A summit of water bodies, community leaders, food processors, irrigators and MPs, asked for the minister to reset relationships and open dialogue with regional communities.
The summit, held in Bendigo, and attended by the Victorian Water Minister Harriet Shing, carried three resolutions urging the federal minister to listen.
Joint chair of the GMID Water Leadership Group David McKenzie told the summit, what was once known as the basin plan, no longer exists.
“The Plibersek Plan that has replaced it has been enacted against the will of key stakeholders and communities, including the entire Victorian Government,” Mr McKenzie said.
”All the important protections for communities that were either embedded in the original plan, or have been added thereafter, have been removed.
“In northern Victoria, we are totally exposed to the whims of the Plibersek Plan.”
He said the most recent credible analysis of the impact of water recovery in the GMID (undertaken by Frontier Economics in late 2022) found that water recovery to that point had already seen 50 per cent less water use.
“The modelling showed that in a scenario where a further 700 plus gigalitres would have to be recovered from the Southern Murray-Darling Basin, combined with a repeat of the Millenium Drought, gross value of irrigated agriculture would fall by $900 million a year (including $300 million in northern Victoria), and assuming all water would flow to the highest value users, there would be no water for rice, no water for irrigated cropping and grazing, none for dairy, and more than 20,000 hectares of permanent plantings with insufficient water to keep them alive,” Mr McKenzie said.
“In the GMID alone, a total drying off of about 45,000 hectares.”
This was, he said, a nightmare scenario.
The summit resolutions were:
- The Federal Minister for Water and Environment, Tanya Plibersek, must begin to collaborate in good faith with the Victorian Government and northern Victorian communities and support the approach outlined in the Victorian Prospectus to deliver water saving projects that have neutral or positive socio-economic outcomes.
- As publicly stated by the Commonwealth Government, Victorian irrigation districts must be excluded from current and future EOI buybacks to ensure equity with interstate districts and to prove the federal minister’s commitment to good faith negotiations.
- The federal minister must actively reset the relationship with northern Victorian communities to ensure basin plan outcomes can be met without sacrificing socio-economic stability, preserving a viable irrigation footprint for future food production.
- The Victorian Government must urgently deliver a whole-of-government response to support irrigation-dependent communities from the impending negative impacts of the federal basin plan.
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