 It's a pleasure to be here to talk about adaptive management of Commonwealth Environmental Water and Murray Darling Basin, and it flows very nicely from what Philip has said as the first time I've had the opportunity to address this prestigious event. And let me start, too, by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet the nunnel and paying my respects to their elders past and present. I think it's probably fair to say that the Commonwealth Environmental Watering Program is unmatched anywhere else in the world for scale and ambition. And even though it's only early days, it represents a unique experience in terms of protecting and restoring the environment in a regulated system. And so there's much to be learned from it. That's another way also of saying that I can't cover all that we do in 15 minutes and I'm not going to try. So instead, I'll give you some very brief context. And then I want to talk in more detail, but again, very limited detail, about three things. First how we are managing quite deliberately and collaboratively to very specific targets, to very clear outcomes. Secondly, I want to talk a little bit about my good neighbour policy. And then thirdly, I give you only two examples, but two from a wide array of examples of adaptive management. So we really are trying to take this concept that is much talked about and often very little practised and turn it into the real world in the basin. Yep, you might have seen this slide in the last talk, which is not surprising since I shamelessly plagiarised it from the MDBA. And I'm not going to go through it again, but I do want to use it to make this point. What we're talking about in the Murray-Darling Basin is an environmental program that is set firmly within the context of a large and prosperous agricultural community. This is a place that produces a great deal of food and fibre, has for a long time and will continue to do so. So here is a real world natural resource management or conservation program, if you like, set very firmly in the context of a working basin. And if you look at those fast facts, you get that sense, both of the agricultural output and also the natural values that are left there. So our ambition is to work within that framework. There is no intent on our part to whine back the clock. We're working in a highly modified system. Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder, that's the position I hold, as David suggested. It's a statutory position established under the Commonwealth Water Act and it has a singular, arguably an elegant purpose, which is I am responsible for protecting or restoring the environmental assets of the Murray-Darling Basin. Environmental assets, of course, is a legal term to describe in a sort of dispassionate way the rivers, wetlands and flood plains of the Murray-Darling Basin. Every decision I make as the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder has to be consistent with the Water Act, with the Environmental Watering Plan, which is chapter eight of the Basin Plan that Philip already talked about, and with the Environmental Watering Strategy. And so this is the beginning of that first point I wanted to focus on. You will often hear, if you're interested in this debate or see, claims that the Commonwealth Environmental Watering Program is unclear about what its aims are, it doesn't know what to do with the water, we've got too much water and no ambitions in terms of the changes we're trying to make. That's very clearly not true. The targets are set out for me in these instruments. Also on the screen, and I'm not going to go through it in any detail, I think we've cleverly designed it so you can't read it anyway, but that is the extract from the Basin Plan, chapter eight of the Environmental Watering Plan. And you can see, or you could see if you look carefully, that there are three broad objectives or outcomes that guide all of my decision-making, and remember these are mandatory, this act is mandatory. As well as the Environmental Watering Plan, I have a Basin-Wide Strategy developed by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. This actually applies to all environmental water holders, so those who work in the state, as well as the Commonwealth, are obliged to deliver water in ways that support the outcomes here. And again, I'm not going to go through this in detail, in fact, this is a very brief summary of a quite long and complex document that targets four specific areas, the headings in the green there, and then has an ambition under each of those, and then a series of specific targets. I've included just one target under each area to give you an example, but the point of that is if you look at those targets, they're not vague, they're quite specific, measurable, manageable targets that we are expected to achieve. You might also see, if you look at the timeline on the Basin-Wide Strategy, that we're not expected to achieve them overnight. They very sensibly take account of the fact that ecological outcomes are long-term. Some of these will take at least a decade, if not more, decades. Also make the point that these targets apply to the states, so it's not just Commonwealth Environmental Water, it's all the environmental water held by the states, and that they're achievable under the existing system, under the existing constraints and rules and guidelines, and that's certainly our perspective. I'm also obliged, as are the state water holders, to take into account annual priorities across the Basin. These are set each and every year by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, so again, you can see the relationship. The authority is, in a sense, the regulator, the target setter. It will make assessments of my performance against those targets over time, and in that same vein, it sets annual priorities. These are not mandatory on me, but I do have to take them into account. Again, I'm not going to go through all of these and read them. It's simply to reinforce the point that you can see a hierarchy of outcomes and objectives from broad biodiversity protection outcomes in the Basin plan through to very specific ones in the strategy to even more specific ones annually that take account of the circumstances in the Basin, and these include very specific geographic targets, for example, so there's some up there about the Kurong and the Lower Lakes, others about mid-Murray and Bidji wetlands and so on, which gets me to my second point that I wanted to focus on about how we deliver environmental water. And this is not a technical conversation. This is really an opportunity for me to speak very briefly about our good neighbour policy. So like all irrigators in the Murray-Darling Basin, I have entitlements to water, and each entitlement, each class of entitlement has its characteristics, little rules and procedures that are attached to those. And I'm entitled to use water in ways that are governed by those entitlements and the rules set by the utilities, state utilities. But within that, within that legal framework, I've chosen to work within a voluntary management framework that I'm calling my good neighbour policy for one of a better name. And this is really based on a simple principle, and again in the same way that I plagiarised your slide, I've probably plagiarised a bit of the Hippocratic Oath, and so the good neighbour policy is built around the notion of first do no harm. So really it's a set of guidelines or protocols that we observe during our decision making to be very conservative and risk averse, to avoid third party impacts, that's code for making sure we don't impact on irrigators, our neighbours, commercial irrigators, and to embrace local knowledge and meaningful engagement. So that in the end, and we're not there yet, but in the end we arrive at a position we hope of respectful, mutually respectful and harmonious coexistence with commercial irrigators, farmers. Just to mention briefly, localism, this is an extension of the good neighbour policy or component of the good neighbour policy, this is about involving local communities. I'm not going to read you the slide, but I want to use it as a prompt to talk about our commitment to engagement and participation by local communities. I acknowledge right at the very beginning that we've got a long way to go in this regard. Governments and government agencies including my own are notoriously bad at community engagement. We struggle with it, it's not a skill that we're necessarily recruited for, so we often have to learn by experience and harsh experience it is, but we are learning and we're not making a judgement by the way about how successful we are, we will leave the judgement to the communities when they feel as though we've reached that point then we will have reached that point, we haven't yet. The point around localism is really we're trying to move beyond consultation, if you talk to irrigation communities, they pale, individuals they pale visibly at the prospect of being consulted with, five minutes, being consulted with by a government yet again, consultation strikes them usually as a one-way process. So we're trying to talk about engagement and participation and although I legally have the responsibility to make the decisions, we're trying to move towards a practice with local communities where they're interested and not all of them are. Many of them will say to me, David, I don't care what you do with environmental water as long as you don't bother me and you don't injure my practice and others want to be heavily involved, so we've got a spectrum to deal with, so those who want to be involved, we want to offer a system where they can influence my decision making and that in broad terms is what I'm calling localism. I'm just going to do some adaptive management of my slides here because the chairman's told me I've only got four or five minutes to go. I'm not going to go through this slide. This is a demonstration of the broad approach that we bring to adaptive management, which is about demand and supply. So ecological demand, those environmental assets, the rivers, the floodplains, the wetlands, where are they in their cycle, how much water they need and how much water we've got. And this document is simply demonstrating that as you would expect sensibly when ecological demand is high and water availability is low, then we manage those assets and the water that we deliver in a very different way. So this is my final point. I wanted to talk to you in any detail. I wanted to give you two examples of adaptive management. Now, don't be intimidated by this hydrograph. Let me walk you through it very briefly. I'm just going to get myself in a position where I can use this pointer. So this is in the River Murray flows downstream immediately downstream from the Hume Dam and on the left axis you've got flows. It's really don't worry about the numbers. It's really trying to demonstrate how we are with managed water, water that we own and hold and can manage. We are trying to mimic natural flows. So if you look at the graph, the top line is what's described as the approximate Yarrawonga model natural flow. So that is based on MDBA data held over a long time. What would the river flow on average look like if there were no dams? That's the blue line up on top. The dashed orange line is the release without eWater. So that's the water coming out of the dam for operational purposes, either the supply irrigation or other needs. Then you've got the blue line in the middle. That's environmental watering. So that's essentially largely Commonwealth environmental water at this stage. And so you can see the difference between the blue line that is environmental water and the hatched line is the volume of environmental water. Now, what I'm trying to show here is that we're trying to mimic nature. So you can see in the Southern Connected Basin, winter-dependent rainfall, you get a natural flow in winter after the rains have fallen, then a subsequent peak, and then it tails off. And you can see we're trying to mimic that sort of natural flow because, as is self-evident, if you think about it, the biota that is dependent, water-dependent biodiversity, which is one of my main outcomes, of course, is adapted to that natural flow regime. And by regulating the system, we've changed everything. We've reversed the flow systems. We've changed the temperature. We've changed volumes. And so I'm trying to set some naturalness back into it. Notice I don't say that we're trying to restore nature because we can't. We're attempting to insert some natural patterns back in. And without, again, going into detail, this is a nice example of how adaptive management has to take account of reality. So over here, we adjust our flow rates because we need to accommodate firewood collection in some of the forests that we're trying to water. So there are all those sorts of practical limitations on what we can do. I'm going to be very quick because I know I'm going to run out of time shortly. So I'm going to run you through the next example, which is a series of three hydrographs of it, reflecting what we've done over three years in the Galben River. Now, this is a sequence of how adaptive management really works, where what you wanted to do in year one didn't work, but you've learned from it. And so over time, we've changed the watering in the Galben to get out of it what we want. Now, again, it looks slightly complicated, but it's flows on the left axis, time on the bottom axis. Environmental water is that sort of purple color. The big blue is natural flows, and then the little blue is operational flows. But that's not really what I want to concentrate so much on as showing you the progression over three years of what we've done. Now, our ambition here was to get golden perch to breed, an endangered native fish that's been much challenged by regulation and also to do something about banks slumping by getting the flows right to induce vegetation growth. So we put what we call a pulse. There's a pulse. There's another pulse. And then we monitor what we get. And you can see in this first year that a number of things happened. First of all, no golden perch spawning. So that's the outcome we wanted. We didn't get it. So we had to go away and think about and talk to the locals about why that was happening. Second thing you might notice, again, managing in the real world, we put a fresh down the system that coincided with the opening of the cod season and got into a lot of trouble because it ruined the cod season opening in Melbourne. So we needed to think about the environment in which we were working. One minute. I can get through two slides in a minute. So next year. So again, the same color. You can see that, again, because we know that the golden perch is response to pulses of fresh water. There's the fresh. But this time, we've left a gap in between the two freshers so that the cod season is not impacted. We had community concerns about access to pumps. And we put in another pulse later in the year for vegetation. And we got, in this year, golden perch spawning. So the beginnings of success. Final year, 14-15. Again, we modify based on what we learn. Two freshers, a gap in between so that the irrigators can access to their pumps. We finished that fresh before cod opening. So we're not interfering with cod opening. We put another fresh in for vegetation. And we got a huge response from golden perch, the biggest spawning response since the natural floods of 2010. So this is a very much simplified, I must admit, demonstration that we are attempting to utilize the principles of adaptive management in the way that we are managing the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holding. And I think on that note, I'll leave it be.