Mr Burke should be aware that the most essential environmental outcome, namely returning outflows to sufficient levels to enable the rivers to rid themselves of their salt and toxin load, is absolutely dependent upon the volumes returned to the system.

There are ever-increasing concerns that the soon-to-be-released Basin Plan will fail conspicuously in its primary aim of defining truly sustainable diversion limits, in favour of what Craig Knowles, the recently-appointed Chair of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, is fond of describing as “adaptive management” - a process which many fear will entail returning laughably small volumes of water to the rivers - whilst consuming the $10 billion of taxpayers funds allocated to implementation of the Plan - and monitoring the environmental impacts over the next eight years.

If this is indeed the case, such an approach could be reasonably accused of being not only an irresponsible use of taxpayers’ monies but also a cynical, politically-expedient dereliction of duty on the part of those charged with the care of the nation’s most vital rivers: natural resources which are a national asset and not the property of irrigating agribusiness, which for far too long has been encouraged by a succession of myopic governments to overexploit the waters of the Murray-Darling Basin.