NSW flood plain harvesting licences criticised amid drought

Paul Cameron watches his mob of thirsty cattle sink their heads into the Goan waterhole on the outskirts of Trangie in western New South Wales.

Mr Cameron has driven his cattle to graze the scrubby patches of Crown land hugging the public billabong for more than a year.

"I've been walking the stock to town … because we haven't got any water in our own system," Mr Cameron said.

But his is not a typical drought story.

Mr Cameron says water that would normally flow onto his property when it rains is caught in dams on his neighbour's place under a flood plain harvest licence.

"All my natural flows are gone and gone forever due to artificial mechanics," Mr Cameron said.

Water for courses

Mr Cameron is a dryland farmer.

His type of farming relies on rainfall and water moving through the wider river system.

Irrigators, like Mr Cameron's cotton-growing neighbour, are different.

They need higher volumes of water than rain-fed crops, so they store water in dams and channels.

Most of the water comes from government-built dams but some of it comes from capturing rain or floodwater, known as flood plain harvesting.

It takes water moving overland, headed for natural water systems and has always been opportunistic, according to water policy expert Bill Johnson.

"Because it had been allowed to go on like that, it was easier to licence it than it was to enforce it."

From 2016, the NSW government began to issue flood plain harvest licences to irrigators who fitted certain criteria across five of the seven water management zones in the northern Murray-Darling Basin.

NSW Executive director of water planning and knowledge, Mitchell Isaacs now heads the team that oversaw the rollout.

"In order to be eligible, people had to have either a [dam] that was in place at the time or an approval for a [dam] that was to be able to take flood plain harvesting," Mr Isaacs said.

Dubbed the Healthy flood plain Project, some farmers were able to get very old or even unregistered dams rubber-stamped as part of their flood plain harvest licence.

Some were permitted to dramatically expand their storages.

Mr Isaacs said the criterion acted as a "cap" on how much water could be taken.

"If you didn't have a work or an approval, then it meant you weren't an existing flood plain harvester and we were trying to prevent any further growth in take."

'Growing like topsy'

NSW Farmers Association president Xavier Martin said he was dubious about the way the government was processing flood plain harvest licences.

"Members are reporting to me valley to valley, region to region, there's a serious lack of transparency in the departmental approach to what they do and how they do it," Mr Martin said.

He said the number and size of dams had ballooned under the Healthy Floodplains Project, meaning the amount of rain or overland flow entering the dams had also surged.

"One branch meeting I was at recently, a member was showing me how a quite small 3 megalitre tail water dam that he didn't have a problem with … has since been approved as a 3 gigalitre storage," Mr Martin said.

He said flood plain harvesting practices were changing the landscape, drying downstream users out or exposing them to bursting dams during heavy rain.

"Some people lose their beneficial flows," he said.

"They might have been able to run 600 cows [but] because of the flood plain take, they can barely run 200 cows.

"Others get extreme velocity.

"And then there's just a few that are in the Goldilocks zone that actually get the water they want when they want it."

'Boots on the ground, eyes in the sky'

The Natural Resources Access Regulator (NRAR) is the independent body responsible for monitoring how much water licensees are keeping in their storages under flood plain harvesting licences.

The watchdog relies on a network of satellites and installed meters to catch people taking more water than permitted.

"They've got boots on the ground, eyes in the sky and they are a fair but firm regulator," Mr Isaacs said.

But NRAR's latest compliance figures across the five water management zones paint a patchy picture.

Two zones — the Border Rivers and the Gwydir — have the most storages metered.

However, Macquarie, where Paul Cameron is, has 67 per cent of storage unmetered.

Neighbouring Barwon Darling sits at 71 per cent unmetered and the Namoi zone is yet to be inspected.

Mr Isaacs says this is because irrigators are still grappling with a decade-old system.

"There will always be some teething issues when you have any new regulatory framework," he said.

Bill Johnson says the problem is cultural.

"In 2017, the New South Wales Ombudsman did its third report on the administration of water in New South Wales."

"They observed that there was a cultural impediment within the department to really enforcing the law."

Rainwater exempt

Central to the flood plain harvesting debate is rain.

Because the NSW Environment Protection Authority prohibits irrigators from discharging water in case it contains pesticides, exemptions are made for any rainfall licensees capture.

But since flood events only occur every five to 10 years, rain is what is most often going into storages under flood plain harvest licences.

Mitchell Isaacs said the government had factored that in.

"We've effectively removed that [rain] from the volume we would issue [on] a flood plain harvesting licence." he said.

Bill Johnson said this loophole made measuring accurate water harvest impossible.

"I don't think anyone knows how much water is being taken with flood plain harvesting," he said.

"It's all mixed up with rainfall run-off, different sources, river pumping and unregulated flows."

He says graziers like Paul Cameron will continue to suffer as long as water is seen as for the taking.

"There're many stories like Paul's across the basin," Mr Johnson said.

The NSW Irrigators Council and the minister for water declined to be interviewed for this story.

Mr Cameron's neighbour also declined, but told the ABC they had always complied with NSW government water policy requirements.