Matthew Warren, The Australian
JOHN Howard’s $10 billion national water plan will be scrapped and replaced with a more aggressive redistribution of the resource, under a radical reform blueprint released yesterday.
Under the plan to drought-proof the Murray-Darling basin by leading water economist Mike Young, the 10-year Howard plan to hand out nearly $6 billion to irrigators for efficiency improvements would be scrapped.
Instead, $5 billion of this would be spent during the first term of the Rudd Government to compensate the 15,500 irrigators in the basin for the permanent restructuring, and in most cases cutting of their permanent water entitlements.
About $1 billion would be spent on efficiency upgrades but only after the reallocation of water to deliver equal property rights to irrigators, the environment and all other direct and indirect users of water in the system.
The new plan includes the water being diverted from the system for managed investment scheme (MIS) forests and other related activities, and will formalise trading in the resource between different states and catchments.
Professor Young and his co-author, Jim McColl from the CSIRO, have been working on the plan since the election lastyear.