THE month of June is a deadline for the NSW Government to review the State’s Water Sharing Plans (WSPs).
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In addition to this the government needs to review any savings projects.
In 2019, WSPs are supposed to be rolled into the Federal Water Resource Plans and the Murray Darling Basin Plan (MDBP)
NSW Murray Darling Basin communities have not had sufficient opportunity to assess the effectiveness of current WSPs nor have they seen any completed reviews.
The NSW departments responsible for these reviews have undergone restructure and are lacking some focus and resources.
The 2004 WSPs were further negatively impacted by the Millennium Drought, The Water ACT 2007 and the MDBP.
The WSPs are now, most definitely, struggling to deliver good outcomes in average to above average seasons. WSPs divvy up or prioritise water access and they have scrambled and confused the whole process.
State held accounts and state environment accounts have priority over everything.
Apparently, inland MDB communities and their productive capacities are not deemed to be an important part of the NSW environment. In the WSPs, the Office of Environment and Heritage (OEH) has been progressively gifted priority water via such measures as rule changes and the so called ‘voluntary’ contributions.
The amounts are often difficult to quantify as there is little transparency with their accounting or their activities.
The WSPs also divvy out priority water for such things as translucent, transparent and dilution flows.
The WSPs deliberately impede the timing and volume of general security allocations to ‘cover off’ on these volumes. Irrigators must pay fixed fees and charges on undelivered water but they are not the only ones hurting.
Our wider communities are also bearing the brunt with impacts on production, jobs, businesses, population numbers and the ongoing reduction of essential government services. Excess water is often traded back to productive use by State departments at extraordinarily high prices.
Originally, when not needed, that water would have been re-allocated to the paying customers (the producers). Environment and other State held accounts definitely appear to be ‘over catered’ with priority water.
It is well past time for state and federal environment ministers, their policy advisors and leading bureaucrats to visit MDB communities and witness, first hand, the impacts from their mindset about storage, modelling, flushing and irrigated agriculture. Our irrigation communities are important, functional assets of the NSW environment - not a low priority or separate from the environment!