Hung out to dry
We need a Murray–Darling Basin royal commission

As argy-bargy over border closures continued in national cabinet, Water Minister Keith Pitt announced a sweeping overhaul of the Murray–Darling Basin Plan, axing water buybacks from irrigators and shifting responsibility for ensuring compliance from the Murray–Darling Basin Authority to the new inspector-general of Murray–Darling Basin water resources – a post currently held by former Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty. In a speech delivered at lunchtime today, Pitt said the changes would “end the perceptions that the MDBA is structured in a way that it could mark its own homework”. The reforms were welcomed by the National Irrigators Council. Axing buybacks is administrative, but the governance reforms will need to be legislated. Greens environment spokesperson Sarah Hanson-Young told the ABC this morning that the announcement was “a huge blow to the environment and hangs South Australia out to dry”, and she reiterated her call for a Commonwealth royal commission into the Murray–Darling Basin. The announcement comes straight after the Morrison government, in a show of poor faith on parliament’s last sitting day for a month, gagged debate on its proposed overhaul of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act in the House of Representatives, infuriating crossbench MPs who had hoped to propose amendments, including Helen Haines, Zali Steggall and Rebekha Sharkie.  

Yesterday, the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists released a landmark valley-by-valley assessment of observed versus expected river flows under the Murray–Darling Basin Plan between 2012 and 2019. Noting that the Commonwealth has spent almost $7 billion to recover 2100 gigalitres of water to increase river flows and improve the health of the basin’s ecosystems, the assessment found that, since 2012, flows were 20 per cent lower than expected (an average of 320GL per year). The ABC reported yesterday that climate change was a prime factor in the missing 2 trillion litres of water, and Keelty’s interim report as inspector-general had previously found flows through the basin had halved over the last 20 years. As the South Australian royal commission into the Murray–Darling Basin Plan observed last year, the authority “completely ignored” climate change when determining how much water needed to be saved.

Public confidence in the Murray–Darling Basin Authority was lost long ago. There’ve been two ABC Four Corners investigations (“Pumped” and “Cash Splash”), which exposed water theft and questionable grants to irrigators for water-efficiency upgrades. There was the “watergate” scandal, in which $80 million was paid for water rights to a company linked to Energy Minister Angus Taylor, at a price that was recently revealed to be nearly twice the valuation. And then there’s an ICAC investigation into the former NSW water minister and another senior bureaucrat, which has been running for more than 1000 days. As Shooters’ Party state MP Helen Dalton told The Canberra Times in April, “There’s no info on ICAC’s website. No update. No report. No timeline.” Sarah Hanson-Young is right: only a royal commission can restore confidence in the management of the Murray–Darling Basin. 

On the day of Pitt’s announcement, environmentalist Geoff Cousins, a former Optus chief executive and adviser to John Howard, writes that the Morrison government is using the cover of COVID-19 to rush its environment laws through parliament, with the single aim of fast-tracking projects for approval. It’s becoming a theme. There are the overt politics of the pandemic – today’s instalment is the PM announcing that the national cabinet will no longer operate as a consensus body – and then there are the covert politics of the pandemic, in which the Morrison government presses fast-forward on its real agenda. 

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