Muray-Darling basin water ministers want to delay until 2019 any final plan to save the ailing river system.
The Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council met in Adelaide yesterday and noted progress in developing the draft basin plan by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, due to be completed next year.
But in a communique they requested that the authority wait another seven years before requiring states to fully implement reforms. ”Ministers welcomed a process that included consideration of environmental, economic and social issues in the development of the basin plan, and discussed the importance of providing sufficient time for communities and industry to adjust to the sustainable diversion limits.”
The Australian Conservation Foundation said such a delay would put off action to fix the long-term problem of over extraction from the river system.
”The states have said that they would do this since 1994, and they’ve made not an awful lot of progress,” said a spokeswoman for the foundation, Arlene Harriss-Buchan.
She said a further delay could only be justified if the authority cut diversions from the Murray by a large amount - 4000 gigalitres or more.
”That is quite a big transition for irrigators and communities to make, and they deserve a reasonable amount of time to make that transition as smooth as possible.”
But Dr Harriss-Buchan said the ACF feared governments wanted the ”absolute minimum number possible” as part of a quick political fix and to take as long as possible to put it into place.
