To date, most of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan’s water goals have been achieved through buy backs which have been now independently verified to create adverse regional socio-economic impacts and meddle with the operation and value of the national water market. 

On/off-farm water efficiency projects have contributed the second-highest volumes, which have been reported to support local communities and irrigators as they encourage more ‘crop per drop’. They also provide a range of economic benefits and jobs in the regions associated with engineering and construction.

However, progress on water efficiency projects has been slower than expected, which is being compounded by the inherent complexities associated with large-scale infrastructure projects – including long lag times, supply chain constraints and rising costs.

As the July 2024 deadline looms to finish the environmental water required under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, it has now been conceded by Government that the existing plan to recover this shortfall through efficiency projects will not be achieved in full and on time and that the Federal Government will have no choice but to consider other ways to make up the shortfall.

This WFEP Program offers an immediate, affordable and genuine solution to make up the shortfall without any adverse impact on local growers or their communities.

Irrigators and growers who choose to be part of the program would get the benefit of both an upfront and annual income payment, while being able to make productive use of the environmental water when it’s not needed by the Commonwealth.

Additionally, the program will enable growers to vote their annual water covenant to the best local environmental watering projects within their catchment and enable them to further engage with these projects together with other local community and First Nations peoples.  

No. The Water Futures Efficiency Program is a proposal that has been made to the Government to fund as an alternative to other measures, which will have alarmingly detrimental impacts to our regional communities.

The program framework includes a range of water sharing options or covenants, which have been designed to maximise the support and involvement from different grower groups. 

As such, each of the four products create a covenant over a different section of a grower’s water entitlement (ie first, last or equal sharing) and are activated under different water flow and allocation conditions.  While it is the grower’s choice about which product to activate, it would be envisaged that a rice grower would choose a different product than say a citrus grower and the program has been designed to enable this flexibility.

As such the program will deliver water under a range of climatic conditions, also providing the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder with an ability to support diverse deliveries and outcomes under drought, normal or wet catchment conditions.  

Environmental Water demand varies from season to season and catchment by catchment, which can experience drought, normal or wet conditions. During wet conditions (eg, excess water flows), under the WEFP program, it would be most likely that the CEWH would not call upon the water delivery, as such they would have no need to access/or disrupt the market, and water can be used by the grower and/or be carried through to a future season for use by the grower.

The program utilises existing state water titling and common/contract law provisions to create and register the covenant and, as such, does not require any legislative change to create the product.   A determination or definition needs to be established, however, if the WFEP will meet the requirements of the long-term water adjustments required by legislation under the Basin Plan, Waterfind proposes that this could be a simple policy determination rather than a legislative change, but ultimately this would be a decision of the government.

A blunt, rapid approach to buybacks would have potentially devastating socio-economic consequences across our regions.  An escalated recovery through buybacks of up to 1 million ML of raw entitlement may be required to achieve the long-term cap equivalent shortfall of the water recovery targets.  

A water recovery target of this magnitude is far greater than the normal market liquidity (quantity of trade in the permanent market per annum) and, as such, would either require the government to conduct this purchase over a long run timeframe (10 or 20 years) or dramatically increase the price to, in essence, ‘bring forward’ future years market liquidity to today.

While dramatic inflationary shocks would be welcomed by retiring farmers, it would leave unknown substantial consequences to those farmers who remain as well as new farmers entering the sector. This is because the value of water would quickly reach an amount which would make farming unviable, exhausting this most important industry from our regional communities and national food security.