LEON BYNER: More than 200 billion litres of precious floodwaters is evaporating upstream in the Menindee Lakes while dying Riverland towns and desperate irrigators battle for water entitlements. Now, the ordinary person … says, how can we do this? Let’s put some sense to this…
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LEON BYNER: Now Simon Birmingham, you’re a Coalition Senator, you’ve been recently up in the Menindee Lakes area… What can you add to our story today?
SIMON BIRMINGHAM: Good morning, Leon and listeners. Yes, I was up in the Menindee Lakes area on Tuesday this week with a number of my state Liberal colleagues and looking at the inflows and how the lakes are managed, and there are two key problems that have been highlighted from the revelations today and from the visit up there. The first is that there were serious inaccuracies in the forecasting of just what flows would reach the Menindee Lakes from the flood events earlier this year. They were managed on a premise and an understanding that there would be enough water to totally fill them. That’s proven to be wrong and so Lakes Menindee and Cawndilla, the last two lakes in the system which are interconnected and can’t be controlled between the two of them… they’ve allowed water to flow into both of them… that means you get the seepage effect in both, you get evaporation off both… that might all be justifiable if you were going to manage to fill both of them as they originally thought. That’s not the case, and what’s going to happen is they’re only going to be half or two-thirds full, you’re going to have all of the losses that you get from using those two without getting the storage capacity that might justify putting the water in there for longer term use…
LEON BYNER: So what are you saying we need to do?
SIMON BIRMINGHAM: … so, on that front, we really need to have a very serious public inquiry into why those forecasts were wrong and what we can do to make sure that forecasting of flows in future …
LEON BYNER: Well there’s no point in going back and asking why they got it wrong because that doesn’t achieve anything.
SIMON BIRMINGHAM: No, but Leon it does, in the sense that… the Authority and the managers of the water will only be destined to make the same mistakes again if we don’t learn our lessons as to why they got the forecasts wrong. They knew how much water had fallen up in Queensland and New South Wales, they knew what was flowing into the Darling, and why…
LEON BYNER: … and they put water from some areas where it was dammed, into other areas, expecting more to fill it up and it didn’t.
SIMON BIRMINGHAM: That’s right and so why didn’t the water that they expected to reach Menindee Lakes… the New South Wales Office of Water and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority… they all believed Menindee Lakes would be filled from these events… that’s why they took the management decisions they did by opening these lakes. They got it wrong. We need to know why they got it wrong and what they can do differently in future to fix it. And the second problem is that we need to get on with the urgent infrastructure works in those lakes that could actually save water for the future and allow them to be better managed. Just by putting, I’m told from the visit up there… just by putting a regulator between Lake Menindee and Lake Cawndilla lake three and lake four in the system just by putting a regulator that meant you could separate flows between those two lakes, you could in this event have simply filled Lake Menindee, left Lake Cawndilla dry… that would’ve given you the maximum possible storage with the least possible losses and that would’ve cost $25 million.
LEON BYNER: Simon Birmingham, thank you for calling in this morning on 1395, Adelaide’s FIVEaa. Boy, this water issue is hotting up…