Heavy floods and rain have masked the poor condition of the Murray-Darling Basin’s wetlands, an environmentalist farmers’ group says. And the deceptive appearance of the wetlands should not stop a clampdown on taking too much water from the rivers, it warns.
”The whole basin looks excellent at the moment because of this massive flood, but these are exceptional events rather than normal rainfall patterns,” the treasurer of the Australian Floodplain Association, Terry Korn, said.
Meters must be placed along waterways throughout NSW and Queensland to ensure that the $10 billion the federal government has allocated to saving the rivers is not wasted as water continues to be siphoned off for various uses or lost through evaporation and other natural events, he said.
Good metering systems would allow the states to manage the water being sent down the river system for agricultural production and environmental purposes, he said.
”Secondly, it would reduce the chances of any water being misdirected or stolen. We don’t believe a lot of that occurs, but we believe it is a human trait to break rules when they are made, just like driving on the road. People bend rules.”
It is understood that NSW government water managers will press the Federal Water Minister, Tony Burke, to agree to funding for the meters when they meet him today. They will use a finding in a report by the consultants Sinclair Knight Merz that across five northern NSW valleys - the Macquarie, Gwydir, Lachlan, Namoi and Border Rivers - as much as 52,800 megalitres a year could be saved through making changes to water management, including installing meters. Although scientists and rural residents have been dazzled by the regeneration of vegetation and wildlife on the waterways of the eastern seaboard, environmentalists caution that it is only temporary.
Wetlands in nine NSW zones, including the Murrumbidgee, Lachlan, Western, Northern and Southern Rivers and the Gwydir, were rated as ”very poor” in a report by the NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water published late last year.
The annual State of the Catchments report also classed wetlands in the Sydney metropolitan area, Hawkesbury-Nepean and Hunter catchments as ”very poor”. Wetlands in the Central West, lower Murray-Darling, Murray and Namoi were ranked ”poor”.
Mr Korn said: ”All the scientific data shows wetlands and floodplains have been in decline because of over-allocation and because of the drought and the system generally relies on low level and medium level flows to keep it healthy.”
But neither NSW nor Queensland properly managed the river system, he said. Over-extraction continued and a system of banks, dams and channels diverted water away from wetlands and floodplains that needed it.
