The best plan for the Murray Darling Basin is clear

Agreed to in 2012, the Basin Plan's regional unpopularity translated into a lack of political support, resulting in the foot-dragging and reneging which has left the MDBP behind schedule and incomplete. In order to get the Basin Plan back on track the government late last year passed the Restoring Our Rivers bill.

The Basin Plan is a crucial-nation building project. Its intent is to recover sufficient water, and remove the constraints against the strategic use of that water, in order to prevent the further decline of degraded ecosystems - rivers, wetlands and floodplains - within the MDB. It is crucial to achieving the socioeconomic sustainability of the entire system and to futureproof all water users, including irrigators.

I'm an irrigator myself. The evidence is clear my viability as a producer, my water security, and the value of my water entitlement would be best protected by the government's program successfully restoring and implementing the agreed MDBP.

The primary focus of the new legislation is water recovery, which remains well short of the agreed target. Water recovery can be achieved by buybacks or efficiency projects and the government can make a solid case for both.

Buybacks are popular with irrigators like myself who irrigate wholly or partly with entitlement. They inject huge amounts of money and investment into irrigation districts, increasing their competitiveness, and they enable irrigators to recapitalise in order to increase their efficiency and output.

Buybacks have been subjected to a Chicken Little scare campaign in which they have been wrongly conflated with rural decline. However, irrigators understand the advent of water trading means irrigation no longer requires the ownership of entitlement. Irrigators can operate wholly or partly with the purchase of temporary allocation, so the popularly presumed nexus between buybacks and the cessation of irrigated activity does not exist and never did.

Recent research by leading water economist Sarah Wheeler, of Adelaide University, confirms the actual drivers of rural decline as being terms of trade factors and downward spikes in catchment inflows, meaning the government is now better-placed to present an evidence-based case in favour of buybacks.

Ms Wheeler and her team reviewed the studies into the socioeconomic impacts of water recovery and ranked them for academic rigour. The key industry (RMCG reports) and state government-commissioned (TCA reports) studies used to conflate rural decline with water recovery were found to be "unrobust".

Conversely, independent "peer-reviewed" studies ranked as "robust". The Wittwer and Young study, Distinguishing Between Policy Drought And International Events In The Context Of The MDBP 2020, was one of several "robust" studies confirming although many rural industry challenges and some water price spikes occurred during the time of buybacks, "correlation is not causation" and buybacks were not to blame.

Efficiency projects are win-win deals where subsidised works capture previously wasted water. With on-farm projects, for example, the farmer gets subsidised infrastructure and keeps most of the saved water, but a portion is transferred to the Commonwealth for the environment.

Under pressure from Victoria and NSW, the Commonwealth in 2017 auspiced a report into water recovery by Ernst & Young. It found by implementing efficiency projects, the 450GL of physical water for the Plan's Upwater program could have been recovered by 2024, without the need for buybacks, and with a neutral or positive socioeconomic benefit. But politics saw Victoria and NSW shelving the projects anyway, despite their popularity with irrigators, along with the report.

Efficiency projects are unpopular with academics because they are expensive per megalitre, and because of their supposed effect on return flows. Pragmatically, however, the government has left efficiency projects on the table and they could be resurrected to reduce the buybacks required.

Off-farm efficiency projects, for example, refurbishing Victoria's massive gravity irrigation systems, could also be put on the table, constituting a subsidy for Victoria's redlining economy it couldn't ignore.

The right package of efficiency projects might persuade Victorian Water Minister Harriet Shing to see her way past the electoral imperatives requiring her to stay within the bounds of her industry-oriented departmental advice, and bring Victoria back to the table with the Commonwealth and the other states, and cooperating in delivering what was promised in 2012.

The progress this year of the Commonwealth's program will be critical in securing the socioeconomic sustainability of the MDB. It will be ironic indeed if a person of the inner city left in Tanya Plibersek proves to be the saviour of our iconic inland river system and its people.