Menindee fish kill: NSW water minister says he's 'not downplaying' latest deaths
The New South Wales primary industries minister, Niall Blair, has admitted that “we’ve seen nothing like this” while touring the site of another massive fish death in the Lower Darling River at Menindee.
The mass death incident in the Lower Darling, the third in a month, has left stretches of the Lower Darling upstream from Menindee covered in a carpet of dead fish.
Most were small bony bream but golden perch and Murray cod have also been dying in recent days.
Menindee local Graeme McCrabb said it was worse than the second event on 7 January, which killed hundreds of thousands of fish.
“It’s about 10km to 15km upstream from the town and the river is literally carpeted from one side to the other with thousands of bony bream,” he said on Tuesday morning. “They’re still dying, so I don’t think we’ve seen the end of it yet.”
Standing on the bank of the Darling, Blair faced the media and a rowdy group of locals. He said he did not want to see further fish kills but had little to offer on solutions.
The government has already tried installing aerators in the river at four sites to provide small refuges of more oxygenated water, but the latest fish kill occurred upstream from the aerators.
Most locals believe the fish kills are the direct result of the government’s decision to empty the Menindee Lakes in 2016 and 2017 and send the water downstream to other storages, leaving almost no water for flows during the prolonged drought that has gripped the state.
“I don’t want to see this ever again,” Blair told locals. “Were the aerators the silver bullet? I never said that they were. Do I apologise for putting them in? Absolutely not.”
Blair said he was not aware of any other solutions other than river flows and that, in the drought conditions, this was a challenge.
“The issue and the urgency at the moment is to come here and get the briefing first-hand, to be able to have a conversation with some of those issues,” he said. “I wasn’t prepared to stay in Sydney and get it sent through on a piece of paper or an email.
“If I could change anything, it would be this and what happened in January and in December, and what’s happening down on the Murrumbidgee and what happened in Lake Burrendong and what happened at Lake Cathie.”
Fisheries staff from the NSW primary industries department were on Tuesday heading to the Redbank weir near Balranald to confirm reports of the fish deaths on the Murrumbidgee River.
“State and commonwealth agencies are meeting this afternoon to discuss available options for managing flows within the Murrumbidgee River to address declining water quality at various locations,” a spokeswoman said.
When locals accused him of downplaying the massive fish kills in the Darling, Blair agreed that the others were “nothing like this”.
“I’m very happy to acknowledge what we are seeing here is nothing like we’ve ever seen in the state before,” he said. “And that’s why I’m here. So I’m not downplaying this.”
Blair said that some storages were down to 1% and the government was trying to manage them “the best that we can”.
He said a lot of the state had now “0% going to farming”, a reference to allocations to holders of general security licences. High security licence holders still have the right to pump water for farming and some irrigators have large on-farm storages where they hold their allocations.
A fish clean-up team, contracted by the NSW government, has cleaned up the dead fish closer to the town.
McCrabb said Tuesday’s meeting with the minister was much more fruitful than last time, when Blair toured the river by boat and declined to meet with locals assembled at the boat ramp.
“He was very keen to help the town and listened to our six-point plan for Menindee,” McCrabb said.
Blair also said he would consider the local water users’ groups suggestions about how to make the lake system more resilient, including using some deeper lakes in the system to store water for drought conditions.
A report from the South Australian royal commission into the Murray-Darling basin plan is due to be released any day.
It is expected to find that the targets for recovery of water for the environment are too low and that the previous federal Labor government took into account factors other than the environment in setting the target.
The health of Australia’s rivers is set to be a major issue in both the upcoming NSW state and federal elections.