"Traditional owners in Murray-Darling Basin take fight for water rights to governments", 29 August 2021

Cultural flows, or water rights for First Nations communities, are one of the biggest unfulfilled promises of the Murray-Darling Basin plan.

But now a group of traditional owners has put together a detailed project to restore a culturally significant lagoon, and is demanding the federal and Victorian governments deliver meaningful, legal water rights to enable the project to go ahead.

If the calls are not heeded, the next step could be a Mabo-style case to force governments to deliver on cultural flows.

The concept of giving First Nations people a share of the water in the basin was enshrined in the Murray-Darling Basin plan almost two decades ago. In 2020 the federally funded cultural flows project reported on both the cultural and economic significance of flows.

Yet despite governments acknowledging cultural water in the plan, no rights have been allocated.

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In 2018 former federal minister David Littleproud agreed, after negotiations with Labor, to set aside $40m to buy water to be controlled and used by Indigenous communities along the river system.

But nothing substantive has happened. Earlier this year, the current water minister, Keith Pitt, suggested he might reallocate the money to other projects.

The Tati Tati traditional owners are taking a firm proposal to the government to ensure the delivery of an initial gigalitre of water at Margooya Lagoon, a culturally significant wetland near Robinvale in Victoria. That’s the equivalent of 444 Olympic swimming pools of water.

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The Tati Tati have proposed a legal and policy package that will enable traditional owners authority over the management of that water on their Country, along with a cultural-flows management plan for the site that aims to restore healthy flows to Country and culture.

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They are particularly perturbed by the Victorian government’s announcement that it will allocate 2bn litres of “additional” water savings from the Goulburn Murray Irrigation District Connection project to irrigators, with traditional owners missing out once again.
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Bruce Lindsay, a senior lawyer with Environmental Justice Australia, said colonisation and decades of mismanagement and over-extraction had left the Murray-Darling River system in a poor state and had an immense effect on Aboriginal people’s rights to healthy Country and culture.

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