Following last week’s announcement by the NSW government of a new Richmond River Coordinator, a gathering at Swan Bay heard from Julie McLellan, CEO of Healthy Land & Water, southeast Queensland’s natural resource management organisation, about the practicalities of restoring rivers.
Member for Lismore and Minister for the North Coast Janelle Saffin was also present. She told The Echo that the position of Richmond River Coordinator would be advertised ‘within a month or two – but don’t hold me to that,’ saying that the Richmond was in a very poor condition, while noting that the will to improve the river and other waterways across the region was clearly there.
Ms Saffin suggested she’d pushed for the coordinator idea because she didn’t feel the region was ready for a full commissioner model. She said the first steps would be to work out where to start, which parts to tackle, and in what order.
As she explained, the Richmond River system involves around 30 different government and community agencies, and over 50 different pieces of legislation and regulatory instruments.
Structured coordination
She said the coordinator’s role would be to pull all these strands together around river recovery and provide ‘structured coordination’, sitting within the NSW government structure and reporting primarily to Water Minister Rose Jackson, along with other ministers in related portfolios, such as Tara Moriarty.
Ms Saffin said the Richmond River Coordinator will have supporting staff, and be based in the local community, with the position currently funded until June 2028.
Guest speaker Julie McLellan was asked what could realistically be achieved in two years. ‘Not much,’ she said, noting that anyone walking into such a job would have to be ready for a lot of evidence-gathering and trust-building with diverse stakeholders, which takes time, rather than coming in with pre-existing ideas.
As the CEO of Healthy Land & Water, Ms McLellan outlined how decades of science, collaboration, and targeted investment have improved waterway health in Moreton Bay and its catchments, and why those gains are now under threat.
Her talk was both a case study and a strategic roadmap for saving rivers in a hostile political and economic environment. She said it was important to gather scientific evidence to target interventions, build political and community support for the necessary work, and then find creative funding models to scale restoration up to landscape level impacts.
Lessons from SEQ
Ms McLellan stressed that every major decision her organisation made was grounded in data, not politics.
With 17,000 km of waterways across southeast Queensland, nearly all degraded to some extent, she said there would never be the resources to fix everything, so the only rational approach was to use science to identify where interventions could deliver the biggest benefit (bang for buck), prioritising locations based on measurable impacts, such as nutrient reduction, sediment reduction, ecological recovery, and economic co-benefits.
She said it was important for scientific experts to argue out the detail behind closed doors, but then find public consensus and clarity on the key issues, rather than bamboozling politicians with too many alternatives.
As she put it, community pressure is important, but community pressure alone isn’t enough for people looking for good environmental outcomes. You need politicians prepared to expend political capital, but they will only move when the science is clear and unified.
She then explained how this had worked in practice by reducing flows of unwanted nutrients into Moreton Bay. ‘When we upgraded the big sewage treatment plants, you could see it in the data – a massive drop in nitrogen and the seagrass coming back. We proved that targeted intervention works.’
Sedimentary runoff
Sadly, Ms McLellan said that water quality in Moreton Bay was now declining again, mostly due to sedimentary runoff from population growth and too much clearing on upper catchments for agriculture and housing developments, also a major problem in the Northern Rivers.
Regarding the oft-dismissed impact of natural solutions, when it comes to sediment, clearing and riparian zones, she said, ‘It’s not a “nice-to-have” – good riparian vegetation will trap seven times more sediment, sixteen times more phosphorus and three times more nitrogen. Yet we’re still allowing clearing right up to the water’s edge.’
She said a major problem was local councils refusing to accept the cumulative effect of multiple instances of clearing across a large catchment, amounting to a big problem which no one is prepared to take responsibility for.
Using the examples of the Logan, Lockyer and Bremer rivers she said that 20 per cent of SEQ catchments contribute 80 per cent of the sediment entering Moreton Bay, making those areas obvious priorities to target first.
Using before and after slides and scientific data, she then showed how large-scale riverbank restoration is both technically feasible and economically rational, with wins for everybody, including agricultural landholders, councils and everyone downstream, and multiple flood events providing the ultimate proof of concept.
She explained that such investment is justified not just for environmental reasons but for asset protection and economic continuity.
Ms McLellan then went through a number of vegetation, bank works, instream structures and fish passages across the Lockyer-Bremer system, leading to 65 per cent reductions in annual sediment load.
She noted that one dairy farm in the area had earlier spent around $3 million trucking eroded soil back uphill after a flood when it ended up in the streets, illustrating the false economy of neglecting catchment health.
Urban interventions
Illustrating her argument with cases from suburban Brisbane, Julie McLellan emphasised that small works in local creeks also mattered as part of the whole of catchment story, with the tree planting and management efforts of community and school groups leading to measurable, lasting improvements in urban run-off, along with better downstream water quality.
She gave examples of wetland reactivations, such as reopening or modifying floodgates and changing drainage, to restore wetland and floodplain function, with benefits in terms of nutrient processing, wildlife habitat, and flood mitigation for downstream communities.
The recurrent pattern was clear: slowing water, stabilising banks, and restoring floodplains keeps soil on farms, reduces downstream dredging, protects infrastructure, and improves ecological health.
Creative funding and the economics of restoration
Julie McLellan was blunt that government cannot and will not fund everything, whether in Queensland or NSW. To scale restoration to the levels needs, her organisation has developed innovative funding approaches.
These include nutrient offsetting: rather than endlessly upgrading sewage plants for diminishing returns (dealing with the problem downstream), utilities can meet regulatory obligations by funding catchment works (upstream) that deliver greater nutrient reductions per dollar.
She cited a factor of about ‘five times better nutrient outcomes’ from upper-catchment interventions compared to further plant upgrades. This creates a regulated market, where utilities and ports pay for upstream improvements.
She also talked about corporate partnerships. Examples include the Port of Brisbane, which spends heavily on dredging but also faces regulatory requirements for ‘water-sensitive urban design’.
By funding catchment works (e.g. in the upper Lockyer/Laidley), they gain compliance and additional hardstand area for shipping containers, and reduced sediment loads over time.
Ms McLellan said drink giants Coca-Cola and Suntory both have global commitments to replenish the water they use, via volumetric benefits schemes. In SEQ, this means they fund: Fencing, riparian works, and farm management improvements, along with groundwater recharge projects using reactivated wetlands.
As she explained, for them it’s a brand and compliance issue (and petty change); for catchments it’s major new capital for river restoration.
She’s also an advocate for broader natural capital markets, meaningful carbon credits and emerging biodiversity credits, while being skeptical of ‘greenwash’. Arguing for independently verified impact studies, she says serious projects must be backed by robust scientific monitoring, which is ‘non-negotiable’.
She said long-term data is essential to understand pressures, prove impacts, and convince governments and corporates to invest in river restoration at scale.
Big picture
According to Julie McLellan, anyone seeking to fix a river system needs to take a ‘whole of catchment view, with no single fix or sector able to solve waterway decline. This is something that requires coordinated action from landholders, utilities, governments (at all levels), corporations and communities.
She says land management is central: Most of the problems (and solutions) are tied to how we use land – including clearing, grazing, cropping and urban development.
Most importantly, she says prevention is a much better option than repair: it’s far cheaper to conserve remaining healthy areas and keep development away from waterways than to rebuild broken systems later.
Ms McLellan says that those who benefit from land and water resources should be required to reinvest in their restoration and protection, and believes we are closer than ever to genuine markets that properly value ecosystem services, which will change everything.
Success is possible
She frames south east Queensland’s story (while incomplete and far from perfect) as a successful proof of concept for the idea that sustained, science-led, collaborative work can restore waterways – if society is willing to allow that to happen.
You can find out more about Healthy Land & Water here.
Let’s hope someone on the NSW side of the border is listening.
Having been among those pushing strongly for a single authority to restore the Richmond River, Graeme Gibson and Steve Posselt will be organising more meetings with stakeholders and scientific experts in coming months, as they and others seek to bring the Richmond River back to health.
If the Richmond River Coordinator model is successful, it’s hoped that this idea might be extended to other troubled waterways across the Northern Rivers and the state.
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