There is a high likelihood the New South Wales government will fail to meet the deadline for developing a crucial water resource plan that will underpin the Murray-Darling basin plan, the South Australian royal commission has heard.



Bill Johnson, a former MDBA senior staffer who now serves on an advisory committee developing the NSW Barwon-Darling water resource plan, told the commission he feared that the agency was preparing to sign off on the plans with only a perfunctory review.

He said the authority seemed more interested in meeting its schedule for accreditation of 30 June 2019 than ensuring that NSW’s water resource plans delivered the outcomes promised – and that this could compromise the entire Murray-Darling basin plan.

He told the hearing in Adelaide that NSW was aware of that approach.



“An officer of the NSW water agency told me that, that in his view, MDBA was not sufficiently familiar with NSW water planning processes to ensure that it was able to review the NSW water resource plans effectively,” he said.

He also warned that NSW was preparing to present “umbrella plans”. Without assessment of the underpinning water-sharing plans, which would detail the rules for water extraction, environmental flows and managing salinity, the water resource plans could be ineffective.

Johnson, who worked in a range of senior roles at the MDBA for seven years, said in his assessment the way the plan was being implemented was undermining its objectives.

The water-sharing plans were a case in point, he said. His advisory panel for the Barwon-Darling had not yet seen a draft, had had no discussions, and there was no progress on dealing with the most contentious issue in the old water sharing plan finalised in 2012: a provision that allows irrigators to take water in the lowest of flows, despite “suspicions of inappropriate influence by the irrigation industry” .



He said the stakeholder advisory panel was working on the assumption that Barwon-Darling water use was within the caps imposed under the plan for each river valley and for the basin overall – but he was not at all confident of this.

“A memo of February 2014 asserts that the only reason for this [compliance] is that NSW has changed the model to make it so. That if it hadn’t the Barwon-Darling would have breached cap every year since 1995.”

In the wake of the Four Corners report on water theft in Barwon-Darling a year ago, the MDBA acknowledged the need to improve its compliance, oversight and reporting.



It now reports quarterly on progress on water resource plans. The latest report, from May, shows that most of NSW’s 22 plans are at 30% – indicating that the MDBA has seen only preliminary material.

Other states are also lagging. Only one water resource plan, in the Warrego river in Queensland, has been accredited, with just 11 months to go.

Johnson also echoed concerns of earlier witnesses about the adequacy of the hydrological models used by the MDBA, and in particular how they were used in the Northern Basin review, which has resulted in the MDBA recommending a cut of 70GL in water recovered for the environment.

Johnson, who spent most of his professional life working in wetlands in the basin before he joined the MDBA, said that people on the the ground repeatedly told him the hydrological model did not reflect what they knew to be the realities of the river.

“It doesn’t speak to the river they know,” he said.

A spokeswoman for the NSW Department of Industry and water said NSW was working with the MDBA and is on track to lodge the water resource plans by the deadline.

The MDBA has refused to participate in the royal commission.