Her deal with the Greens and cross-benchers to secure a further 450 gigalitres of environmental water above the original basin plan target of 2750Gl cynically buries a century of cooperation among the basin states.
By tossing out the proviso to ensure there is no detrimental socio-economic impact on basin communities, Ms Plibersek dispensed with a critical brake and then removed the cap on further buybacks from irrigators — potentially allowing water buybacks of 750Gl.
Greens leader Sarah Hanson Young couldn’t contain herself: “For over a decade, South Australia has been fighting for the 450GL of water to be in law to be guaranteed to be delivered”.
In other words, South Australians never thought the socio-economic impact on upstream communities mattered and now, with the help of the Greens and the disgraced Victorian senator David Van, they are getting their way.
Hanson Young added, “Because it’s what science says is needed to save the lower reaches of the Murray, the Coorong and the Lower Lakes”.
But as Jane Ryan is pointing out in her illuminating Country News series on the Murray-Darling Plan, this is complete nonsense. South Australia has starved the Coorong of water from the 1860s onwards, by erecting huge drains across the low-lying southeast country that had fed the Coorong for centuries — but blamed upstream irrigators.
And the Murray mouth has always been an estuary, like every other river reaching the Australian sea-board — sometimes more fresh, or more salty, than others.
But it so happens — if anyone cared to look — that the Coorong and the lower Murray are in fine shape, having recovered long ago from the millennium drought.
It beggars belief that, nowhere in the Murray-Darling Basin Plan roll-out has there been any attempt to examine the restorative impacts of the 2100Gl already recovered from irrigators. Any recreational user will tell you that the Southern Basin river environment is in excellent condition.
So what’s this about? It’s about a Labor election promise designed to hold those South Australian seats and fend off the Greens. And Ms Plibersek’s determination to deliver on that election promise is entirely about her power play with Anthony Albanese. There is certainly no logic, science or environmental imperative behind it.
On the contrary, every water manager in the Southern Basin will tell you that they simply cannot deliver the environmental water already owned by the Commonwealth without devastating the river environs.
And yet Labor and the Greens have just committed the taxpayer to find another 750Gl, equal to one-and-a-half Sydney harbours.
Give that massive volume a moment’s thought and the sheer, venal absurdity of this deal becomes obvious. It has nothing to do with helping the environment: like the fabled Vietnamese village, Ms Plibersek’s unholy alliance will kill our river in order to save it.
