The Albanese Labor Government should not be proceeding with their Murray-Darling Basin water buybacks while the quietly released evidence shows farmers have returned environmental water by many magnitudes more than Labor’s buyback target, the Member for Mallee Dr Anne Webster said today.

“The Basin Authority has quietly released its 2022-23 report into water take in the Murray Darling Basin six months late, which lays waste to Labor’s claims in a $14 million advertising campaign that water is being ‘overused,” Dr Webster said.

The 2022–23 Sustainable Diversion Limit Accounts Registers of take and interim registers of take, March 2024 report shows that consumptive water use across the Basin is well below allowed levels.

The report found that every valley in the MDB used less water than was permitted in 2022-23, continuing a trend across multiple valleys ever since accounting commenced in 2019.

The Victorian Murray had an actual annual take of 909.8 gigalitres, compared with an annual permitted take of 1,145.4 gigalitres in the report (79.4 per cent of permitted take, with 236.5 GL less taken), while the Loddon valley’s actual take was 34.4 gigalitres less than permitted (97.6 GL of 132GL allowed, 74 per cent taken). Wimmera-Mallee surface water take was 59 per cent of entitlement, taking 31.1 gigalitres less than the 76.6 GL permitted.

Across the Basin, some 1,568.8 gigalitres less was taken than irrigators were entitled to use.

“Labor is right now buying 70 gigalitres of annual water entitlements across the Basin, though much is expected to be bought in the southern Basin (River Murray and its tributaries), yet across the three catchments alone in my electorate of Mallee irrigators voluntarily declined to use more than four times that – 302 gigalitres – in the latest reporting year, while across the Basin irrigators returned 22 times that amount voluntarily to the environment,” Dr Webster said.

“Little wonder Labor sat on this report until they started wasting precious taxpayer money buying water – it is a disgrace.  The Albanese Labor government has also disingenuously wasted taxpayer money on advertising campaigns – using fake CGI imagery and stock photos from Turkey and Sydney – to convey false information when in fact the reverse is true.

“Farmers are sick of Labor and the Greens painting them as environmental bandits in the metropolitan media so a political water target is reached to appease city voters, far removed from the reality in regional Australia.”