REGION - South Australia is taking its fight for more water down the Murray to the courts.
The state government last week announced plans to mount a legal challenge to force Victoria to abolish its cap on trading water licences, which it sees as a barrier to the long term health of the river system.
Premier Mike Rann told State Parliament he wants the four per cent trading cap in Victoria removed before the 2014 deadline, saying five years from now would be “too late” for the river.
“We need that cap lifted well before 2014,” Mr Rann said in his ministerial statement.
Mr Rann said South Australia will not “shirk its duty to keep the Lower Lakes and their environment in a sustainable condition until the Commonwealth can purchase enough permanent water licences to send additional environmental water down the river.”
He said his government has “exhausted all diplomatic channels available” and again emphasised that the Wellington weir was a last resort option and something the government hoped to avoid.
The plan, revealed last Thursday, has met with mixed responses.
The Alexandrina Council has applauded the state government’s move, and pressed the urgency of the situation.
“This is precisely the sort of action for which we have been crying out for over the past year or more,” the mayor, Kym McHugh, said.
“We know the water is there and is available. Let it flow.”
Mr McHugh called on the Federal Government to release the results of an independent audit into upstream water stocks.
But Family First MLC Robert Brokenshire of Mount Compass, has hit out at the announcement.
Mr Brokenshire says he’s “livid”, saying the government blew it at COAG and now its polling is confirming that failure, “they are desperate”.
“I said last October at the time of the River Murray handover that it was flawed, and for that reason Family First was the only party that tried to amend that Bill.
“We challenged the Premier’s claim that it was a one in a 100 year achievement, and the news of a constitutional challenge – and the Springborg musings in Queensland that if elected he may renege on the handover deal – shows what a shemozzle that handover was,” Mr Brokenshire said.
He hopes the challenge is successful, but believes the best way of handling this would be for Mr Rudd to use his constitutional power and go to the high court and for SA to be in support of that.
“We have to fight for what we should be getting and that’s a proper water supply and that should be the first requirement.
“The initial legal advice I have been given is that it may get up under section 92 but the danger is if it doesn’t get up and there is significant costs then we could be paying a big bill plus their (Victoria’s) bills so we could end up with a multi-million dollar bill and nothing else.”
Liberal Member for Hammond Adrian Pederick has also attacked Mr Rann, saying this latest move lowers the Premier’s credibility.
“After two years and four months Mr Rann’s finally acknowledged there are thousands of people and a whole environment below Wellington, for which he and his government are currently responsible,” Mr Pederick said.
Opposition Leader Martin Hamilton-Smith has said with Labor’s national water deal now in the “waste paper basket”, it’s time for the Premier to call on the Prime Minister to institute genuine federal control of the River Murray.
“Mr Rann has admitted to the conclusion drawn by everyone else last year that the so-called historic agreement wasn’t worth the paper it was written on,” Mr Hamilton-Smith said.
Meanwhile, the Minister for the River Murray, Karlene Maywald, has been defending that state against Victoria’s Minister for Water, Tim Holding, who had attacked the high court challenge, saying the SA case was “weak”.
Ms Maywald explained that SA capped its extractions in 1968-69 while Victoria waited until 1996 to cap theirs and continued to issue licences until then, “contributing to the current chronic over-allocation of water in the basin”.
“And while SA is reducing its reliance on the River Murray, Victoria is embarking on a pipeline to deliver 75,000 million litres of Murray-Darling basin water to Melbourne.,” Ms Maywald said.
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