Melinda Pavey on the first flush, north v south and environmental flows

Ms Pavey spoke to the 200 people registered for the webinar from a dairy farm at Belmore River in her North Coast electorate of Oxley.

The Nationals' party member, who has held the water portfolio for little over a year, gave listeners an insight on everything from the controversial management of the first flush to the release of water from Wyangala Dam.

The Minister, who grew up on a Victorian dairy farm, also discussed the growing division between water holders in the north and south of the state.

But, she also flagged what appears to be an awkward division between the minister and the various government departments and agencies she oversees, particularly around the communication of decisions by "political servants" to the Minister.

Ms Pavey said the antagonism between water users in the south and north of the state had been exacerbated by drought.

"To have the south for the third year without good general security allocations is stressful, I get that," Ms Pavey said.

"But I'm not going to continue to be part of a north versus south debate, I get accused when I'm in the south of supporting the north and when I'm in the north they say 'well aren't you from Victoria".

"I just want to show the leadership required to get the outcomes that we need to restore faith, having people fighting, cheap political pot shots is not the way to solve that."

Ms Pavey said she also needed more leadership from industry bodies including the NSW Irrigators, National Irrigators Council, NSW Farmers and National Farmers Federation.

"When Nationals leader John Barilaro suggested food security was at risk, we had the National Farmers Federation come out and attack him," she said.

"We need to support each other and not turn on each other, we need to turn united on the greater enemy that wants to take our water away."

Uniting was a common theme of the seminar, Ms Pavey acknowledging anger and division often came from a lack of understanding of water policy, pointing out even her own agencies offered conflicting advice and more work was needed on water literacy.

"It is easy to get concerned, I got that concern when I've been in the Murray over the past 12 months, to see a river flowing at minor flood when we're in the middle of a drought defies commonsense, so that challenge, hysteria and anger, I understand that and that is what has perpetuated the myth and the misunderstandings," she said.

"It is very difficult to get that water literacy up there when you have such a complicated system, even in my own agency, it's getting better and we have some reforms happening, but I can sometimes get different sets of advice. Things need to be better."

The disconnect between government departments - and government departments and the minister - was brought up when Ms Pavey was questioned on the handling of the first flush event in January, which saw an embargo on floodplain harvesting lifted in parts of the northern basin, angering downstream water users.

Ms Pavey said she wanted to make it very clear that she, as minister, "had nothing to do with any of the decisions that were made."

"Any aspersions that are being cast are being cast at people who work for the Department of Fisheries, Department of Environment, Department of Industry Water and Water NSW," Ms Pavey said.

"They as a group made decisions during that rain event, because they were getting information from farmers and people in those communities.

"Remember they were about to put sandbags out at Narrabri, there were some very big rain cells that had an impact.

"It was those officials, those public servants, who made a decision that for three days of the 30-day event there would be a lifting of the embargo of floodplain harvesting in a certain patch.

"There was about 30 gigalitres of a 350GL event used to avoid damage to infrastructure."

The management of the first flush event is now under review by an independent panel.

The minister also brought up the disconnect between agencies in relation to the 22GL released from Wyangala Dam by the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder in September and October last year.

"I think some of the conversations have been missing at a Murray Darling Authority level and a Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder level.

"I was very annoyed to learn last October that we just dropped 22GL of water from Wyangala Dam which is today only at about 13.5 per cent.

"The Commonwealth response was 'well you knew about it NSW', well I didn't know about it as the minister, Water NSW made the transaction because they're the river and dam operator and there were conversations that went on in the environment department but there was never the thought of bringing all those conversations together.

"That is not an optimum outcome but we have to learn from those challenges and those issues and make better decisions into the future."