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Thanks very much Leigh and thank you for that sort of
quick summary of the views across the Basin.
I think that's a fair reflection of the
divergent views that we've heard over the last
several or the many, many months actually.
What I thought I might do given that we're about
three quarters of the way through the consultation
period, which are the formal consultation period
which started in November last year.
Let's just give a very quick overview of just
some of the background, the rationale and what the
key elements of the Basin Plan are and then have a
short discussion I think on what I think is where
the state of affairs are now.
Where some of the message we've been getting,
the views of people, where this is all leading and
what the next steps are and leave most of it I
think to some of the questions that you might
have to follow up on that.
So the first thing, the rationale,
I'll really go through this pretty quickly.
But it's always useful I think to just think of
where this comes from and I think Leigh mentioned
before there was the drought of the millennium
drought which really focused attention on what
the damage is.
But then I think the other things that have been
brewing for some years, the increasing water allocations.
Oops I haven't got the slide up.
Over the last many decades particularly in the '50s
and '60s and then a lot of the environmental problems
that have been emerging along at the same time.
Huge wealth and productivity was generated
but the same time we saw the emerging management
problems that had to be addressed like salinity,
blue-green algae and some of the challenges most
particularly and spectacularly in the lower
part, lower regions of the Murray in the drought.
So some of these problems have been emerging for a while.
The salinity ones first became really evident,
although there's evidence back into the '20s but
really evident in about the '70s and some of the
problems of the at the lower reaches,
the Murray mouth closed for the first time in 1981
in recorded history and I think there's more and
more problems emerged over time.
The Sustainable Rivers Audit is, while there's
another one coming very shortly,
the 2008 one, although it was 2008 it did take a
long-term view in assessment of the health
of the various catchments and clearly showed that
there was some significant issues in all but a few of
the northern catchments.
The Water Act was in effect a response to a
whole range of the issues that had been emerging and
were exacerbated in the drought and it affected
many things.
I'll just speak on some of the key things that are
pertinent to the draft plan and the MDBA.
It led to the establishment of the MDBA
and out of that there was agreement through
extensive state negotiations over a few
years to some referral of powers to enable the MDBA
to operate as an independent authority and
manage the Basin as a whole.
I think it's one of the key things about what the
Basin Plan is requiring.
You hear a lot about the sustainable diversion
limits and certainly that's,
you know that's one of the key objectives was to try
and identify what a sustainable diversion
limit was.
But it's also signalled a change to a Basin-wide
planning and management and that's really quite a
significant shift.
Although the Basin had been managed on many
aspects in a collaborative way,
on salinity and on fish strategies and a number of
other things over many years this was the first
time that this was going to be quite a formal
process and include a whole range of activities
that will be pulled into that planning framework.
So I think the other thing that's probably worth
keeping in mind too is that the whole planning
framework was meant to be a fairly high level and be
the planning framework for the whole of the Basin of
which the states would be primarily continued to be
responsible for the water issuing in management decisions.
So just briefly now on the key features of the Plan.
The first and might be just very quickly going through
some of the principles that the authorities
undertaken in putting its documents forward.
These are just a sample a few props here,
but there's actually a mountain of material that
sort of underpins the analysis that underpins it.
But I think it's worth just sort of running
through some of these principles to get a sense
of what was driving their proposals that are coming forward.
The first one is the healthy working Basin concept.
It was one I think that originally came up in the commission.
I think it's been coined for some time but it was a
key driver of the thinking that one of the
requirements of a plan is that you maintain a
working Basin that was going to continue to
deliver wealth and productivity to Australia
for the future and to return that to health.
So they're actually quite sort of the key principles
I think.
The optimising social economic,
environmental outcomes is in fact really just a sort
of more greater elaboration of that
initial point really.
And it's been a key driver of the Authority's
decisions across the whole range of aspects of the Plan.
Adaptive management as one of the key principles of
effective natural resource management has been a
central part of our thinking on the Plan.
That you have a starting point,
which is the proposals we are putting forward,
and then we have first the process of transition
before the limits are becoming enforceable in
2019 and then you have opportunities to adapt not
only during that period but as part of the ongoing
process of 10-year reviews of the Plan.
Localism is the other key concept where the, although
this is a high-level framework document,
the actions the things that really make a
difference and is the collective activities of a
whole range of people who live in the Basin and
have lots of ideas and have the incentive and the
wherewithal to manage.
The time for communities adjust as I said is one of
the critical parts of our thinking.
Just briefly in the key elements of the Plan as I
said, it's the framework for water planning and management.
There's an Environmental Watering Plan,
there's the Salinity Management Plan,
there's requirements for state water plans and the
Authority has a role in accrediting or advising
the Minister on accreditation of those
plans, a level playing field for water-trading and
monitoring and evaluation so all those broad
requirements that you have for NRM Planning and management.
And the other part of it is the sustainable allocation.
What's the sustainable level of use that can
continue and still retain the environmental benefits
and the health of the environment?
The one we are proposing, it looks a very exact
number actually but it's 10,873 GL a year.
That includes diversions and interceptions and it's
actually the result of looking at reduction
against 2009 levels of use of 2,750.
I'll quickly run through the development of the
Basin Plan.
The first point I want to make with this slide,
it's a terrific slide.
It goes back over 114 years actually but it sets
out what the challenge of determining a long-term,
sustainable diversion limit is for the Basin Plan.
The issue is, are we worrying about the
droughts, are we worrying about the floods or what
is, you know is it just a mathematical thing where
you can work out the long-term average and then
deduct a proportion of water and say that's how
it will be?
Of course our system doesn't work like that.
And so what we've had to look at over this whole
span of years is how different levels of
consumption are going to be able to be managed
across the whole breadth of that time.
So we've modelled very complex scenarios over the
flood times and the drought times looking back
at the climate record that we have detailed
information of the climate record and the flows going
back 114 years.
That means what we're looking forward is not the
sustainable limit for next year or the year after.
It's looking at what is the long-term limit for
the health of the Basin.
We looked at 122 I think it is,
sites across the Basin, particularly those where
there's high water use so that we were able to
identify what the impact was going to be in some of
the most water-hungry areas those particularly
in those large flood plains in the lower
reaches of the--or both of the Murray but also some
of the northern rivers as well.
I won't go into this other than to say it's very complicated.
It's not just a matter of just putting the
water, stopping, you know reducing the irrigation
and then just returning the water to the river.
It's quite a complex assessment of the water
requirements of different wetlands of freshness in
rivers of requirements in upper flood plains and the
timing and pulses of those requirements.
So it's quite a complex process and this is
modelled over those 114 years.
We also had a look at the social and economic impacts.
We both looked on the positive side ,
which I haven't shown here actually,
but we looked at the industries in the Basin
and those dependent on irrigation and their
productivity growth and their opportunities for
future productivity growth and we looked at the
impacts on irrigation communities,
given irrigation communities to those that
would be the most affected by any reductions in water use.
This showed I think, it's a very complex graph and
it's really sort of the endpoint of a large
number of analyses of which we were assisted by
ABARES in doing these analyses as well as a lot
of local economic and social studies that we had
as well.
Just trying to give an indication of where in
some of those more highly impacted areas where some
of the likely areas of risk might be.
Given the social and economic impacts, how do we
integrate these?
This is always a very challenging question.
There are sort of three things I guess that we did
as our way of integrating.
There was one as I said was the whole construct on
which we set our proposals and that was that all
these operating structures,
the rules and the rivers that were built up to
deliver irrigation water were going to remain so
that productive irrigation use would continue.
And so that did constrain some of the opportunities
we might have had for environmental watering but
it was critical to maintaining the working
river nature of the Basin.
We also had the transition period which in all the
advice that we've got from the social studies is the
most critical thing that you can do to assist
adaptation over time and adjustment of communities.
And we took probably the lower end of the band of
the environmental risks and that's sort of
where we sort of started out with our scenario
modelling which was both looking at the way the
level of reduction we thought would be
manageable over time with assistance for communities
and also ones that would still nevertheless achieve
the environmental outcomes.