Tuesday, 30 July 2024

Water policy

Wendy LOVELL (Northern Victoria) (17:44): (995) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Water, and it concerns the state’s constraints measures program. The action that I seek from the Minister for Water is a guarantee that the Victorian government will not use the state’s power to compulsorily create flood easements in order to inundate private land without consent as part of its constraints relaxation policy.

Farmers, landholders, residents and stakeholders in northern Victoria are still reeling from the Commonwealth government’s announcement that it will purchase entitlements for a further 70 gigalitres of water from the Murray–Darling Basin. Despite an earlier commitment that water recovery would exclude irrigators, Tanya Plibersek has broken her word with an open tender that deliberately targets irrigation districts in northern Victoria along the Murray River that are socio-economically vulnerable to buybacks. This is a shocking betrayal. Victoria has already done more than its fair share of recovering water for environmental use, having contributed 440 gigalitres more than South Australia and 170 gigalitres more than New South Wales.

The new buybacks planned by the federal Labor government will take water entitlements from irrigators out of the pool used for productive irrigated agriculture and transfer those rights to the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder. But the government is currently unable to deliver all of the environmental water it already holds because of constraints measures and the river operating rules that govern flows. These constraints limit the amount of water that can be released into the river without causing flooding of public and private land. In order to deliver more environmental water, these constraints would need to be relaxed. Relaxing these constraints and increasing river flows will lead to flooding of land along the river, including private land owned by farmers and graziers that is used for productive agriculture. The assumption in the constraints relaxation program is that payments will be offered to landholders to compensate them for damage and lost economic activity if they consent to inundation of their property.

Recent reports suggest that while the Commonwealth pushes ahead with its water buyback policy, the states are falling well behind in their negotiations with landholders, with around 6000 properties nationally still waiting for flood easements to be arranged. But experience shows that many landholders will not agree to having their land flooded. The recently published feasibility study into the Victorian constraints relaxation program notes that while a voluntary agreement between the states and landholders is the preferred form of flood easement, existing legislation does enable the Commonwealth and state governments to create flood easements by compulsory powers without the agreement of the landholder. There is a genuine worry in the community that if the Commonwealth is aggressively buying water entitlements, it intends to release environmental water whether landholders like it or not. If the Victorian government cannot manage to negotiate flood easements with private landowners, they will have to acquire those easements with compulsory powers in order to allow higher river flows.