Wednesday, 4 March 2020

Broken River irrigation system

Ms RYAN (Euroa) (19:05): (1976) My adjournment matter this evening is for the Minister for Water. The action I am seeking is that she give irrigators real input into the terms of reference for a review that she has announced into the Broken irrigation system. The minister promised that review in December last year at the same time that she announced a qualification of water rights. It is something that has come after years of lobbying by local irrigators, me and the Victorian Farmers Federation. The need for that review has arisen as a consequence of the former Bracks and Brumby governments’ decision to decommission Lake Mokoan, which I am sure members of the chamber who have been here for some time would well remember the debate around.

At the time Labor guaranteed that there would be no reduction at all in the reliability of water supplies in that system, but 10 years on we know that not to be true. Irrigators have been stuck on a zero allocation for a number of years now, and when we were in government we were actually working with them to make legislative change to give them access to advanced allocation. Now, the lack of reliability around the system really comes because Lake Nillahcootie, which is the storage on that system, is quite small for the system, and some of the biggest tributaries which supply the system actually come in downstream from Nillahcootie. So the consequence of taking Mokoan out of the system means that those irrigators now no longer have access to water from particularly Ryans Creek and Hollands Creek. As a result that has severely impacted on reliability.

There was a meeting of Goulburn-Murray Water’s water services committee last week, where irrigators were told that the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP) was out collecting data for this review. There has been no engagement to date with irrigators about the terms of reference, and they are very disappointed by that. There has been a subcommittee of that water services committee that has been set up for years now looking at these issues, made up of local irrigators. The fact that DELWP has not even gone to them to talk about what they want to see in the terms of reference and what outcomes they might be looking for is leading them to fear that the government has already made up its mind what the findings of that review are going to be, that this is no more than a tick-the-box exercise and that DELWP will just formalise consultation through this process once they have already determined the outcome. I would ask the minister to instruct her department to engage genuinely with those irrigators so they can be confident of the outcomes of that review.