Two state governments have drastically underdelivered more than $160m in infrastructure measures to improve river health in the northern Murray-Darling basin eight years since they were promised, a major independent review has found.
This includes failure by the New South Wales government to secure any of the private land access needed to improve water flows over floodplains in the state’s Gwydir region, where scientists had to scramble to rescue turtles in dried up wetlands last week.
A separate NSW government project to install passages to help fish migrate around barriers in waterways has delivered just 64km (3%) of the original 2,135km target, with the target later reduced to 589km.
In Queensland, promised refurbishments and upgrades to weirs also never proceeded past the feasibility stage, the review by the federal inspector general of water compliance, Troy Grant, found.
Grant’s report, published on Wednesday, found the NSW and Queensland governments had “severely underdelivered” on promised infrastructure and engineering measures under a program known as the “Northern Basin Toolkit”.
“Quite simply the environment is the loser along with the taxpayer,” Grant told Guardian Australia.
The toolkit was agreed to by the NSW, Queensland and federal governments to deliver actions that would improve river health without adding extra water.
The program was intended to compensate for a 2018 federal decision to reduce the amount of environmental water for the region from 390bn litres a year to 320bn litres. Environmental flows refer to water released by the government from dams and tributaries into rivers and ecosystems to restore their health.
Governments agreed to deliver infrastructure and policy measures to enable water to flow into wetlands more easily, increase fish populations and to protect environmental water from pumping as it moved downriver.
The federal government committed $166m over the program’s life, with a deadline for completion of the projects of the end of this year.
“The failure of the Northern Basin Toolkit program raises the question of how can Australians really trust their governments to deliver their promises to look after the rivers,” said Prof Jamie Pittock from the Australian National University and chair of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists.
“The failure to implement what was promised means that turtles, fish and wetlands die.”
Grant said the NSW government’s delivery of only a small fraction of promised fishways was “abysmal”.
He said another proposal to build a piece of infrastructure that would direct water to the Macquarie Marshes area had not advanced beyond some rocks put in place to stabilise the riverbed in preparation for additional water flow.
Scrutiny of the program comes after serious criticism was directed at the NSW government this week over a WaterNSW decision to abruptly stop environmental flows to the Gwydir wetlands near Moree, leading to the deaths of turtles, waterbirds, frogs and sheep.
Pittock said it was “really disappointing to see that NSW is yet again the recalcitrant misfit failing to deliver for river conservation”.
The NSW water minister, Rose Jackson, welcomed the report and said she had met with Grant to discuss its findings.
“The Northern Basin Toolkit program was established in 2019, with very little progress made under the former government,” she said.
“We’ve worked to turn this around but I acknowledge that it’s been challenging to deliver on all measures in a short timeframe.”
Jackson said the NSW government was committed to further work to “deliver better environmental outcomes”.
Grant compared the Northern Basin Toolkit to “a plane full of passengers being flown without a pilot”. He said the successful measures the review identified were all policy-based measures that “didn’t cost a cent”.
Among his recommendations were changes to improve accountability and transparency under the program.
He said his report was a “wake-up call” as a broader review of the Murray-Darling basin plan got under way.
The Greens’ environment spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, said the report “makes it abundantly clear that despite millions of dollars being splashed around, it has not gone to protecting the river”.
Emma Carmody, commissioner for the River Murray South Australia, said the money that had been spent on the program “is money that they could put towards buy-backs and other initiatives which we know will return crucial environmental flows to our rivers and wetlands across the basin”.
An Albanese government spokesperson said the government was considering the recommendations and expected the findings would also be considered through the broader basin plan and Water Act reviews.
“The collaborative nature of the Murray-Darling basin plan means that many matters involve shared responsibility and shared accountability across all Basin jurisdictions,” they said.
A Queensland government spokesperson said the federal government gave “95% of the funding from this program to NSW despite large portions of the basin being in Queensland”.
“And the former Queensland Labor state government failed to do basic costings and diligence on the projects they submitted,” they said.
“The Crisafulli Government is turning this around, delivering real outcomes for our rural and regional communities.”
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