RUSHED water legislation is a train wreck waiting to happen, writes PETER HUNT

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd faces a second humiliating defeat in delivering one of his government's key environmental promises.

Mr Rudd and his Water Minister, Penny Wong, are rushing to cut the Murray Darling Basin cap, which top water industry analysts are already warning is a "train wreck".

The Commonwealth, in partnership with the Murray Darling Basin Authority, released an issues paper on establishing new Sustainable Diversion Limits on all water users across the basin's catchments in November. The SDLs are at the heart of the new cap.

But industry, state governments and community groups were given until December 18 to respond to one of the most complex issues to confront them.

The MDBA has until the end of next month to produce draft SDLs for basin catchments, which must then be handed to the lawyers for drafting prior to their public release mid-year.

Let's make this clear, we are talking about cutting the water supplies of thousands of irrigators and two million people in a bid to boost the basin's environmental flows.

Surely such an ambitious task requires some decent modelling, community consultation and socio-economic studies.

How can the environmental water best be managed as it flows through the basin? What are the sites to be watered and how? What are the environmental goals?

The MDBA issues paper is so poorly written that not even top state government water bureaucrats and irrigation industry leaders, north and south of the Murray, could make sense of it.

Take this pearl of wisdom: "After (one would have thought before) the environmentally sustainable level of take characteristics are identified and characterised, it will be necessary for the MDBA to determine the environmental watering requirements of key environmental assets and key ecosystem functions as a key contribution to the environmentally sustainable level of take and integrate the characteristics and undertake a Basin-wide review and gap analysis".

Make sense? The only real description of the Federal Government's environmental goals is a vague ambition in the issues paper and its Water Act that the new basin plan should "give effect to relevant international agreements", with specific reference to Australia's RAMSAR commitments.

Meeting our obligations under these RAMSAR agreements is nigh on impossible in many MDB catchments.

For example:

Reviving the RAMSAR-listed Coorong, would first require filling the Murray River's Lower Lakes (a vast volume of water). Then another 2000 megalitres a day would be needed to be flushed through the Murray Mouth to keep it open allowing the tide and wind pushed seawater back into the Coorong. Yes, the Coorong at the Murray Mouth is a marine ecosystem.

The Wimmera Mallee's RAMSAR-listed Lake Albacutya is downstream of Australia's largest freshwater lake, Lake Hindmarsh. Lake Hindmarsh must fill to at least 378,000 megalitres before it spills into Lake Albacutya.

Annual inflows into the Wimmera catchment have averaged 61,000 megalitres, for the past decade. Lake Hindmarsh alone would lose 145,000 megalitres a year in evaporation.

Even blind Freddy would recognise meeting our RAMSAR and other international environmental commitments would result in SDLs of zero for the rest of the community, a truly absurd proposition.

One rather reserved catchment manager said: "The timelines for this SDL process are very, very challenging to say the very least".

Whereas irrigation industry leaders were more blunt: "It's bloody stupid".

The tragedy is many Basin communities are, as yet, unaware of how damaging the new SDL-based plan will be to their futures. And the penny won't drop until it's all a bit late.

No doubt all hell breaks loose across NSW and Victoria once the SDLs are released mid-year.

But don't expect Penny Wong to flinch.

She has Papa Rudd breathing down her neck, demanding they get the basin plan sorted after the failure to deliver a CPRS.

Then again, if all else fails Penny and Kevin can always go back to blaming the Victorian and NSW Governments for their own failures. After all that's what their predecessors did.

  • Peter Hunt is a senior Weekly Times reporter.