PROPERTY rights are being talked up as major focus in the development of a new cap on water use in the Murray Darling Basin.
Farmers may be sceptical of yet another attempt – this time nationally – to wind back water use in the Murray Darling Basin to more sustainable levels and are concerned about what this might mean for existing entitlements.
But the new Murray Darling Basin Authority chairman Mike Taylor said farmers' rights must and will be clearly defined.
He said they will also be transparent, but will explicitly detail all the risks associated with holding a water entitlement in a future with less water.
While recent high-profile purchases of water for the environment have dominated attention given to the Government's national reforms of the Murray Darling, the MDBA last week released a new "concept statement" which outlines the steps the authority will go through to develop this new national management plan and ultimately cap ground and surface water extractions.
A proposed plan will be released in July next year for comment, with a final plan in out in 2011.
One of the most important changes with this plan will be having clear consistent property rights right across the basin, Mr Taylor said.
"What is meant by water in one part of the basin is understood (differently) in another part of the basin," Mr Taylor said.
"There will be clear registers of those rights and farmers can actually get clarity about what is available.
"Importantly there need to be clear trading regimes so when trades take place people generally understand what is happening."
Mr Taylor said he could understand the anxieties of farmers as their communities entered another period of water planning.
He said a continual shifting of the goal posts in terms of cuts in allocation were a good indication of the poor decisions of the past.
"We've been issuing water property rights as though we knew what future rainfall was going to look like and what future certainty was going to look like in terms of climate, or climate variability, and this is what we are now paying the price for," Mr Taylor said.
"We made all those water allocation decisions then we've been confronted with a decade of dramatically less inflow.
"So a critical part of the future is being much clearer about what the certainties might be around your property right and what the risks are that you're going to carry with it.
"As a nation we gave farmers a large amount of water with a hand over the heart and a promise that would always be provided. But there was no good basis for it."
Mr Taylor, who grew up at Donald in country Victoria, said he can still see a major role for irrigation and agriculture in the Murray Darling Basin.
"I don't think there's any doubt that the role of irrigation would continue to be a significant part but it will have to be within the new sustainable limits that are going to be determined off the back of environmental, scientific and knowledge-based information," he said.
"I don't think there's any doubt that we are going to see some very high productivity coming from that water and high-value being delivered from it.
"When water becomes scarce we actually put better systems in place to get much better productivity from it.
"I don't think we should see anything that the authority's undertaking other than working to put an environment in place that actually sustains and improves significantly a very degraded environment."
That said, Mr Taylor made it clear the status quo was not going to continue, although he argues there have already been significant changes to the way water is used and what it is used for.
"A very simple way of looking at this is the way in which the basin is used for irrigation compared to 25 years ago – this has already changed very dramatically," he said.
"There was once a time when water in the basin was used extensively for wheat production and fat lamb grazing.
"That no longer occurs and one would expect that in changes in practices and greater efficiency in water use you would see a different set of industries evolving."
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