Murray-Darling Basin: NSW government officials busted favouring irrigator groups

Emails on flood plain harvesting reveal the environment department singled out sympathetic groups and discussed how to sideline critics

Just a week after the New South Wales corruption watchdog concluded that the state's water bureaucrats had an entrenched irrigator focus" that made policy making vulnerable to improper favouritism", the same division has been caught singling out sympathetic irrigator groups and discussing how to sideline critics.

The deliberate strategies were contained in an internal email chain that was inadvertently sent out to a number of stakeholders this week.