Date: 24th June 2026

A growing chorus of local government voices is demanding the Federal Government halt further Murray-Darling Basin water buybacks, following the Commonwealth’s purchase of almost 86 gigalitres of water in June 2026 at a reported cost of $430 million.

The Riverina and Murray Joint Organisation (RAMJO) has condemned the purchase, with RAMJO Chair Cr Ruth McRae OAM saying the buyback shows the Commonwealth is still pursuing water recovery targets without properly accounting for the local and regional consequences for farming, food manufacturing, transport, service industries and towns. Cr McRae said the Basin Plan had been done to communities, not with them.

“Every gigalitre removed from productive use has consequences,” Cr McRae said. “It affects what farmers can plant, what processors can source, what transport operators can move, and whether small towns can retain jobs, services, schools, sporting clubs and young families.”

RAMJO’s submission to the 2026 Basin Plan Review argues that water recovery by any means — including buybacks, rules changes, and reductions in reliability — should stop immediately, and that remaining recovery funding should be redirected to practical environmental works including floodplain restoration, fish passage, carp control and riparian rehabilitation.

In Leeton, Mayor Cr George Weston has written directly to the Prime Minister, calling on him to intervene and halt further buybacks. Cr Weston disputed Federal Water Minister Murray Watt’s claim that the Basin Plan — including the recovery of an additional 450 gigalitres — has always enjoyed bipartisan support, arguing the socioeconomic neutrality test was removed by Labor in 2023 without bipartisan backing.

Cr Weston also pointed to what he described as a fundamental delivery problem with the current buybacks, noting that the Murray-Darling Basin Authority’s own science — released in February — indicates that much of the additional water cannot be physically delivered to achieve its intended environmental outcomes. He argued that continuing to acquire water in those circumstances represents neither sound policy nor responsible use of public money.

“In our Shire, for example, we have eight value-adding jobs for every one farm job in rice,” Cr Weston said. “Destroying real jobs to pursue needless water recovery is ideological madness.”

That concern is echoed in Victoria, where Loddon Shire Mayor Cr Dan Straub has called for a fundamental reset of how the Basin Plan is implemented. Speaking to Chris Eddy for an upcoming episode of VLGA Connect, Cr Straub — a former chair of the Murray River Group of Councils — said the review process had drifted into political point-scoring at the expense of both scientific evidence and community impact.

Cr Straub cited the closure of the Bega cheese processing facility at Strathmerton and the loss of around 300 jobs as a concrete example of the plan’s consequences for regional industry, and said he had heard directly from businesses that have lost confidence in the Victorian water market entirely.

“We’ve never argued that the environment doesn’t need water, but we need a balanced format to deliver it where it’s needed,” Cr Straub said. “The plan’s telling us that the environment has already benefited from water already purchased — yet there’s still this ploy to take more out of that consumptive pool, away from not just irrigators, but away from town water as well.”

Loddon Shire, which sits within the Murray-Darling catchment and has an agricultural sector valued at approximately one billion dollars annually, has made individual submissions to the current review, in addition to contributing to the Murray River Group’s collective submission. Both call for a halt to further buybacks and a return to community and industry-led decision-making.

A consistent theme is emerging from local government across the southern basin. It is that the current approach to water recovery imposes disproportionate costs on rural communities, that the environmental justification for further buybacks is contested, and that remaining funding would deliver better outcomes if directed toward collaborative on-ground works.