JOURNALIST: We have the federal Water Minister Senator Penny Wong in the studio this morning. Good morning Senator.

WONG: Good morning to you.

JOURNALIST:  Now is this announcement yesterday, is it a commonsense approach from New South Wales or was their arm twisted by you or the Prime Minister or anyone else?

WONG: Well obviously, as I have said publicly, we were urging New South Wales to exercise its discretion fairly to release water that was available for the environment downstream. And we are very pleased that New South Wales has done that. I think that’s a credit to Kristina Keneally who has indicated that she is prepared to ensure that she releases reasonable environmental flows downstream.

Now obviously how much that will be needs to be sorted through. Because in part as yet we don’t know precisely how much water will get to Menindee and therefore how much will be able to be released after an appropriate amount is taken out by New South Wales, including for Broken Hill’s water supply.

JOURNALIST: So the Premier’s letter to the Prime Minister last week – has that had any influence on the New South Wales decision?

WONG: Look obviously Mike Rann has been out there publicly calling on New South Wales to do this, as have we. We wanted to have a cooperative approach rather than…

JOURNALIST: Did you speak to the New South Wales Premier about this?

WONG: She’s on leave.

JOURNALIST: Have you spoken to her?

WONG: We’ve had office to office contact. But look, ultimately this is about a cooperative approach being taken by the states in relation to water. It’s a tough gig, the Murray-Darling Basin. Everyone knows that. And we have over a decade or more of over-allocation, poor management, the rivers not being managed as a Basin – recognising that rivers actually flow across state borders – and then on top of that we have got climate change and the drought. So sometimes we are able to get a good cooperative approach from the states. This is one occasion and we are very pleased about that.

JOURNALIST: How much water? Now, we must have some idea. A bottom level, a lower limit of what we are going to get out of this. Because we keep saying we don’t know how much is going to flow into Menindee Lakes. You must have a ballpark figure, surely.

WONG: I’m not going to get into that Mike and the reason is – I think you saw the photo in The Advertiser today – there’s a lot of water but it does flow out over some pretty dry, flat country before it gets further south. So you do lose a lot in what we call transmission. And I’d want to wait until I see how much actually gets there before I’d be – as Minister – able to give you a clear indication of…

JOURNALIST:  Is there a chance that all of us – you, I and everyone else – are getting our hopes up over this? That the evaporation, before it even gets to the Lower Lakes, will just about, we’ll lose a lot almost.

WONG: It is the case that it’s not a pipe. And just because there’s water at one end doesn’t mean there is water at the other. Because you lose a lot along the way. And that’s always one of the things you battle with, with the Murray-Darling and we battle as the state at the end of the River. But there is certainly a very significant amount of water coming down and we have cooperation with New South Wales on this issue. As you said the officials meeting today, what we call the Basin Officials Committee, is meeting and I am hopeful that they can start to make some progress to how we actually do this. But the advice I have at the moment is that it is too early to indicate how much is likely to arrive at Menindee and how much would be available.

JOURNALIST: Is this generosity from New South Wales – and I say that in inverted commas – is that just purely to stop it reaching the trigger point of 640 megalitres or billion litres or trillion litres in Lake Menindee? And is it to help them out so it doesn’t ever reach that trigger point that they lose control of the water? Is that essentially the reason behind the generosity?

WONG: You’re a very cynical man Mike (laughs).

JOURNALIST: No I’m not. I think it’s a pragmatic approach from a political party interstate. You say, hey we can save our problem and your problem in one hit.

WONG: But there are other technical issues which might also impact on this. And that is the Menindee Lakes regrettably is still not a very efficient storage facility. That is why we’ve got a $400 million commitment to improving it.  But that is going to take quite a number of years and we’ve spent a fair bit of money on researching how to do that. Studies – geological studies – to do that, but that’s going to take some time.

And it is the case you that you do get to a point in terms of filling up the Lakes where any additional filling of another lake is going to not be so efficient. You’re going to get more evaporation. So these are the sorts of things which water officials will be looking at. But I think it’s important to recognise New South Wales has been prepared to be cooperative. Whilst we might not think about this here in Adelaide, the reality is there are parts of New South Wales which have been doing it very tough for the last few years. There have been areas which have had zero allocation for a couple of seasons. They’ve closed a lot of their facilities…

JOURNALIST: And their irrigators on that basis say our state, our irrigators, are going to miss out altogether on this environmental flow. But New South Wales says because we have been so dry on such a low allocation, South Australia shouldn’t get any. Is there an argument for that?

WONG: Well look I’m sure that may well be put by some irrigators. What I would say to that is you have got to look at the system as a whole. And you’ve got to try and be fair. And the reality is we’ve got significant environmental pressures downstream. That’s why we are purchasing water. That’s why we are doing what we are doing. But if there is water available for additional environmental flows we need to make sure that is provided to the river.

JOURNALIST: You said a couple of minutes ago you anticipate a significant flow to come down the Murray. They were your words of two minutes ago. Does that now mean, that will just about rule out, put a weir at Wellington off the radar now?

WONG: I don’t think one flows from the other, no pun intended. Those decisions about what to do at the Lower Lakes are pretty tough decisions. As I have said on this program before, the key thing, the first thing we have to do, is to avoid acidification. That is an environmental crisis that you don’t want to allow to happen. Obviously we want to have more water down there. But the reality is we have been struggling with that because of the system being so dry. We seem to have seen a big step change in terms of climate change.

JOURNALIST: But we don’t want a weir at Wellington. No one does in their right mind. You would have to say that this would go a long way to allaying fears of people at Wellington that when we talk about the amount of water that is potentially available. I’m not trying to tie you down to a quantity coming down. But wouldn’t that be, you would say, the best news possible for putting an end to a weir at Wellington for now and all time?

WONG: Well the best news possible for ensuring the continuation of the Lower Lakes in a viable freshwater form. Of course we want that. No one has been here advocating that we want something different. I think what all governments have been struggling with – and South Australia has had a tough time with this – is what do you do with the Lakes in the circumstances where there isn’t enough water to do what we want?

Now we hope this water coming down will make a significant contribution to the management of the Lakes. As I have said before on this program the difficulty is we simply haven’t had enough water to do what we would like to do there. When you take into account what we have to take out of the system – not so much just for irrigation, although there are permanent plantings you have to protect – but also for critical human needs including Adelaide’s water supply.

(TALKBACK)