The National Water Commission has delivered a damning indictment of the Labor government’s record on water reform. Perhaps the most damning revelation is that “COAG has not yet responded to the Commission’s recommendations in its previous biennial assessment, released in 2009.”
In its review the National Water Commission has found that the regulation of coal seam gas developments is not being fully integrated into water planning arrangements. The Commission notes that while the NSW government has introduced reforms which require coal seam gas developments to obtain water licences, Queensland’s arrangements “remain outside water planning and management frameworks.” The Commission has found that the coal seam gas industry could extract around 300 GL per year from groundwater systems over the next 25 years, compared to the 540 GL per year currently extracted from the Great Artesian Basin.
Well yet another Labor Party belly flop. They have been so busy in their concern for CO2 that they seemed to have ignored H2O. COAG has not yet responded to the Commission’s recommendations in its previous biennial assessment, released in 2009. The Labor party is just so busy frolicking that up to 300 GL (300,000,000,000 litres) a year of water from one of the nation’s most precious resources, the Great Artesian Basin, that it seems to have been given away without water licences to coal seam gas operators. Some farmers have lost up to 95% of their groundwater in NSW. Just another one of the mad paradoxes of Labor in its varying guises of incompetence.
We should not be surprised that Anna Bligh is putting the mining royalties over water security. That is what happens when you start heading towards $85 billion in debt.
The Nationals passed a motion at their recent Federal Council which called on the government to ensure that the regulation of coal seam gas developments “are properly evaluated under national water planning processes.” But this government can’t even bring itself to respond a report released in 2009. How can we expect that they can manage the complicated impacts of an industry which will potentially increase the water extracted from the Great Artesian Basin by over 50%?
The National Water Commission also finds that the Commonwealth Government’s progress on recovering water for the environment has been “disappointingly slow”.
This government has delayed the release of the draft Basin Plan three times this year. If it can’t even release a report, what confidence can people have that this incompetent government won’t mess up the Murray-Darling Basin which produces 40 per cent of Australia’s food.