The former head of the federal agency that holds the government’s water entitlements has accused New South Wales and Victoria of undermining the Murray-Darling Basin plan by failing to do their part on enforcement and being overly influenced by irrigators.

The accusation by the former commonwealth environmental water holder comes as several politicians, including the federal government’s new envoy on drought, Barnaby Joyce, call for environmental water holdings to be made available to farmers to finish growing winter fodder crops.

NSW has already announced plans to sell 15,000ML of environmental water holdings in the Riverina and will use the proceeds to help farmers, but federal authorities say the calls fail to understand how the plan works.

The federal agency, also called the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder, holds 1,227 gigalitres of water purchased by the taxpayer as part of the effort to restore balance between the environment and farming. It is obliged under the 2007 federal Water Act “to use the water first and foremost to get benefits for the environment”.

As its website notes, environmental water can only be delivered if there is water available, the same as other water entitlement holders. Allocations are made according to conditions and planning is done for a range of scenarios from wet to drought.

“There is a functioning water market in place, and there is water now available on the market for purchase,” the water holder said.



In a submission lodged with the South Australian royal commission looking into the Murray-Darling Basin plan, David Papps, who recently retired after five years as the man responsible for the commonwealth’s portfolio of environmental water, said the biggest problem with the plan is the lack of commitment to it from NSW and Victoria.



“Whilst CEWH I became concerned at the quality of draft NSW water resource plans,” he said.

“These concerns were part of a broader anxiety I had in relation to the attitude of the relevant NSW minister and the NSW water department in relation to their clear failure to properly implement, in a timely fashion, their responsibilities under the plan and associated intergovernmental agreements.

“It was clear to me that the NSW minister was reluctant to meet those responsibilities in any way which either he or some of the politically active elements of the NSW irrigation industry deemed inimical to the industry’s interests.”

Niall Blair is the current water minister in NSW.



Papps said in his view some of these industry players had an ambition to have the plan repealed entirely.

He said the importance of having effective rules in the water resource plans to protect environmental water could not be overstated. It was a fundamental legal obligation.

Yet he said there had been clear evidence that the NSW government intends to undermine or weaken those provisions.

“This was the case, for example, in relation to a provision in the Namoi water-sharing plan aimed at contributing to the conservation of native fish. It was weakened by the NSW DPI water under pressure from Namoi Valley irrigators,” Papps said.

He also gave an example in the Murrumbidgee where local irrigators had received public support from Blair for a review of the Murrumbidgee translucent flow rules put in place so environmental water could be released in variable quantities to mimic nature.

Papps said these were “fundamentally important to environmental outcomes” but the minister had intervened after irrigators complained.

Papps also said that Victoria may also be weakening protection of environmental flows by arguing that environmental flows included in the state’s bulk water allocation could have multiple purposes.

Papps said this was, in his view, a semantic device designed to subvert the spirit and intent of the plan to protect environmental flows that existed prior to the Murray-Darling Basin plan.

He also said the Victorian government’s water and catchment amendment bill 2017 had broadened the reasons for using environmental water reserves to include “social and recreational uses and values of waterways”.

He said the Victorian minister, Lisa Neville, has formed a political alliance with Blair and their lack of commitment to a full and proper implementation of the plan was seriously compromising its environmental outcomes.

He urged a greater role for commonwealth ministers in the plans but said “this will not, in itself, deal with the obstructionist or undermining approach of the Victorian and NSW ministers”.

