Plans to expand Lake Buffalo, near Myrtleford, into a million-megalitre dam are no longer practical with the advent of the Murray-Darling Basin agreement, Ms McGowan said yesterday.

And with 50 years of inaction on the proposed project, she added, successive state and federal governments would have built it by now if they truly wanted it.

Ms McGowan made the comments following a tour of the Lake Buffalo region from Big Buffalo lobby group members Tiff Rayner, Kev Dinneen and Fred Neal.

The group wants the Victorian government to make a decision on whether the project will go ahead or not.

If it won’t, they want the land that was compulsorily acquired from local families for the project in the 1960s to be returned to freehold.

Ms McGowan said she was “not optimistic” the dam would go ahead, and a definite decision was deserved for a group that had been “passionate” advocates for the development.

However, she said she believed while there “was a good argument at the time” for the dam, the state’s attitude to water strategy and planning had changed.

“The practicalities of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan are very real,” she said.

“Everyone has signed off on it and there are rules on allocating water.

“If we built it, the water would have to come from somewhere, so who is going to supply it ... and even if we could buy it, there is a whole lot in Ovens Valley already that is not being used.”

Mr Rayner called the meeting a “watershed moment” — and while their preference was for the project to be completed, they were prepared to instead lobby for the return of land.

“Just tell us yes or no,” he said.

“We’ve always been fighting for it but we’re quite happy to accept a reasonable argument against it, we’re commonsense people.

“The land’s been laying idle doing nothing for 50 years.”

The project was last mentioned in a state government discussion paper on water management last year.

Ms McGowan and Mr Rayner agree the site would be prime agricultural land and say it has not been managed but over-run with vegetation.

Ms McGowan said she would speak with her state government counterparts and the federal government to “put a line in the sand and get a decision”.