An evaluation of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan has found improvements in Murray-Darling river system, but not everyone is happy.

VFF said the recently released 2025 Basin Plan Evaluation portrayed a deliberately deceiving snapshot of the Murray-Darling Basin and ignores the real-world reality facing farmers and communities in the region.

VFF Water Council chair and Murrabit dairy farmer Andrew Leahy said the Murray-Darling Basin Authority appeared more focused on defending its own plan than objectively evaluating the impacts.

“While the report declares, ‘we are better off with the basin plan’ and claims the basin’s environment ‘is better now than it would have been without the basin plan’, it does so by measuring ‘economic growth’ against a baseline year of 2007, in the middle of the devastating millennium drought,” Mr Leahy said.

“2007 was one of the worst years in living memory for agriculture. Using this year as a reference point for ‘economic improvement’ is misleading.

“Of course there has been some rebound since then. The real question the report refuses to ask is what economic growth could we have achieved if the basin plan hadn’t stripped productive water from regional economies?

“I live in northern Victoria, and the impacts are real.

“Fewer farms, means fewer jobs, fewer people in our schools, and fewer kids on the footy and netball teams.

“What’s missing in this report is any real discussion about how agriculture is expected to survive the next drought with even less water and that needs to change.”

MDBA said the evaluation found evidence that the rivers, wetlands and lakes were in better shape under the 13-year-old basin plan.

MDBA chief executive Andrew McConville said the evaluation provided strong evidence that the sustained commitment of basin communities, industry and governments to implement the basin plan was working.

“This is the most comprehensive assessment of the progress made to restore and sustainably manage the basin’s environment and water resources,” Mr McConville.

“At a basin scale there have been substantial benefits, but it is also the case that for some irrigation dependent communities this reform has been tough with direct impacts.

“Collaborative efforts to manage environmental watering are getting results – keeping rivers in the north and south connected, restoring low-lying floodplain vegetation and helping water birds to breed in places like Hattah and Narran Lakes.

“In dry years, water for the environment was the only water sustaining flows through the Murray mouth.”

The evaluation highlighted some limitations of the plan, where work to deliver water savings projects and maximise the use of environmental water through constraints relaxation has proven challenging.

“We still have challenges getting water onto the mid and high floodplains, and this was one of the original intentions of the plan,” Mr McConville said.

“Four water resource plans are yet to be accredited, only modest progress has been made in addressing delivery constraints, and we anticipate a shortfall in water recovery under the Sustainable Diversion Limit Adjustment Mechanism.

Access the full 2025 Basin Plan Evaluation online from 2025 Basin Plan Evaluation | Murray–Darling Basin Authority.

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Saturday, 15th July 2023

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