Agriculture
14 July, 2024
Ditch buyback tender approach: Mayors
NORTHERN Victorian mayors want the Federal Government to ditch its tender process to buying water from irrigators. Murray River Group of Councils, including Loddon Shire, wants Water Minister Tanya Plibersek to “respect regional communities and...
NORTHERN Victorian mayors want the Federal Government to ditch its tender process to buying water from irrigators.
Murray River Group of Councils, including Loddon Shire, wants Water Minister Tanya Plibersek to “respect regional communities and work with us to deliver genuine and lasting environmental outcomes, and a sustainable irrigation future for northern Victoria”.
They have told the Government to urgently rethink its approach to the Murray River Basin Plan.
President Ross Stanton said the rush to recover water through open tender buy backs regardless of the impact on communities was a key concern of councils.
Cr Stanton said there was also concern with “grossly inadequate “compensation” offered to communities in return for the socio-economic harm that open tender buy backs would bring.
He said that buying back water through one-on-one deals from anywhere across the southern Basin, without a strategic plan developed with communities, would be the worst outcome for all Australians.
“Open tender buy backs will have serious negative social impacts on our communities,” Cr Stanton said.
“They will have serious negative economic impacts on our businesses and our towns.
“Worst of all, they will not restore our region’s rivers or our valued floodplain ecosystems.
“When market forces alone determine how much and where water is recovered, it actually makes achieving environmental outcomes harder.
“This is because it concentrates environmental water in dams upstream and it’s more difficult to deliver to the ecosystems that need it.”
Council representatives including Loddon Mayor Gavan Holt and Cr Neil Beattie were in Canberra for last week’s Association of Local Government conference where the push was made for a Government rethink.
Cr Stanton said there would the economic costs of open tender buybacks and impact on jobs.
“The Commonwealth’s recent ABARES report forecast an annual reduction in farm gate production in the southern Basin of $111m per year. The last time the Commonwealth did an open tender water buy backs in our region, we lost around 1600 jobs, it cost us hundreds of millions of dollars in production, and the price of water for agriculture went up by $72 per megalitre.
“Our irrigation districts ended up looking like Swiss cheese. They are delivering about 50 per cent less water over the same sized area – that has driven up the costs for all the remaining irrigators. If that happens again, it will push districts to breaking point,” said Cr Stanton.
“It’s not just our communities either. This is going to have an effect on prices in supermarkets, on exports, it will affect GDP, all at a time when cost of living is an issue for everyone. We all want healthy rivers, and a thriving environment, none more than those of us who live in it in our river communities.
“We also need thriving towns and businesses and relying on market forces and focusing purely on water recovery as a number through open tender buy backs will cause social and economic damage” Cr Stanton said.
The Commonwealth has recently provided more detail about its Community Adjustment Assistance fund which will be $300 million over four years across the entire Basin.
“This is woefully inadequate. It wouldn’t even simply offset the economic damage that will be done,” Cr Stanton said after talks in Canberra.