The heated row over water rights is set to escalate with the imminent publication of a new plan to save the Murray Darling Basin.
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The authority managing the region decided late yesterday to issue the draft plan on November 28.
It is expected to spark another furious reaction from irrigators who made bonfires with an earlier version of the plan.
After that, the chairman of the Murray Darling Basin Authority, Mike Taylor, resigned and was replaced by a former minister in the NSW Labor government, Craig Knowles.
The key sticking point remains how much water irrigators would have to give up to keep the rivers flowing.
The authority says it is considering returning 2800 gigalitres of water back to the environment, only slightly less than the proposed scaling back of water allocations last year that prompted the hostile reaction.
Environment Minister Tony Burke conceded the Government faced another harsh backlash.
''It's an opportunity that no lobby group will miss, and no community will miss,'' he said.
''We need to remember with this that there never will be a consensus position on the Murray Darling Basin where every community or interest on the basin says this is the perfect outcome and they all agree on something, that won't happen.
''There needs to be the political courage to make a judgment call as to how you provide a sustainable future for the basin.''
He said a meeting of Murray Darling Basin ministers in Canberra yesterday, which ACT Environment Minister Simon Corbell attended, decided to revert to the original conversion rates for water diverted to the environment.
''[The recent change] had provided a high level of uncertainty for communities and a whole lot of people have started to look at how much water they thought had been recovered in their catchment and have questioned, have the goal posts suddenly been shifted?
''Even though technically you can justify these sorts of changes, the uncertainty that it creates for communities just isn't worth it. Any reform is hard but it's made much harder if you add uncertainty to the equation.''
Mr Knowles said the authority would conduct consultations over the draft plan for 20 weeks.
The authority's chief executive, Rhondda Dickson, told Senate estimates there were no plans to hold community consultations similar to those held when the guide to the plan was issued late last year.
The communique said, ''Ministers noted the authority would make available more detailed information about the science underpinning the proposed water recovery targets and sustainable diversion limits at the time the draft basin plan is released.''
Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce said this showed the authority had not got the science right.
''We are heading towards the same mistakes as last time, foisting an unprepared and unrealistic plan on the 2.1million people who live in the basin,'' he said.
