Keynote speech by R. Quentin Grafton delivered at the River People’s Forum,19 June 2026
Water for Rivers and Water for Life
Hello,
First, let me thank you all of you who have put in the time and effort to make this forum a reality with special thanks to Jacquie and Peta. The title for this year’s forum, ‘Restoring Flows, Reviving Life’,is most appropriate when, within the year, the next Basin Plan is determined for the coming decade, and possibly longer.
I would very much like to acknowledge that we are meeting on the traditional lands and water of the Wadi Wadi Nation. I pay my respects to Uncle Vince and all their Elders, past and present. Australia’s First Peoples have been, and always will be, the traditional custodians of our waters and land.
I need to acknowledge fellow members of the Murray-Darling Basin Knowledge Alliance, which includes my friends and colleagues, Matt Colloff, Dan Schulz and Maryanne Slattery who have joined the forum today. Much of what I will talk about comes from a joint submission on 29 April this year by all members of the Murray-Darling Basin Knowledge Alliance to the Murray-Darling Basin Authority in response to the Basin Plan Review.
Back to the Future
In a National Press Club Address in 2007, Prime Minister John Howard delivered a ‘National Plan for Water Security’. That plan was a response to water crises made worse by a decade-long Millennium Drought that ended in 2010.
Prime Minister Howard, at that time, told us that Australia’s “…current trajectory of water use and management is not sustainable”. Further, he called it: “a great national problem.” His solution, in his own words, needed: “…radical and permanent change.” and to “…to confront head on and in a comprehensive way, the over-allocation of water in the Murray-Darling Basin.”
In 2007, Australia also had a new Water Act which had as its key objects:
(i) the return to environmentally sustainable levels of extraction for water resources that are overallocated or overused; and
(ii) to protect, restore and provide for the ecological values and ecosystem services of the Murray–Darling Basin.
Rivers are Not Yet Restored
Sadly, for all of us, neither what John Howard promised nor the key objects of the Water Act 2007 have been delivered. We are still waiting for the changes that the Basin needs and what most Australians want. Most Environmental Watering Requirements in the Basin have not been achieved for aquatic ecosystems. As a result, many riverine systems and wetlands across the Basin are in poor ecological health. Most of the 27 Indigenous, environmental, social and compliance indicators, using publicly available data, have also not been delivered in a recent assessment of the state of the Basin.
The health of the Baaka/Darling is in severe decline, with low flows and ‘freshing’ flow pulses reduced by over 90% due to irrigation diversions. This has caused catastrophic fish kills and mussel deaths, including the massive fish kills in the drought of 2017-2019. According to the Australian Academy of Science in its 2019 report on the fish kills: “The root cause of the fish kills is that there is not enough water in the Darling system to avoid catastrophic decline of condition through dry periods”.
Other rivers are also in poor health, as shown by the 2026 listings of the Macquarie Marshes as endangered, and the Lower Murray as critically endangered, under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
The proposal for the next Basin Plan is to pretty much leave the Sustainable Diversion Limits, or SDLs, in the current plan unchanged. This is despite the fact that current SDLs do not account for climate change.
Failing to have SDLs adapt to increased warming is beyond ridiculous! Climate change in the past decade is accelerating, with average global surface temperatures currently rising at about 0.35° Celsius per decade. In the Basin, increases in temperature are already driving higher evaporation rates, and greater variability (magnitude and timing) in rainfall. Climate change has already reduced stream flows. But this is made much worse by increased water diversions in the northern Basin, including from floodplain harvesting. Over the past three decades in the Northern Basin, irrigation has been responsible for increased volumes of water extracted, stored and evaporated. This is water that would otherwise flow into rivers and wetlands and that would have provided highly valuable and critically important environmental and cultural services.
We are told by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority that much of the ‘heavy lifting’ for the next Basin Plan, when responding to climate change and environmental watering, will be done by ‘Complementary Measures’. This claim is supported by very little evidence. Indeed, the Inspector–General of Water Compliance Northern Basin Toolkit Inquiry Report highlighted the failure of two state governments to deliver more than $160 million in infrastructure measures to improve river health in the northern Basin—eight years after they were first promised! This documented failure adds further pressure to the impact of declining flows and diminishing flooding regimes which are the primary cause of ecosystem and biodiversity degradation.
In sum, when it comes to restoring rivers, the best available evidence tells us:
- The proposed SDLs remain too high (and must be reduced) in the next Basin Plan if they are to achieve an Environmentally Sustainable Level of Take (ESLT), as required by the Water Act,
- There is no credible evidence that ‘Complementary Measures’ can respond to the environmental needs of the Basins at scale.
Post-Truth
A common and often repeated claim is that socio-economic market costs – namely, the perceived negative impact of water recovery on irrigated agriculture–constrain any further reductions in SDLs. This is repeated in the Basin Plan Review document prepared by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority.
This is an example of post-truth, opinion not based in fact or evidence. The fact that the claim has been stated and restated and then repeated does not make it true. Indeed, psychologists have shown that we all, to a greater or lesser extent, suffer from an ‘illusory truth effect’. That is, the more we read or hear fake news, the more likely we are to believe it. Indeed, repeated false information is too often perceived as being more truthful than new information that is truthful.
The fact is that the negative impacts on Basin irrigation are dominated by climatic, market prices and demographic factors much more than by fully compensated reductions in the volumes of water entitlements. In a recent study commissioned for the Basin Plan Evaluation the conclusion was:
“Overall 95% of changes in irrigated and dryland agricultural turnover are due to factors other than basin plan water reforms from 2009-2022. Water recovery has decreased irrigated turnover by around 1.8%” (Cheesman et al. 2025, p. 28).
It’s important to know that voluntary buybacks of water entitlements from willing sellers is the most cost-effective form of environmental water recovery. Such buy-backs assist with climate change adaptation much more than irrigation infrastructure upgrades. The average costs of water recovered for the environment from buyback is some $2,100/ML; the average costs from irrigation infrastructure subsidies are some $7,100/ML. Importantly, the cost of irrigation infrastructure subsidies ($/ML) are trending upwards at a much faster rate than water recovery from voluntary buybacks, with recent off-farm infrastructure costing exceeding $20,000/ML.
Irrigation infrastructure subsidies have largely failed to deliver the desired and planned increases in Basin stream flows. If, instead, open tenders had been used to acquire water rights from willing sellers, Australia would already have achieved the stream flow targets in the current Basin Plan. And this could have been accomplished at a saving of billions of tax-payer dollars.
In sum, if we look at the evidence rather post-truth and fake news we find:
- Governments need to invest in water buybacks because there are the most economically effective means of returning water to the rivers.
- Irrigation efficiency schemes and infrastructure subsidies, intended as an alternative to buybacks to ‘save water’, should not be continued because they are expensive, ineffective and potentially environmentally damaging because of their impact on return flows.
Dearth of Data
Bad decisions, typically, get made behind closed doors with little transparency and even less accountability. This means that water planners, water users and the public need to know where, how and when water is diverted for urban communities, irrigated agriculture and other uses. We all need to know what is returned to aquifers, rivers and wetlands.
Comprehensive water accounting was agreed to by the Council of Australian Government in the 2004 National Water Initiative, reiterated by Prime Minister Howard in the National Plan for Water Security in 2007, and was a key recommendation of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Agriculture and Water Resources in 2017. Yet what has been recommended has not been delivered.
In general, Basin water planning has favoured irrigator interests rather than the public interest. A 2020 investigation into alleged inappropriate influences, undertaken by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), found that water access rules had allowed for: “opportunistic extraction by a small number of large irrigators of unprecedented volumes of water at low flows, which are the flows that are critical to riverine ecosystem health”
ICAC further found that a senior NSW public servant who had provided confidential information to an irrigator reference group did not act in the public interest. That is, his conduct was improper. As a result of its investigations, ICAC exhorted, in relation to how water is regulated in New South Wales, that: “Public officials cannot be permitted to get too close to one sector in their portfolio and ignore the other stakeholders.”
In sum, the evidence tells us that Basin water planning needs:
- Comprehensive and independent annual water auditing is critically needed. Such water audits should encompass (a) public reporting, at the river valley level, of diversions to urban, agriculture, other human uses, and environment, separated into groundwater and surface water and their interactions and (b) the impact on evaporation and return flows from irrigation infrastructure upgrades. Such an audit should have taken place years ago given the many billions in tax-payers dollars spent irrigation on infrastructure upgrades in the past 20 years.
First Peoples
Last, but not least, I want to talk to the gross injustice done to First Peoples in relation their dispossession from water on their Country.
From the very beginning of colonisation in 1788, land and water have been stolen without treaty. This dispossession has taken place under the unprincipled and patently false premise that the land and the water on which First Peoples had lived for millennia belonged to no one.
The ‘Great Dispossession’ was manifest in Australia’s own ‘water wars’, beginning first in New South Wales in the early nineteenth century. It was motivated by the desire of a few to acquire highly valuable squatting rights by stealing the land—and the water on it—from its rightful custodians, First Peoples. These water wars led to the destruction of First Peoples’ food sources by livestock; the removal of First Peoples’ fish traps; and the deliberate poisoning of the food and waterholes to ‘move on’ First Peoples.
In sum, the evidence tells us that we need to:
- Implement a focused program for Indigenous land ownership specifically in wetland and river areas, with ongoing support for Traditional Owners water management.
- Ensure that the next Basin Plan has minimum river targets, water availability and water quality requirements to support First Peoples’ health, social and economic well-being, and development.
- Incorporate the rights and interests of First Peoples in policy and management in the institutions and practices of environmental water management.
Closing Remarks
If someone gets away with water theft, or if water allocation plans allow up to 80% or more of the stream flow in dry periods, there are real winners and losers. If, annually, one thousand two hundred billion litres of water are extracted to grow cotton in the Murray-Darling Basin there are real costs to downstream users in terms of both water volumes and water quality. To give just one example, the town of Wilcannia on Baaka (lower Darling River) ran out of town-supplied drinking water in 2018–19 during the last drought. This ‘Day Zero’ event occurred months before it otherwise would have because of large upstream irrigation water extractions.
Over the years, the regulation of rivers through the construction of weirs and dams has partially or completely disconnected groundwater and surface interactions. Barriers across rivers have prevented or restricted overland flows to floodplains and wetlands, and damaged and/or destroyed fish, bird and invertebrate habitats.
Successive Australian ‘State of the Environment’ reports have consistently identified on-going risks to wetlands from overextraction of water, exotic aquatic weeds and introduced pests, and water pollution. Environmental degradation has occurred even in internationally recognised wetlands such as the Coorong, Lower Lakes and Murray Mouth.
We need a different Basin Plan, and we need to think and act differently. We cannot assume that statutory authorities or governments will implement the reforms that were promised or even legislated. We have had 30 plus years of failed promises.
As the People’s River Forum shows, we need to work together to make sure what’s good for our country, what’s good for our waters, and what’s good for our future actually gets delivered.
In summing up, the evidence tells us that we need to:
- Learn to Care for Country in partnership with our First Peoples,
- Democratise water decision-making so that all voices are listened to,
- Hold decision-makers accountable for what they do and don’t do with independent water audits and real time monitoring of diversions, water consumption and return flows,
- Actively adapt to accelerated warming and much too high levels of water consumption by ensuring much lower water extractions.
Until and unless Australian governments do all of the above, we will not achieve the key objects of the Water Act 2007. Nor will, as a country, be on a sustainable pathway towards a sustainable future that recovers our rivers, revives our environment and restores our communities.