; and there won't be enough water to restore anything close to a reasonable flow. So the response was new federal legislation, the Water Act 2007.
[SLIDE: Response new Federal legislation]
[SLIDE: Murray-Darling Basin Authority]
A few important things came out of the legislation. One of the major ones, from an administrative point of view, was that the Water Act established the Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA). So it changed from the Murray-Darling Basin Commission to the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. It is a very major difference because the commission was a ministerial commission—the federal minister and the state ministers. Now it is six people—six supposedly independent people—well, five at the moment, since we lost our chairman. So we are an independent authority, and we have got, when you read the Act, quite significant functions and powers, including, if we ever had to use it, quite significant enforcement powers. The aim is to manage those in a sustainable way.
[SLIDE: Murray-Darling Basin Authority. (picture).]
[SLIDE: Building on past reform]
I'd like to emphasise that this new Act isn't something that has just come out of the woodwork. The River Murray Commission was established around 1914. And then many years later, in 1987, the Murray-Darling Basin Commission was established. In the 1990s it was recognised that there were still all sorts of things going on in terms of additional allocations of water, and that was when the Commission put a cap on any more diversions. Well, it was actually a cap on surface water diversions. What happened was that there was a mad scramble for groundwater diversions.
[SLIDE: Brief history of Australian water policy]
In terms of the development history, the late 1800s up to the 1980s was really about a development ethos. This is a little bit tongue in cheek, but it did tend to form the way in which we always do it with bushfires or droughts, we put up an inquiry and then we respond to it—a new dam in most of these cases.
Then the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) was involved and COAG was convinced that we needed a much more sophisticated way of developing the whole of this process of water resource development within the Murray-Darling. Then the National Water Initiative indicated we very much needed water reform.
[SLIDE: Basin Plan—vision]
This is my version of the vision—it is a very simplistic view. The Act uses all sorts of bureaucratic language. To me, what we are on about is really trying to rebalance the system, so we need more water back for the environment. The word in the Act is 'optimise', but that is a very difficult one to define. We are really trying to minimise the impact on irrigators and the local communities. That is a big ask. It is quite a major reform that we are engaged in. You can't get away from the fact that if you are going to take water away or buy water from irrigators then you are going to have an effect—not so much on the irrigators, because they are really going to be pretty much bought out because of the federal government buy-back process—but certainly the communities and local businesses are going to be impacted. We have got to try to work it so that impact is minimised. We can't just do it ourselves, it has to be with the whole of government.
Another way of describing it, I suppose, is to say that we are trying to ensure that water resources are managed so that ecosystems have increased resilience and so do the communities.
[SLIDE: Objectives of the Basin Plan]
The objectives of the Act basically are these: to give effect to international agreements, such as RAMSAR and the like; to protect and restore ecological values and ecosystem services; to improve water security; and in doing that, try to minimise the social and economic effects.
[SLIDE: A plan for the whole Basin]
This is a plan for the whole of the Basin, as I said before, which is a really major change, because the states, together with the Commonwealth, have been managing the Basin for a number of years. It is pretty obvious that there were difficulties in getting agreement on a whole range of things.
The plan is focused on ecological health. The main thing that people are focusing on is what is called the 'sustainable diversion limits' or the 'sustainable take'. We are trying to increase the resilience of the environment, make water quality better, improve trade markets—which I won't have time to say much about—and there is also a pathway to transition, which we need to take into consideration.
[SLIDE: Basin plan must include:]
I will talk about the sustainable diversion limits, because they are what people are mostly focused on. It is the water that is then available for consumptive use. We also have lots of comments on critical human water needs. The ministers got very worried back in 2006 when it really looked as if a number of the local communities along the Murray and the Darling would actually run out of water—drinking water. You can imagine how the politicians reacted. That is why this Act went back to Parliament in 2008, because there was a modification to put in critical human needs. It is extremely important, it is the pinnacle and it is the stuff that gets done first—but it is only really needed during drought periods. It is actually a pretty small amount of water when you compare it with what the environment needs and the consumptive water needs.
[SLIDE: Water Act requirements]
I might very quickly say here that we are prescribed by the Act to do those optimisations shown on the slide and to work out how much water the environment needs. I think it is very interesting that it is the only Act I know of, at least in Australia, where it is actually specified that we just use best available science, or best available knowledge, if you like.
It is really interesting, given that lots of people have talked about evidence-based decision-making, but that's about as far as it ever goes. So we have been challenged by how to show that we have used best available science. There is also another caveat that says if you can't do that then you use a precautionary principle.
[SLIDE: Water resource plan—context]
This whole Basin Plan cannot be successful unless there is a very close nexus between federal government, MDBA and the states. The states still own the water so they have to be a crucial part of this whole exercise.
What this slide shows is really, just in terms of the blue, the Basin Plan, and the brown/red is the state plan. So there is a Basin Plan, there will be a set of state water resource plans for 19 or 20 regions, probably more than that, which have to be accredited by the MDBA. Then there will be annual managements, in terms of how the consumptive water and the environmental water is dished out, and a monitoring program.
[SLIDE: Other Issues]
One of the things about the Water Act is that it is very much a water Act—and you can say it neglects a number of other components. So in the Guide we actually have a chapter where we have mentioned other issues; issues that we don't have a requirement to do, we have no control over, but we think that they are absolutely crucial to the effective implementation of the Basin Plan.
One of these issues is the whole business of environmental works, works that can offset some of the reductions. You have a situation at the moment where 20 or 30 million dollars are being spent in Gunbower Forest down near where I live in Echuca. It is probably going to allow that particular area to be flooded with about one-fifth of the water that would be needed naturally if you got overbank flow.
So there is money, and in certain areas that will be an option. It is not a silver bullet, but it is certainly an option which we aren't required to look at, but we are certainly looking at.
The other vexed question that a number of people are bringing up is this whole business of: well, you are going to get more environmental water; you are going to let it go down; you want to get overbank flows to go into wetlands and things like that; you are going to flood us out; so tell us what the situation is. It is a very interesting question.
The other area that is almost not mentioned in the Act is cultural water. We have been exercising our minds, together with the Aboriginal communities, north and south, about what Aboriginal cultural water really means. Once we understand it, how do we try to deliver it? The other area left out of the Basin Act is the whole linkage with natural resource management. If you are going to try and manage water quality you have got to manage the catchments. That is not specifically mentioned in the Water Act. We will have to do that by interacting with many of the catchment management authorities.
[SLIDE: Working out the SDL]
Let me just quickly run through the way in which we have worked out the sustainable diversion limits, the amount, the so-called sustainable take that can come out and not compromise the assets, the wetlands or what we call the functions, which are mainly flows in the rivers. So, basically, it is through answering the questions: how much additional water does the environment need? What are the potential impacts on the community? And, therefore, what's left?
There has been a really major paradigm shift from what the situation has been, which was: let's take this water out for consumptive uses and what's left is the environment's; it has really changed right around—at least in the first instance—in saying, no, let's work out what the environment needs and what's left is for consumptive purposes. Except, you've also got to look at what the community impacts are. It is a really major paradigm shift in terms of planning. And there's no doubt as to why there is a fair bit of angst about the end results and how to manage them.
I wanted to show this slide just to indicate that what we are trying to get back into the system is a range of different flows within the river channel, first of all. So we are really trying to get a handle on that whole flow regime rather than just one or two particular components.
[SLIDE: Hydrology of the Basin]
This is a really simple version of the hydrology of the Basin, showing the long-term average flows in the Murray system (at the bottom) and the Darling (at the top).
I like showing this slide because it shows the balance. Most of the water comes down the Murray, from the Alps, so that's why it is a fairly thick line. There is actually lots and lots of water coming down from the Darling but not much makes it all the way down. A heck of a lot goes out over the flood plain and there is a lot of evaporation.
The balance is about 17 per cent—long-term—coming down through the Darling and 83 per cent coming through the Murray system.
So if you are sitting down in the Coorong saying 'those buggers up there in Cubbie Station and all those horrible Queenslanders, they are ruining our system'—it ain't true—well, not entirely true.
[SLIDE: Current diversion limits]
In terms of the current diversion limits, what we are taking out of the overall system at the moment is about 11,000 gigalitres, in what we call ‘watercourse diversions’. So that is coming out of rivers, out of dams, the traditional sources of irrigation water. The other, about 2700 gigalitres, is what we call ‘interceptions’.
The difficulty for jurisdictions or for states and the ACT, in some respects, is that they can relatively easily manage watercourse diversions. They can buy up entitlements. But the interception is a very difficult one. Do you bulldoze farm dams? What needs to happen is that before states allow every lifestyle property of 5-10 hectares to have a farm dam they will have to decide whether owners will have to pay for them.
[SLIDE: Environmental water requirements]
In terms of environmental water requirements, we worked out, basically on the prospects of a relatively small number, that there are about 30,000 wetlands in the Murray-Darling. We chose—I will show you the criteria we used—a bit over 2400 key assets, mostly wetlands and flood plains, as well as key environmental functions, and we tried to work out what those hydrological indicator sites would require.
[SLIDE: Environmental Water Requirements #2]
This is basically the same diagram I showed before, but I've tried to break up some of the assets. It was about getting bank full flows and overbank flows—they were the ones that watered the flood plains and the wetlands—and getting a range of flows within the actual channel, which was allowing us to get the functions.
[SLIDE: Environmental Water Requirements #3]
There are a lot of wetlands. We identified 2400-odd, and four functions.
[SLIDE: Key ecological assets]
We then went through this process of starts with a number of key assets. We actually went through the 2,400-odd. There were five criteria that we used. One was RAMSAR International Agreement, about 16 of those 2400. Was it natural, near natural, vital, particularly vital habitat during drought periods? Did it support threatened or endangered species, and did it support significant biodiversity? They were used to select out of 30,000-odd the 2400-odd. Then out of those we chose 18 of the biggies, particularly the ones down the Murray, Macquarie Marshes, Gwyder Wetlands and a number of others as our indicator sites.
The functions were really the things that need to happen for an ecological system to be operative. That's in terms of primary production, the connection between flood plains and river systems themselves so that you have got access, and the capacity for fish to migrate. In the Murray and in the Darling we have a huge number of barriers. Many of them now have fish ladders on them to allow that migration to occur.
We need variability of flow and temperature too, which are triggers for breeding. They are all part of it, and the whole business of material transport is another key function.
The 18 sites were those that I broadly mentioned. There are a few more than that.
[SLIDE: Hydrological indicator sites]
The pattern that came out is shown in this slide. We were very keen to ensure that we had a representation of the assets, the big wetlands we were using, and also of the sites where we had hydrological information that we could get some indication of whether the functions were being adequately addressed.
[SLIDE: Environmental water requirements]
Out of that process, because of the judgments that you need to make as to the area where you have the highest risk that you might not protect the environment and the lowest risk—obviously the lowest risk involves a hell of a lot more water than the highest risk.
So the range that we came up with over the Basin—and it is all broken down into each of the subcatchments—is somewhere between 3000 and 7600 gigalitres a year extra.
[SLIDE: SDL proposals]
You really only need to look at the colours in this slide to see what sort of end of system flows we were able to achieve when we went through that process.
We were talking about two things within each of the catchments: what does the catchment itself need to have all of its wetlands and functions adequately watered; and how much should it be contributing downstream? It is still a little bit controversial at the moment. Those upstream don't really want to lose too much water downstream, but those who are at the lower lakes and the Coorong are dependent upon water coming out of various catchments.
With 3000 gigalitres extra you improve the situation considerably. And with 7600 gigalitres you improve it enormously. It is all back to very good conditions, which is anywhere from 80-100 per cent of what the natural flow regime would have been.
[SLIDE: Optimisation]
Then we had to do the optimisation process. We worked out how much water we needed. Then we needed to do the socio-economic assessment and optimise the environmental, social and economic outcomes, and assess the impacts on irrigators, communities and small to medium enterprises.
[SLIDE: SDL proposals in Guide]
The sustainable diversion limits, what is left for irrigation, if you like, draw on the social and economic assessment and the environmental water requirements.
We did an initial assessment on the basis of the social and economic information that we had and said, look, 7600 extra gigalitres would absolutely decimate most communities. We made a judgment that it couldn't go below 3000 gigalitres or we would compromise the environment. We thought if we go above 4000 gigalitres it would be a really major impact. That was basically the level that has gone out in the Guide. It says less than 3000 gigalitres will compromise the environmental requirements and more than 4000 gigalitres will probably compromise the social and economic situation. So it was a judgment.
[SLIDE: Irrigators: * C’wealth buy-backs]
This slide is a summary of where we are at at the moment. It contains the graph that I showed you before, the 'Without development' and 'Current'. The Basin Plan is the 'Current' with either 3000 or 4000 additional gigalitres. So if it was 3000 gigalitres, the amount for the environment would go from 58 per cent to about 67 per cent; and if it was 4000 gigalitres it would go from about 58 per cent to about 70 per cent.
In terms of the irrigators, they are probably not in too bad a shape because the federal government has said that it will buy-back whatever water is needed. That was an election promise and it has subsequently been confirmed. So you have got the Commonwealth buy-back program of $3.9 billion. The government is also putting about $5.8 billion into our structural modifications in irrigation systems. So there is a lot of community discussion out there saying that, really, the modernisation is a waste of money, you should be putting it into the buy-backs. I am sure you have read and talked about some of those difficulties.
The other process is a transition arrangement where under the Act we can stagger the introduction of some of these changes, these SDLs, over a five-year period.
The other side of the equation is made up of the communities and the businesses. There is no question that lost water is going to be lost dollars. There is an impact and anyone who says that there is not, that it is a win/win situation, is having you on.
There are considerable levels of debt because of the 10 years of drought. We have been told that in a number of cases irrigators will be made to sell their water entitlements by the banks to pay off their debt. They will walk away with nothing. So there are a number of hidden issues there. Of course, number one, that money will go out of the community. In a lot of cases when irrigators sell their water entitlements they are at the age where they think, 'Oh, thank God, that is a great super. I will go to Torquay to retire'.
So I don't think there is any question that there will be money going out of many of these communities. The question in the short and medium term is what is the capacity of these communities to adapt to that? What assistance might they need from government? That's where we are at at the moment, trying to work on some of those really difficult mitigation responses. Not that we have got the money to do it, but hopefully government will find it.
[SLIDE: Three stage process]
This slide shows where we are at at the moment. The Water Act sees two stages: the proposed Basin Plan and the Basin Plan. We have put in place 'The Guide', which is an extra step we think is absolutely essential in terms of getting much better information out there and much more feedback. We are at the moment receiving submissions, so if any of you wish to make a submission I can guarantee you it will be taken notice of.
[SLIDE: Challenges for the MDBA]
Let me run through some of the challenges I see in these five areas: institutional; challenges for the MDBA itself; federal/state relationships; knowledge; and implementation.
[SLIDE: Institutional arrangements]
The institutional arrangements are, I think, very broad and have been around for a fair while. Now that we are trying to get a whole-of-Basin approach, I think a number of big issues will be raised, such as: boundary issues, in terms of trying to focus on the whole of the Basin, rather than just New South Wales or Victoria or South Australia; transparency of data and processes—the MDBA has a policy of transparency of information and we have about 1500 reports on the web at the moment that underpin most of the work we have done so far.
[SLIDE: The new Authority]
As far as the Authority is concerned—remember these are my views and not necessarily those of my colleagues—it is a new organisation, as I indicated. It is now basically run by a board of six independent members and we definitely have a whole-of-Basin focus. We are not so much interested in separate states—of course, we have to take notice of that—but about what is good for the overall Basin.
Historically the Authority has been largely built up from river operations. The Murray system consists of many weirs and dams, and really sophisticated stuff in terms of when water should be released, when irrigators want their water and so forth. That's where the organisation has come from. There are some really interesting challenges for the new Authority, the staff now works to a board rather than to a ministerial council, that in itself is an interesting challenge that we have been working through. We have also found that we have a real need for building expertise—and we are working on that at the moment—in the social and economic areas.
We have not been as good as we could have been, to put it mildly, in terms of communication and engagement. And how do you change an organisation that has been largely engineering-dominated into a much more management policy organisation? I think there are some really good challenges there.
[SLIDE: Knowledge needs]
We are now in an era of evidence-based decision-making. How do you collect best available? How do you assess best available? How do you give stakeholders confidence that you have actually collected the best and you have used it? And how do you show the transparency of it? You use websites, which is great for most of this audience who know how to download and interpret data, but there are a lot of others who need different ways of being confident that the evidence is actually useful.
We know that there are a lot of knowledge needs and we know there is a fairly large amount of money available for water research within the Murray-Darling, within the National Water Commission. This is in the federal sphere and also in the state, but there is very little coordination between the two. Land and Water Australia has gone and it is not known whether the CRC for Freshwater College, eWater, will get a guernsey in 18 months' time—there has been a real decimation of land and water research capability in Australia. I think that is a major issue that we have got to try to address.
[SLIDE: Hydrology-ecology]
[SLIDE: Social and economic]
Without going through the detail, there is a whole raft of social and economic issues which have raised themselves in the development of the Basin Plan and are going to be absolutely vital in terms of getting the Basin Plan accepted. Government has reacted to the first week of the public consultation processes by setting up a parliamentary inquiry. There is also a senate inquiry on the same social and economic issues. The politicians see that as a really crucial issue, and so they should, but we have got to look at much more of the evidence.
[SLIDE: Implementation challenges]
The two major components that I see in terms of the implementation, which is likely to be in 2012 or thereabouts, is very much improving the relationships between the states and the Commonwealth and between those organisations and regional organisations which are very strong catchment management authorities in Victoria. They are getting stronger in New South Wales and they are not too bad in South Australia, but they need a good legislative base in Queensland. Nevertheless, there are regional organisations that are much closer to all of those assets that need to be watered and they are going to have to be part of the equation.
The second component is that if we are going to get back something of the order of 3000-4000 gigalitres a year, you buggers won't know what to do with it! That's not really true of course, but it is a challenge.
Just to put that into context, you have probably heard or read about the Living Murray Initiative. A few years ago the Murray states got together and decided that they would try to get back, through various initiatives, about 500 gigalitres—not 3000—500. They have just about got there now. In eight years they actually never delivered that amount.
We are talking about six times, maybe eight times that amount of water—over a bigger area—and boy, if that is not a challenge. It will be trying to manage a resource where you need the things that go against organisations, state organisations, federal organisations, where you need flexibility. You have to handle uncertainty and so on in a variable climate.
[SLIDE: Implementation]
I haven't got time to go through the other implementations, but we certainly need to revisit what we have done on climate change. I don't think we have handled that terribly well. We have all sorts of things in the Basin Plan about adaptive management. How do we actually include that?
[SLIDE: Summary]
The Murray-Darling Basin Plan is really the latest step in two decades of major water reform. It is a major reform of rural Australia, and I have gone through a number of the challenges.
Discussion
Question: You were talking about evidence-based management and you showed us a couple of scenarios, for example, of returning 3000-4000 gigalitres, 7600 gigalitres and the conditions. But what criteria will be applied to know whether that return of environmental flow has worked? In other words, how will we know when we have gotten there?
Barry Hart: A very good question. That is challenging us too. I suppose what we have tried to do is to go back and say, certainly in terms of the wetlands we have looked at: what are the sub-assets that we are trying to protect? Let's take Barham. There are wetland components which really need watering each year. There are red gums which need a return of, let's say, three to five years. There is blackbox, slightly higher up, that need one in nine years or thereabouts. So it is really risk-taking those and trying to work it out. That gave us a feel for the amount of water.
I think in terms of how we are going to know is really through a very effective monitoring program. That is going to be an interesting challenge too, because the Murray-Darling Basin Authority hasn't got the expertise to do it. It will probably mostly be done by the states.
Question: You have touched on a number of related things. You said we must manage the catchment if we want to manage water quality and look at the natural resource management. Linked in with that, you made reference to the catchment management authorities at that regional level. Along with that, there is the loss of Land and Water Australia on the research side, and linked with these is a statement you made early on about the challenge of the salt that is generated, where we need to flush through the system 2 million tonnes per annum.
So, because of all those interrelated issues, I guess I am thinking about the relationship of that catchment, the land and what happens on it, the quality and possibly quantity of water, could you elaborate a bit more, please?
Barry Hart: I think it is very well-known that you have to manage the catchment if you are going to manage a water resource. This is my view of how the Water Act was established. If you remember back a few years, there was a lot of argy-bargy between the states about giving up part of their powers, their rights. So they ceded certain rights to the federal government that they were certain that they weren't going to do. The catchment component had a lot of planning aspects to it. I think that they baulked at that stage.
I think anyone who is in the water management game recognises that you have to manage the catchment. It is well and truly on our radar that we need to work through the interactions with those natural resource management agencies, both in the states and the catchment management authorities. So the question will be how do we establish those good working relationships?
Question: In some places, the wetlands that we are trying to improve the condition of are also severely limited by other things like piths and weeds, levee banks, the distribution of water, saline groundwater, the impounding of water above the weirs and what that does to groundwater and salinity. So it seems to me there is a lot of scope for some of the environmental water being applied and having, in a way, very little impact on the outcomes that we are trying to achieve. How will the Plan go about addressing those issues?
Barry Hart: Well, that's why I said early on that water is one thing that has caused the degradation, but there are many others. You have just gone through a few additional ones.
What will happen, if and when the Basin Plan goes through? Each of the states, as I indicated, will have to develop the way in which they are going to stay within the sustainable diversion limits; and, secondly, what their environmental water plan looks like over a five-year period.
They have to be accredited by the Authority. I think we will be looking quite closely at the links between water and other management assets.
Question: I think the funding for that will be really critical. It is all very well—you have got the funding, or it looks like it, for the environmental water, you might get an accredited plan that looks good on paper. If there isn't the funding associated with managing the wet plains in situ with the water, you will get the water. It won't achieve the outcomes and the critics will come back and say 'look, the trees have still died'. It is a really critical issue.
Barry Hart: Absolutely. Put in a submission, will you.
Question: The Authority's chairman today expressed the personal view that the Authority was neither empowered nor equipped to adequately carry this project forward. On the matter of empowerment, this would seem to be a dispute between the legal advice available to the Authority and the legal advice available to the minister, which is obviously fairly important to resolve.
On the question of being equipped, this would seem to be more of a question of the technical qualifications and competence of the Authority and the staff, which would seem to be supported by the evidence, to the extent if one looks at the evidence on the environmental, the economic and the social issues. The volume of numbers and evidence-based science that supports the 3000 gigalitres or the 7000 gigalitres is very solid and quite convincing. The evidence on the other issues is quite thin. Is the Authority adequately equipped and empowered to carry this forward?
Barry Hart: I didn't see that. That must have been another press release.
Question: They were literally the words used in its advice to the minister.
Barry Hart: I will have to have a look at that, because that is not what I saw. I did try to indicate in terms of the challenges for the Authority itself that I thought that we still needed to build up capacity internally, particularly in that social and economic area, and probably the cultural, and also in communications. I don't mean PR in a sense of trying to sell the product, but in public relations generally I don't think we have done very well. We haven't been very pro-active at all. What we have done is been mainly reactive. Broadly I would agree with that part, but not so much on the other side.
Question: I thought your presentation was an extraordinary summary of an infinitely complex issue.
In 1975 the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act was passed. That only involved the Commonwealth and two states and it was terribly difficult. Now the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and the Act is more complex because of the number of states and territories.
In the Great Barrier Marine Park Act there is a provision that the minister may not legally make a direction to the Authority that is not in accordance with the Act. This has had a remarkably effective effect. The only firm direction that was ever given to the Authority was withdrawn the next day, when it was pointed out to that minister that his direction was contrary to the Act and would be put in the annual report. And it was—as is the withdrawal in the annual report to parliament—somewhat embarrassing.
Has the Murray-Darling Basin Authority got any protection of that kind that stops you from being directed by a minister or a government that is not in accordance with the provisions of the Act for the sake of political or other reasons?
Barry Hart: I don't believe so. Certainly we produce the Basin Plan and submit that to the minister. He can disagree with things, but it has to be out in the open. Then it has to be accepted by parliament. So it can be, and it probably would be at the moment, rejected by the senate. It might be okay a little later on, unless we have another election, but who knows in that political vacuum.
The situation with respect to accreditation of the state resource plans is that they have to be accepted by the federal water minister on the advice of the Authority. But I don't know of any way in which the minister can totally direct us.
