ABC
A central west irrigators group says now that Murray Darling Basin Plan has been accepted, people need to put effort into making it work.
The Federal water minister Tony Burke has signed off on the controversial plan to increase environmental flows by 2,750 billion litres by 2019 and will present it to parliament.
Macquarie River Food and Fibre says there needs to be regional input in the implementation phase.
Executive officer Susan Madden says the focus will now be on the management of water resources.
"We're already looking for ways to move forward," she said.
"In terms of trying to make sure that the appropriate governance and management arrangements are in place for dealing with the increasing share of environmental water holding.
"Also, trying to move along with some of those infrastructure projects that we already have underway in the Valley."
Ms Madden says the Murray Darling Basin Plan ought to be regularly reviewed and improved upon.
"It's been very much focussed on a headline number, 2750 gigalitres, to be recovered across the basin.
"That sort of becomes the language that's talked about publicly, but when you actually drill down to some of the numbers and what they mean regionally, it's actually recognised that there are still information gaps and knowledge gaps."
She says ideally the group would like to see most of the recovery to be through water saving infrastructure and not further buy-backs.
However, Barney Stevens from the Darling River Action Group disagrees.
He says he would have preferred to see the additional savings made by buying water from cotton growers.
"I think everyone's going to have a lot more certainty now, including the environment groups and irrigators," he said.
"But, environment groups won't be happy with the result because it's just not enough water.
"The Federal Government's going to blow its budget on this amount of water.
"They could have got a lot more by putting more money into buybacks."
He also says the timeline for the plan is too long and he's concerned irrigators in the upper reaches of the river will still be able to take too much water for cotton crops.
"It's not doing much for the lower Darling River though.
"It does quite a lot for the tributaries of the Darling; it does quite a lot for the Murray.
"It probably doesn't do enough for the whole system; I think they needed 4000 gigalitres rather than 3200.
"They're not even going to get the 3200 until 2024.
"That's a long time to wait."
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