Mick Keelty's report on Murray Darling river basin confirms South Australia's water care amid big inflow fall

Interim Independent Inspector General Mick Keelty's town hall meetings across the Murray Darling river basin in compiling his report. Inset: The drastic drop in overall flows into the river basin system.
Images courtesy Kath Sullivan, ABC Rural; and the Murray Darling Basin Authority.

South Australia’s careful approach to looking after water from the Murray-Darling river basin, compared to cavalier aspects of New South Wales water culture, was highlighted in a 2020 report on the basin by former Australian federal police commissioner Mick Keelty.

Keelty also confirmed that South Australian irrigators were the most efficient in Australia. hile South Australia had chosen to distribute a much smaller proportion to its water entitlement to licence holders than New South Wales. It also restricted the licences in the 1970s but New South Wales didn’t restrict them until the 1990s.

But the “most telling” finding of the Keelty report was the drastic overall decline of inflows into the river system, with climate change during the previous 20 years intensifying the problem. Keelty also found an absence of leadership, transparency and "a single point of truth" across the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.

In December 18, the federal and state (including the new South Australian Liberal) governments involved in the plan had agreed on how environmental water would be returned to rivers – including up to 450 gigalitres sought to sustain South Australian Coorong and lower lakes. This was on the condition it did not have a negative socio-economic impact (according to a agreed test) on river communities. This was marginal progress on the original Murray-Darling Basin Plan in 2012.

The progress for South Australia was that water minister David Speirs secured federal funding for environmental projects in the Coorong and Adelaide's desalination plant.

Keelty, appointed interim inspector general for the Murray-Darling Basin, was commissioned to do his inquiry by then-federal water minister David Littleproud in late 2018 after 1,000 angry irrigators converged on Canberra calling for the basin plan to be scrap. Their particular complaint was that too much water was being diverted to the environment.

Keelty's report met with scathing criticism from irrigation groups in the eastern states and was condemned as not providing any solutions.