The Barmah Choke is famous for constricting the flow of water down the Murray, but a largely overlooked decision last week has highlighted its loosening grip on the river and raised fresh doubts about the need for a multimillion-dollar bypass being considered by the Brumby Government.
Bans on trading water from upstream of the choke — a narrow and elevated 50-kilometre section of the river near Echuca, which is home to wetlands and redgum forests — to downstream have been relaxed because of low water levels.
Such trades have usually been discouraged because only a limited amount of water could flow through the choke.
Aside from complicating trades, flooding the choke at the wrong times was damaging the wetlands, which have been listed as internationally significant.
But bans on trading water through the choke were temporarily relaxed last September due to recent low water levels.
The decision was extended in December and again last Thursday until at least October.
Thursday's decision means water trading through the choke will soon have been under way for more than 12 months, throwing fresh doubt on the need for an expensive bypass channel that is being considered by State Water Minister Tim Holding.
The Brumby Government has spent $3 million on a feasibility study into such a bypass, and the completed study was handed to Mr Holding earlier this year.
Conceived in wetter times, the bypass around the choke is intended to accelerate flow rates and assist water trading.
Former Water Minister John Thwaites estimated in 2007 that such a bypass could free up 1300 gigalitres of extra water.
Previous estimates put the cost at about $200 million.
Arguments against the bypass have usually focused on the health of the redgums, but critics are increasingly asking if the bypass is redundant given grim forecasts about water availability and the recent success of water trading through the choke.
Victorian National Parks Association spokesman, Nick Roberts, said the reasons for building such a bypass were increasingly unclear in times of diminishing rainfall.
"You combine the impacts of climate change on water availability into the future with the massive buyback that will take place over the next few years of water licences, and you have to ask is this massively costly piece of water infrastructure necessary," he said.
The Victorian Nationals' water spokesman, Peter Walsh, agreed that such a bypass could not be justified under current conditions.
"In the immediate future, no, we don't need an inter-connector, and until we return to some sort of normality with our seasons and our storage levels, we aren't going to need an inter-connector," he said.
Mr Walsh said the project could be reconsidered if wetter times returned.
"To spend hundreds of millions of dollars at the moment to build an inter-connector from one dry catchment to another dry catchment doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense," he said.
But Mr Holding's spokesman, Luke Enright, said the Government was still considering the report.
"A feasibility study was recently undertaken into the inter-connector and the Government will now consider its findings," he said.
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