They're buying companies with their permanent water allocations, and that's like buying the
oil well. There's only so many water rights on the Murrumbidgee, and if the deals go ahead, Webster will have around 235GL of permanent water allocations -- that's over 5% of the Murrumbidgee rights.
See <
http://www.water.nsw.gov.au/Article...rray_murrumbidgee_water_availability.pdf.aspx>, for a current allocations picture.
Now Webster could try to buy up things piecemeal on the open market, but:
1. they'd be competing with Tandou and possibly Bengerang in this.
2. there aren't allocations available on the open market (particularly High Security) of anywhere near the quantity that T & B have (for instance this Broker has only
30 ML of Murrumbidgee HS at a high price --http://
www.wilkswater.com.au/permanent-water), and in the last 6 months, Ruralco has sold less than 1GL of Murrumbidgee HS allocations in total. Tandou has over 17GL of HS alone (not just Murrumbidgee, though)
3. you're unlikely to see large rights holders selling a large quantity of allocations without a corresponding land sale.
TL;DR: No.
-T.
