Murray-Darling Basin Plan at risk from shortcuts, Nationals’ scams and uncooperative states

The Productivity Commission (PC) is continuing its lonely war on behalf of taxpayers and economic efficiency with its latest document on the Murray-Darling Basin Plan (MDBP), an interim report on its review of the implementation of the plan.

For more than a decade, the PC has railed against trying to achieve the water-recovery goals of the MDBP through anything other than water buybacks, particularly targeting taxpayer funding for “efficiency measures” such as on-farm irrigation infrastructure, which amounted to taxpayers paying farmers and irrigators for investments they should have made themselves, and which were much more expensive per gigalitre of water saved than water buybacks.