Cotton Australia says the Federal Government must urgently implement its promised $300 million to support on-farm infrastructure improvements to enable water savings to be delivered to the environment.

"The discussion on how Australia’s water resource should efficiently and sustainably be used is clearly too important to our national economy, not to mention hundreds of regional communities, to be reduced to symbolic gestures," Mr Kay said.

"Greater priority must be given to the social impacts of the water buyback scheme as well as the necessary support for on-farm infrastructure improvements that will deliver greater water use efficiency."

Mr Kay said that in a debate with so many strongly held views, it was easy to forget that everyone is after the same outcome: the balanced and sustainable distribution of a limited resource.

"It is not simply a matter of turning a tap off at one point to generate a flow somewhere else," he said.

"It is a complex system where the overwhelming majority of water within the system evaporates from natural lakes at Menindee and other areas before it reaches the mouth of the Murray.

"Drought too has had an enormous impact on water flow.

"Cubbie Station is only on the market because of the ongoing drought that stretches from Queensland to South Australia.

"The fact remains that if Cubbie Station didn’t exist there would be no guarantee that the river system would benefit, even in a wet year because the water would most likely be used by downstream properties or evaporate in areas such as the Menindee Lakes."