CANBERRA, June 15 (Xinhua) -- Australia's new Environment Minister Sussan Ley has said that drought-affected farmers should be allowed to borrow water from river systems.
In an interview with Fairfax Media on Saturday, Sussan Ley said there is a need for "flexibility" that would allow water reserved for environmental use to be used by struggling farmers.
Ley represents the New South Wales (NSW) electorate of Farrer where concerns about the amount of water in the Murray River allocated for agricultural use was a major issue in the campaign for the general election on May 18.
"Sometimes the environment doesn't need all its water but farmers desperately do need water," she told Fairfax.
"(In some cases) there's water in the dams (holding environmental water) and there are crops that are dying and farmers with drought-affected stock that need hay."
Any move to introduce Ley's borrowing scheme would require changes to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan - the agreement on water use across the Murray-Darling Basin, which is Australia's most significant agricultural area.
Changes to the plan must be agreed to by the governments of NSW, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) as well as the Federal Government.
Maryanne Slattery, the senior water researcher at the think tank Australia Institute, said that Ley had failed to properly explain the problem in the basin.
"The environment is just a scapegoat," she said.
"There are so many other aspects of mismanagement and perverse policy outcomes that I think need to be looked at first."
In addition to revealing her water management plan, Ley also suggested that the government would be more aggressive in eradicating pests such as invasive starfish on the Great Barrier Reef.
"As a farmer, I'm very big on (eradicating) feral pests," she said.
"There are some quite clever scientific approaches to the health of the reef, including breeding the coral differently, addressing the crown-of-thorns starfish, working with coastal volunteers because obviously the inflow (of nutrients and sediment) into the reef is important."
