Water buybacks 'dreadfully concerning'

Last Wednesday Water Minister Tanya Plibersek announced it would start the process to buy or 'recover' 49GL of surface and groundwater from seven NSW and Queensland catchments.

The voluntary purchases will help 'bridge the gap' to the sustainable diversion limits set out in the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, continuing to return water to the environment.

In Queensland, the plan seeks to recover 14GL of surface water and 3.2GL of groundwater from the Condamine-Balonne catchment through a tender starting on March 23.

While the NSW government is opposing the buybacks, Queensland Water Minister Glenn Butcher said his government would be backing them.

"The Palaszczuk government is committed to assisting the Australian government to implement the Murray-Darling Basin Plan in full," Mr Butcher said.

"I recently visited Lower Balonne and received feedback from water entitlement holders who want this recovery to be completed, with the community understanding the need for strategic purchases."

Balonne Shire Council Mayor and Murray-Darling Basin community committee member Samantha O'Toole has been in Murray Bridge, SA, this week for meetings with federal staff.

While not opposed to water recovery, Ms O'Toole is against the government's framework.

"We're not disputing that the recovery has to occur. I understand under the Basin Plan that that number cannot move, but ... of the most impacted communities in the basin through buybacks, St George and Dirranbandi are in the top four. No other shire across the entire basin has seen the impact that we have in the Balonne," she said.

"We've just been calling for them to mitigate as much as they possibly can, the impact with future purchasing, and they seem to be, through the framework that they've released, disregarding that, and I just find that so disappointing."

Ms O'Toole said she had seen the framework set up for the purchasing to occur and it was missing vital social aspects.

"We just called them out on this this morning - that even though there's been considerable studies and lessons learned about socio economic impact, there doesn't appear to be any reference in the framework ...," she said.

The mayor said council had floated a number of community solutions about purchasing multiple, smaller licences in conjunction with each other.

SmartRivers chairman and Hebel irrigated cropper Frank Deshon is also worried the buybacks could harm the community.

"It's dreadfully concerning to me," he said.

"I'm in favour of strategic buybacks - targeted small amounts to meet environmental concerns. I get that. What I am definitely opposed to is whole of farm buybacks, where that impacts the community overnight.

"It impacts businesses that were built on that productive capacity of those farms, and to date, those businesses and those communities have had little compensation from the government and we're still waiting. Little towns like Hebel lost half their population pretty well overnight in that first round of buybacks and [is] still reeling from that."

Mr Deshon said he supported every landholder's right to make their own decision but warned "you can't go and just shift a whole set of socio economic data out of a community and think nothing's going to happen".

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