Reject 'open tender' water buybacks, say northern Victorian mayors

Murray River Group of Councils chair Ross Stanton, Gannawarra Shire council, said the rush to recover water through open tender buybacks was a key concern for the mayors.

Councils were also worried about the "grossly inadequate" compensation figure, offered to communities.

Cr Stanton warned buying back water through "one on one" deals from anywhere across the southern Basin, without a strategic plan developed with communities, would be the worst outcome for all Australians.

"Open tender buybacks will have serious negative social impacts on our communities," Cr Stanton said.

"They will have serious negative economic impacts on our businesses and our towns.

"Worst of all, they will not restore our region's rivers or our valued floodplain ecosystems."

Cr Stanton said the recent Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARES) report forecast an annual reduction in farm gate production in the southern Basin of $111 million a year.

"The last time the Commonwealth did an open tender water buybacks in our region, we lost around 1600 jobs, it cost us hundreds of millions of dollars in production, and the price of water for agriculture went up by $72 per megalitre," he said.

"Our irrigation districts ended up looking like Swiss cheese.

"hey are delivering about 50 per cent less water over the same sized area - that has driven up the costs for all the remaining irrigators."

Open tender buybacks were "fraught with danger," he said.

"The government is saying they are going to target diverters, and not irrigation districts, but what they don't understand is that irrigators and water traders are a lot smarter than governments and it will take them two minutes to work out a way around it," he said.

"I will almost guarantee any water that is bought back will come out of irrigation districts and will affect them."

He said he had lived through the "swiss cheese" effect - "and it's horrid".

Cr Stanton said the Victorian government was "close to the mark" in saying it would work with communities, to find ways to shrink the irrigation footprint or look at alternatives.

"Working with communities is always a better outcome - it takes longer, it's harder work, but it's also better and it gives the community time to adjust, evolve and stay sustainable," he said.

Cr Stanton said the roll-out should be slowed down.

"These things, in my opinion, take two and three and five year time frames to get them through," he said.

"The question I have on the urgency is that they have produced a number but they haven't produced any benefits," he said.

"The water is just going to sit in the storages at the top of the southern Basin and be unusable - they are are four or five years away from getting fixed on constraints, so what is the rush?"

Implementation of constraints would take a lot of community consultation and time, he said.