Failure to regulate flood plain harvesting ‘a real embarrassment’, Bret Walker tells NSW inquiry
The former Murray-Darling royal commissioner says the practice is unlikely to be illegal but water laws are ridiculously convoluted
Australia's failure to regulate flood plain harvesting was a real embarrassment", but whether it was an illegal would depend on case by case circumstances, the former chair of South Australia's royal commission into the Murray-Darling basin plan has told a New South Wales parliamentary committee.
In scathing comments to the inquiry into the NSW government's plan to licence flood plain harvesting, Bret Walker SC, one of the nation's most highly regarded lawyers, said the failure of eastern states to address flood plain harvesting over the last 100 years was inconsistent with proper management of a valuable public natural resource.
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