A lot of the discussion around water of late has been about the immediate concerns of watering crops, or growing fodder, but there is a longer term issue at hand that could have bigger consequences.
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While the Murray Darling Basin Association has, on the whole, been given the tick as achieving most of what it needs to have been getting done so far, concerns have been raised about the body marking its own homework.
Stakeholders have been raising the issue of accountability for some time, and now the Productivity Commission has flagged this as a key concern.
At stake is the success of the Basin Plan. If it doesn’t reach its targets by 2024, then more water buybacks will likely be on the table.
The current situation with water lost to buybacks, plus the squeeze on producers with the drought, shows the importance of using dollars on efficiency measures instead of buybacks.
At this point, there remains a lot of planning to make sure offset projects are delivered where they’re needed, and that they allow environmental flow targets to be met.
This planning has to be done by July 2019, if construction and/or implementation is to be completed by 2024.
The catch is the planning is done by the states, to which the MDBA is the advisor, and the MDBA says the states are well behind schedule.
The reason the planning is so important is that phase also has to demonstrate that water buybacks won’t be necessary.
Meanwhile, mid next year the MDBA will be removing its advisory hat to get busy regulating. That is, it will be marking the success of the projects it is currently helping to plan.
MDBA chief executive says he’d rather stick to the plan than allow a pause in its progress.
On the one hand, with the states already so far behind, it makes sense to avoid the disruption of the Productivity Commission’s suggested restructure.
On the other, is the fact the states have been allowed to get this far behind an example of the problem the commission is talking about?
While it is late in the overall scheme of things to call out this flaw, maybe the Productivity Commission’s restructure will prevent greater risk down the track.
