Flooding rains in Queensland late last year and Cyclone Alfred have delivered exceptional rainfall in the north. Yet, inland and the Murray-Darling/Barka Rivers are still struggling to survive a drying and heating climate and ongoing over-extraction of water for industrial scale irrigation and mining.
Environment groups and local communities want NSW Labor to implement new water-sharing rules that raise the amounts flowing into Menindee Lakes and on to South Australia — currently in drought.
The NSW Nature Conservation Council (NCC) welcomed the Natural Resources Commission (NRC) review of the water-sharing rules governing Menindee Lakes and the Lower Darling/Barka River. It confirmed what river communities have known for years: excessive upstream extraction, primarily for cotton irrigation, is robbing the river of its life force.
“For years, communities have been calling for action while report after report confirms the same truth — too much water is being taken upstream by cotton irrigation,” said Mel Gray from the NCC.
While Labor has attempted to curb floodwater extraction, the review revealed that the current water-sharing rules are ineffective. Instead of restoring rivers, they have helped transfer billions of dollars in public water entitlements to corporations, leaving ecosystems and local communities struggling to survive.
The Darling-Barka River was once a permanently flowing river, reducing to low flows in drought, but still maintaining a connection to the Murray River.
It was only after governments made water a commodity that it began to dry down to separated pools. Rivers running dry in drought only happened after extraction increased.
The early irrigators used to run the rivers dry in times of low flow, but this has greatly increased over recent decades.
Fish biologists Martin Mallen-Cooper and Brenton Zampatti have found evidence that the Darling and Murray Rivers did not dry down to separated remnant pools in drought. Minimum flows kept the rivers connected at all times, otherwise large native fish species such as the Murray Cod and Callop could not have survived.
Mallen-Cooper and Zampatti write that the “mythology” of the Murray River is that more than 100 years ago it “dried to a series of pools” in drought and that “therefore, the biota are flexible and adapted to hydrological variability and lentic [still] habitats”.
They found that “cease‐to‐flow events were not natural and were instead caused by multiple small‐scale irrigation diversions” and the Murray River had “widespread perennial lotic [flowing] habitats”.
To sustain adequate water quality, the Darling-Barka system must maintain minimum flows to support fish and river communities along the length of the river system to the junction with the Murray River.
Catastrophic consequences
Responding to the 10-year review of NSW water-sharing plans, community and river defenders have called for urgent action.
Bev Smiles of Inland Rivers Network (IRN) wrote in her submission to the NRC review that the Murray and Lower Darling Water Sharing Plan had failed to improve the health of the Murray Lower Darling/Barka water source.
She said the restricted Environmental Water Allowance in Menindee Lakes storage had failed to improve threatened native fish habitat and water quality. The Lower Darling/Barka River Flow Restart Allowance is “inadequate”, lacking flexibility and adaptive management opportunities.
Smiles said the insufficient water flow means communities in the Lower Darling/Barka are “suffering health threats”, as well as the “loss of recreation opportunities” and “sense of place”.
The tragedy of the Darling/Barka River became clear in March 2023, when an estimated 20–30 million fish died at Menindee.
Last December there was another catastrophic fish kill in Walgett, while toxic blue-green algae bloomed further downstream, choking the Darling/Barka River.
These events are not anomalies; they are symptoms of a broken system.
Over-extraction by cotton companies has removed the river’s natural small-to-medium water flows, creating a pattern of extreme droughts and floods.
Without water flows, organic matter accumulates on the floodplains, leading to severe blackwater events that deplete oxygen levels in the water, suffocating fish and other aquatic life.
“The mighty Darling/Barka River has lost its heartbeat,” Gray said. “The small, regular pulses of water the river needs in between floods have been taken away.”
The consequences are devastating. Traditional Owners speak of their profound pain as the river dwindles, unable to sustain life as it once did. Fish are dying in the millions, waterbird populations have halved in one year and entire ecosystems that have thrived for millennia are collapsing.
Environmental water versus productive water
Communities living near the Darling River blame decades of NSW government policies that put the interests of agribusiness ahead of the environment.
“All parties should commit to revising all existing and proposed water-sharing plans to ensure they reflect the effects of climate change on rainfall and river flows,” Smiles said.
“Inexplicably, NSW water-sharing plans are based on average flows before 2004, before the Millennium drought. Treating that as an aberration rather than a new norm is, at best, wishful thinking and, at worst, gross incompetence.”
IRN said the water-sharing plan has completely failed to meet the majority of its objectives. However, Smiles said it has met a number of its economic objectives, such as establishing water trading rules. “There is an inherent bias in the water sharing plan’s access rules towards economic benefit above the environmental, social and cultural requirements.”
Smiles said that over the past five years, nearly 22,000 million litres of environmental water have been traded to the irrigation industry — mainly cotton growers. Environmental groups, including the Murray-Darling Conservation Alliance, warn that without immediate action, the river’s decline will continue.
The recently released Constraints Relaxation Implementation Roadmap proposed projects to reconnect the river to its floodplains and wetlands, critical breeding grounds for fish and waterbirds. However, many landholders and conservationists fear that political and corporate pressures will delay implementation.
“We’ve all been waiting 10 years for projects that will deliver more water to wetlands and floodplains,” Craig Wilkins, National Director of the Murray-Darling Conservation Alliance said last October. “We feel the frustration of many people consulted for this report, who have told governments to ‘Just get on with it’.”
NSW Labor is being urged to adopt the Connectivity Expert Panel’s recommendations to enforce stricter extraction limits and restore the natural flow of the river system.
Its key demands include improving the irrigating rules on unregulated rivers and for floodplain harvesting diversions and establishing a work program of Water NSW and the Department of Environment and Heritage to improve how rivers connect to floodplains and groundwater aquifers.