New South Wales water officials have acknowledged that decades of unregulated and unmeasured floodplain harvesting by irrigators was illegal, the minutes of recent meetings show. At a January meeting, a week before the first drenching rains in northern NSW, members of a senior government water group discussed the legal implications of irrigators harvesting floodwaters, a widespread but unregulated method that accounts for up to a third of the water used by operators in the northern part of the Murray-Darling Basin.
The practice of irrigators collecting floodwaters using banks and levees to divert the water into large storages and dams has been blamed for contributing to declining flows further down the Murray-Darling River system. The 2018 South Australian royal commission described floodplain harvesting as “one of the most significant threats to water security in the Northern Murray-Darling Basin to both licence holders and downstream states”.
A flood was only weeks away, according to Bureau of Meteorology forecasts. The bureaucrats discussed a solution. The water minister, the National party’s Melinda Pavey, had requested a draft regulation to amend the Water Act by exempting irrigators without a “water access licence”. That regulation was issued on 7 February. The next day, under intense pressure from cotton irrigators, the department lifted a short-lived embargo that had allowed floodwaters to flow into the upper tributaries of the desperately dry Darling River.
Source: Guardian
Finnish site 
Global site