The real amount of environmental water to be delivered by the Murray Darling Basin plan is at most 800 gigalitres, not the 3200 gigalitres trumpeted by the Gillard government on Friday, says independent Tony Windsor.
Mr Windsor says Friday’s announcement of a 450-gigalitre (450 billion litres) ”top-up” to the 2750 gigalitres in the plan was really about giving South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill the ”wriggle room” to back down from his threat of a High Court challenge.
He advised worried farmers to look not at the rhetoric, but at the figures, which showed they were getting a ”good deal”.
The $1.7 billion ”top-up” involves just $56 million over the forward estimates, with legislation to be introduced tomorrow setting up a special account into which future governments would be required to allocate the rest of the money over the next decade.
Mr Windsor - who chaired a recent parliamentary committee on the basin plan - said the uncertainty around the funding, and the fact farmers would have to volunteer for the water-saving infrastructure works it is designed to pay for, meant ”there is no guarantee it will ever happen at all”.
The states have successfully demanded a new federal/state agreement to be finalised within weeks to allow 650 gigalitres of the 2750 gigalitres in the plan to be accounted for through so-called ”environmental works and measures” - pipelines to ensure environmental water is delivered to iconic sites more efficiently.
In practice that means the 650 gigalitres that would otherwise have been wasted can be subtracted from the total, taking it to 2100 gigalitres.
And Mr Windsor points out more than 1300 gigalitres has already been achieved through water buybacks.
”Based on everything [Water Minister] Tony Burke has told me, and all the figures on the record, the real amount of water that has to be delivered to the environment is at most 800 gigalitres … farmers should look hard at the actual numbers rather than the rhetoric because they may never get a better deal than this,” Mr Windsor said.
Meanwhile the Coalition is struggling to overcome deep internal divisions about how it should vote on the new legislation, with South Australian MPs strongly urging that it be backed but rural Victorian and New South Wales MPs - including Sharman Stone, Sussan Ley, John Forrest and Michael McCormack - calling it ”pure madness”.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the vote would finally mean the Coalition would have to stop ”saying something different in South Australia from what they say upstream”.
