More than 25 Murray-Darling Basin draft agreements discarded A couple camp by on banks of the Murray River. MORE than 25 drafts of the Commonwealth and state's agreement on the Murray Darling Basin have been written and discarded, it has been revealed. Department officials told a Senate estimates committee yesterday of a number of delays on reforms for the Basin, including finalising the Intergovernmental Agreement and approving the $265 million River Murray Improvements Program. South Australian Liberal Senator Simon Birmingham said reform had "slowed to a snail's pace." "The department has apparently prepared more than 25 drafts of the agreement, the key strategy ... that's a remarkable number of iterations of a document to try to get to a point of agreement," he said. Having soaked up adulation for finalising the Basin Plan, Labor appears to have dumped its actual implementation in the `too-hard' basket. The department did not detail the sticking points for the plan but Premier Jay Weatherill has previously warned that the upstream states would be "thinking of ways to unpick (it) ." Anne Ruston, another SA Liberal Senator, said she was concerned that the improvements program had not yet even been approved. "My greatest concern from spending the whole morning (in Estimates) is that there seem to be so many loose ends that haven't been tied up, that are unravelling," she said. The people of the river communities, some of these things on the table are the difference between whether they survive or they don't survive. Mr Weatherill said the department was working on the package and would make an announcement once all the details were in place. "Senator Ruston and Mr Birmingham join the long list of Liberal Party members seeking to undermine this historic reform - which will restore the River Murray to health after decades of degradation," he said. Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities spokeswoman Mary Harwood said the improvement program was "under development." "We have just received this week our business case from the SA Government," she said. Assuming the project goes through and is approved, it would roll out over a number of years ... it has yet to go through final due diligence.