"The Land" Extract 16th August,2012

‘Toorale’ sale reflects Basin flop

JULIAN LUKE

17 Aug, 2012 12:21 PM

WHEN David Boyd flies over Toorale Station now it nearly brings him to tears.The former chairman and chief executive officer of Clyde Agriculture – which sold “Toorale” to the Commonwealth and NSW governments for $23.75 million in September 2008 – cannot believe the 91,383-hectare property is lying unused.
Mr Boyd believed the purchase of Toorale Station in 2008 – which he said had a huge negative economic impact on the community of Bourke, for minimal environmental gain – was representative of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.
Last week the Murray-Darling Basin Authority released its final amendments to the Basin Plan, which the Murray-Darling Ministerial Council will now analyse before reporting back to federal Water Minister Tony Burke by August 27.
“The ‘Toorale’ debacle, as I like to call it, is a microcosm of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan ... by that I mean big economic disadvantage, socio-economic damage and bugger all environmental benefit,” he said.
Mr Boyd retired as an executive of Clyde Agriculture in December 2007 but remained on the board as a non-executive director for a number of years.
He wants to see Toorale Station – which is now broken into a 54,385ha State Conservation Area and the 30,866ha Toorale National Park – returned to full agricultural production.
The huge western floodplain on the property is currently lying full of feed thanks to man-made storages along the Warrego River, which have driven successive years of flooding onto the delta.
“If you stock responsibly, if you look after the assets generally, including control of feral animals, control of weeds, then I don’t see any conflict between protection of environmental values and commercial results,” Mr Boyd said.
“If we care about people, if we care about communities, then we want economic activity.
“We’ve got a moral responsibility to sustainably maximise production.”
Mr Boyd said he was infuriated by the fact “Toorale” was not being used for agricultural production.
The Commonwealth commissioned engineering consultants Aurecon to investigate how much it would cost to decommission the six dams along the Warrego River, which found it would cost $79 million to fully decommission Toorale Station.
But Mr Boyd said taking out the dams along the Warrego River – built by Sir Samuel McCaughey in the late 19th century to drive water onto the western floodplain for grazing – would be pointless.
He said the dams merely accentuated what naturally occurred during large floods anyway and believed that by simply opening the regulation pipes installed at the bed of the river in each of the dams down the Warrego, natural conditions would be replicated.
“The Commonwealth government ... (was) obviously feeling the pressure because people were saying ‘where is all this water you were supposed to get’, which they were never going to get anyway,” he said.
“The consultant said it would cost ($79m) to remove the banks and the pipes ... I say for what purpose? What are you going to achieve? If you’ve got the gates open I think you’ve replicated natural conditions anyway.”
Mr Boyd said the 2000ha irrigation area only drew water from the natural water storage, Ross’s Billabong, which Clyde Agriculture filled each year using high-flow water licences on the Darling River, or if it filled naturally when the Darling and Warrego rivers overflowed.
While the Commonwealth government has said it believed the decommissioning of Toorale Station would return about 20,000 megalitres of water to the environment in an average year, Mr Boyd said Ross’s Billabong only held about 10,000ML.
“The other dams (along the Warrego River) are shallow, dry up very quickly and collectively don’t actually hold a lot of water,” he said.
Susie Dunn – who along with her husband Dudley purchased Toorale Station in the early 1970s and transformed it into the property it is today – said the debate about the Warrego River was peripheral and that the water had been delivered back to the Murray-Darling Basin.
When the Dunns – who went on to found Clyde Agriculture with the UK-based Swire Group – purchased“Toorale”, Mrs Dunn said it was “a shell up for surrender”.
Mrs Dunn and her husband helped pioneer the cotton industry at Bourke, building the irrigation area on Toorale Station and also flying to the United States of America to purchase a cotton gin.
The Bourke Shire Council has lamented the loss of the productive capacity of Toorale, which contributed about four per cent of the rates each year and about 10pc of the local GDP.
“We bought it with the hope of putting back a viable property and in fact that’s what we did,” Mrs Dunn said.
She said given that all irrigation water previously used to grow cotton on “Toorale” (from the Darling River) was now returned to the environment, and the Warrego storages had not supplied water for cotton, it would be a “tragedy” to demolish them.
“The Warrego really had nothing to do with it. There are high-flow pumps on the Darling River and that was the water used for cotton.”

Read David Boyd's comment piece on what's wrong with the Basin Plan here.

Toorale

I sent the following two letters to The Australian on 16th May. The second one was published as the lead letter on 17th May,2012

to letters

Your front page article and editorial (The Australian, May 16) highlights the whole fiasco of the Commonwealth and NSW Government’s purchase of Toorale Station.

In opening the Bourke Show on 5^th May, the current Mayor referred to the disasters that had hit Bourke in recent times-the death of former Mayor Wayne O’Mally in an aircraft accident the previous Sunday, the Millenium Drought and the loss of Toorale. Bracketing Toorale with these events demonstrates the depth of feeling in the community in the totally unnecessary economic blow that the conversion of the district’s most productive property to a National Park represents.

Toorale was an iconic Darling River sheep station of 247,000 acres. It included about 7,000 acres in the form of a state of the art irrigation (cotton) farm. The purchase was driven by a political desire on the part of South Australian Senator Penny Wong to be seen “to do something” to reduce water extractions from the Darling and Warrego Rivers. Yet the reality is that it has minimal impact.  If Toorale had continued to operate it would have reduced river flows in the Darling River past Louth in 2010/11 by 0.01%! In low flow periods no extractions or diversions are allowed. In other words, great social cost, for no environmental benefit. 

The irrigation water storage (Ross' Billabong) on Toorale is estimated to hold approximately 10,000 megalitres and this is the only irrigation storage on the Station and apart from any water that may have gone direct on to irrigation fields, this is the maximum amount that can be claimed as being "returned to the Darling". Water for this storage can be pumped from the Darling or diverted from the Warrego. 

The Warrego River, which is mostly not flowing and is only a shallow gutter, runs through the property from north to south. It has five dams on it, all of which have two four foot diameter pipes (and gates) in the bed of the river. These allow smaller flows to pass through to the Darling. They were closed towards the end of a flow so as to retain water for livestock and domestic purposes, both for Toorale and neighbours, not for irrigation. 

When there is too much Warrego water for the pipes to carry, the river spills out to the west and runs down a natural flood plain, flooding over 20,000 acres before entering the Darling downstream of the main Warrego/Darling junction.

The original dams on the Warrego were built in the late 1890's by the legendary Sir Samuel McCaughey and apart from providing livestock and domestic water storages, one was designed to push smaller flows out on to the western flood plain where the water stimulates the most prolific growth of natural pasture, ideal for livestock fattening. 

The very reasonable requirement of the NSW Government, in the second half of last century, to place the pipes in the bed of the river and allow smaller flows to pass through to the Darling, effectively means that natural conditions have been replicated. If there is too much water for the open pipes to carry, the river would have spilled to the west anyway. 

Thus, the Government cannot claim any additional "savings" as a consequence of the purchase of the irrigation licenses other than the water which could be stored for irrigation purposes in Ross' Billabong-10,000 megalitres. The removal of the dams and banks would NOT provide any more water to the Darling.

The conversion of the whole property to a National Park has taken Bourke's most productive station out of production with all of the harmful impact this has on the Bourke economy. Toorale used to pay 5% of Bourke's total Shire rates, now it pays nothing. It has been estimated that it contributed 10% of the district’s GDP.

 An investment of $23.75m. for less than 0.5% of the flow doesn't sound like good economics to me.

(David Boyd is the retired Chairman and CEO of Clyde Agriculture Limited, the former owner of Toorale Station)

On the assumption that my earlier letter may be too long for publication here is a shorter one!

Dear Editor,

The article and editorial on Toorale (The Australian-16th May) highlights the absurdity of this Government purchase ($23.75M) in the first place. Had Toorale's cotton farm (less than 3% of its total area) operated in 2010/11 it would have extracted/diverted 0.01% of the Darling River's flow past Louth-just downstream. In dry years no extractions/diversions are allowed. 

Thus, Bourke has been deprived of Toorale's significant contribution to the local economy for negligible environmental benefit. The Warrego River which runs through the station to its junction with the Darling has a number of dams which are for stock and domestic purposes (not irrigation) for Toorale and some of its neighbours. These dams all have huge pipes low in the river bed and if these pipes are kept open the water will run freely to the Darling and effectively replicates natural conditions. No additional water to the Darling would be obtained by the removal of the dams and banks. When there is too much water for the pipes/river to carry the river overflows to the west, waters a magnificent flood plain of over 20,000 acres with the overflow joining the Darling downstream of the main Warrego junction.

(David Boyd is the retired Chairman and CEO of Clyde Agriculture Limited the former owner of Toorale)

Toorale Money Waste and Community Economic Damage

Just in case the telling point is lost in too many words-see below. The Darling River flow past Louth for the 2010/11 year was 7,910,553 megalitres. The Government claim of "water returned to the river" in 2010/11 as a consequence of the Toorale close down, was 7,672 megalitres-0.01% of the flow.

Toorale Ramifications

The Sydney Morning Herald (David Wroe) has written a well balanced article on the waste of money in buying Toorale (pronounced Too-rally) Station at Bourke.http://www.smh.com.au/environment/station-buyout-a-waste-of-money-20111223-1p8ln.html.
 I attempted to leverage this with a letter to the Editor which failed to make the final cut-

"Congratulations to the SMH (Station buyout a waste of money- 23rd December) for "outing" the Commonwealth and former NSW State Government for the total waste of $23.75m in purchasing Toorale Station. Not only was this a waste of taxpayer's funds for negligible environmental benefit, it also took out of production the hard hit Bourke community's most productive enterprise. How downstream grazier Justin Mc Clure can argue that a 0.01% increase in flow can generate downstream environmental benefits is a real mystery.

The episode has wider ramifications in terms of the Draft Murray Darling Basin Plan. The Commonwealth Water Act 2007 and the approach of the Murray Darling Basin Authority is deeply flawed and the Toorale outcomes represent a good example of the likely consequences-negligible environmental benefit, but significant negative economic consequences. When flows are low, license conditions prevent extractions and diversions, when flows are significant the impacts of extractions and diversions are minimal. Dorothea Mackellar was absolutely right in describing inland Australia as a land of "droughts and flooding rains", she could have added and "not much in the middle".

In using absolute numbers as the MDBA has done, to prescribe acceptable extractions/diversions limits without gearing these to actual flows (availability) is really nonsense. To argue that these numbers are "averages" doesn't help, given the enormous spreads around the averages. Our current water bureaucrats could do worse than studying how the existing control system operates. It works rather well.
J.D.O.(David) Boyd

7A Eastern Arterial Road,

St Ives NSW 2075
Tel:   02 9449 7501
Mob: 0429 999 444
(Former Chairman and CEO of Clyde Agriculture, the previous owner of Toorale Station)"

Toorale Station, Bourke

The purchase (for $23.75m)and closing down of Toorale Station at Bourke, can now be viewed with the value of two years hindsight and can be clearly seen as the great act of bastardry that many saw it as at the time.

It was an action totally driven by cheap politics for consumption in Adelaide, that will have negligible beneficial impacts for the Murray River and very damaging socio-economic impacts on the local Bourke community.

The purchase of irrigation licenses when there are no allocations (or in Toorale's case river heights below pumping or diversion levels) has no benefit when water is scarce and will only limit production when water is plentiful-like it is now.

Since Christmas and prior to the arrival of the latest flood waters from Queensland the equivalent of three Sydney Harbours has flowed down the Darling past Bourke. Had the Toorale water licenses been operable Toorale would have extracted a mere 10,000 megalitres-0.7% of the flow.

The conversion of Toorale to a National Park takes out of play Bourke's most productive property and denies the Bourke Shire Council 10% of its shire rates. And this in a world screaming for increased food production.
Will we ever learn?

Toorale Water Claims

The Federal Government is now claiming (Penny Wong ABC AM 03/02/10) up to 20,000 megalitres of water returned to the Darling River as a consequence of the Government's purchase of Bourke's iconic Toorale Station. A few weeks ago they claimed 11,000 megalitres, so presumably this new figure is additional?

The irrigation water storage on Toorale (Ross' Billabong) is estimated to hold approximately 10,000 megalitres and this is the only irrigation storage on the Station and apart from any water that may have gone direct on to irrigation fields, this is the maximum amount that can be claimed as being "returned to the Darling" from the current event. Water for this storage can be pumped from the Darling or diverted from the Warrego.

The Warrego River, which is mostly not flowing and is only a shallow gutter, runs through the property from north to south. It has five dams on it, all of which have two four foot diameter pipes (and gates) in the bed of the river. These allow smaller flows to pass through to the Darling. They are/were closed towards the end of a flow so as to retain water for livestock and domestic purposes,both for Toorale and neighbours, not for irrigation.

When there is too much Warrego water for the pipes to carry the river spills out to the west and runs down a natural flood plain, flooding over 20,000 acres before entering the Darling downstream of the main Warrego/Darling junction.

The original dams on the Warrego were built in the late 1890's by the legendary Sir Samuel McCaughey and apart from providing livestock and domestic water storages, one was designed to push smaller flows out on to the western flood plain where the water stimulates the most prolific growth of natural pasture, ideal for livestock fattening.

The very reasonable requirement of the NSW Government, in the second half of last century, to place the pipes in the bed of the river and allow smaller flows to pass through to the Darling, effectively means that natural conditions have been replicated. If there is too much water for the open pipes to carry the river would have spilled to the west anyway.

Thus, the Government cannot claim any additional "savings" as a consequence of the purchase of the irrigation licenses other than the water which could be stored for irrigation purposes in Ross' Billabong-10,000 megalitres.

The conversion of the whole property to a National Park has taken Bourke's most productive station out of production with all of the harmful impact this has on the Bourke economy and the local Mayor's call for the property to again be used as a grazing enterprise should be heeded. Toorale used to pay 10% of Bourke's total Shire rates, now it pays nothing.

The only environmental "benefit" that can be claimed as a consequence of the two Governments(Federal and State) purchase of Toorale, as demonstrated by the current flow event in the Warrego and the Darling, is the aforementioned 10,000 megalitres.Since the Ist January when the Darling commenced to flow again at Louth some 1,163,964 megalitres has flowed past Louth. An investment of $23.75m. for 0.86% of the flow (with plenty more to come)doesn't sound like good economics to me. Particularly when you consider that most of the water flowing past will be diverted in to the Menindee Lakes Storage Scheme where around 50% of it will evaporate.

David Boyd
03.02.10

Toorale Water is Different

At Senate Estimates on Thursday night, Penny Wong's officials said that the water saved at Toorale from the February flow comprised 5,900 megs from the Darling and 1,300 megs from the Warrego-a total of 7,200 megs.

Bill Heffernan asked them where they gauged it and for the Warrego River was told at Ford's Bridge. With the Warrego not much more than a shallow gutter, there are always huge stream losses between Ford's Bridge and the Darling junction.

Data shows that, due to water losses in the river system and the Menindee Lakes storages, for every megalitre of water that flows past Bourke only 0.3ML can be expected to appear as regulated flow in the Lower Darling or to contribute to flow in the Murray.

Apparently Toorale water is different as the whole 7,200 megs has been allocated to the various Murray environmental iconic sites!

ARTICLE by PAUL MYERS TOORALE and the DARLING

Toorale and the Darling
Thursday 30 October, 2008

ARTICLE by PAUL MYERS

TOORALE and the DARLING
………………………………………………………………………………………….
The joint purchase in September by the federal and NSW governments of Toorale Station in outback NSW has been shown to be the sham and public relations stunt it always was.
Not only did the Minister for Water and Climate Change Penny Wong admit in Monday’s Four Corners program that she didn’t know the identity of Toorale’s owners in the pre-purchase negotiations, it also emerged that the Commonwealth provided most of the funds for the $24 million acquisition “sight unseen”.
And after suggesting in immediate post-sale comments that 20 gigalitres a year would be returned to the Darling River as a result of the purchase, neither Senator Wong nor anyone else can now quantify the benefit.
Buyer, beware. Nobody ever buys a rural property of any size, let alone one for $24 million, without at least several inspections and a lot of questions – except, it seems, taxpayers. And when it comes to water, that was apparently intrinsically valued in the Toorale sale at about half the property’s price, you want to be doubly sure that what you expect is what you get.
The shambolic and hasty manner in which the federal and NSW governments acquired Toorale is bad enough. But worse, it has effectively killed any chance of achieving broad public understanding of the real problems affecting Australia’s inland rivers, and how they should be tackled.
The sale may well have convinced the public that similar acquisitions of farmland and/or irrigation water can restore health to inland rivers. But in most cases, buybacks will deliver only a trickle of additional water to the environment, because irrigators can access water only when there are significant and prescribed flows in a river after heavy rain.
This is certainly the case with Toorale, which has several thousand hectares developed for cotton, but not a boll of which has been harvested for several years because there hasn’t been enough water available from the Darling and Warrego rivers to support a crop.
So while the drought continues, the payback to taxpayers from the Toorale purchase will be nil. It will still be nil even if there is moderated rainfall, and only minor benefits during floods because a lot of water stays out on flood plains and only some returns to the river from whence it came.
Mother Nature – not governments, environmentalists, irrigators or anyone else – determine whether rivers flow or dry up. It may be too simplistic for some, but 99 percent of the problems on the Darling and other rivers are caused by lack of precipitation, the variability of rainfall, and evaporation. It has been that way for millennia, and always will be.
The Murray, Darling and most, if not all, of Australia’s inland rivers have been dry several times during white settlement, and often beforehand.
The Murray, for example, stopped flowing in 1850 and for six months during the “Federation drought” of 1902 before there was any real human intervention. But Australia’s greatest river has continued to flow during this drought – the worst since white settlement – because water has been stored and subsequently released from Hume and Dartmouth dams.
The Darling is a microcosm of the Murray, with only 12 percent of its bigger brother’s average flow. The Darling flows strongly after a big rain, or otherwise not much at all. Irrigators – mostly cotton farms – on its route are strictly controlled, can take water only when the river reaches prescribed flows at various points, and in a normal year access about six percent of the river’s entire volume of water.
Most of the Darling’s much-maligned cotton growers have produced only one or two crops this decade. The lion’s share of these properties – 97pc in Toorale’s case – is devoted to grazing. This is far from a profligate, raping and pillaging of the river mentality.
It also makes a mockery of the apparent intention of the new owners to pull down the main dam – and perhaps other small dams – on the Warrego (which meets the Darling on the station) that were built in the late 1880s by the architect of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Scheme, Sir Samuel McCaughey, to prevent water being wasted during peak flows.
Like many smaller inland rivers, the Warrego flows only occasionally, usually about once a year. McCaughey designed a system that allowed excess water from the river to spill across Toorale’s floodplains. There are four-foot diameter pipes in Toorale’s dams on the Warrego to allow smaller flows to pass straight through to the Darling.
If the Toorale purchase was a blueprint for fixing the problems of Australia’s inland rivers, we can be sure that a lasting solution will never be found.
Paul Myers
22.10.08