Structural changes made to the Australian water sector since the 1990s have not engaged substantively with Indigenous interests in water, notwithstanding the inclusion of customary rights to water as an incident of native title. The modest policy and regulatory changes made in response to the Mabo decision have failed to address Indigenous water dispossession and, in the Murray-Darling Basin, more recent reforms to Commonwealth water law and policy continue to privilege the interests of non-Indigenous land and water entitlement holders. Indigenous rights and interests are, for the most part, treated as tokenistic ‘ornamental extras’ in the Water Act 2007 (Cth) and its delegated instrument, the 2012 Murray-Darling Basin Plan. We reviewed 10 surface and groundwater plans from NSW submitted for accreditation under the Basin Plan. NSW was selected because it has the largest Indigenous population of Basin jurisdictions. Indigenous peoples in this part of the Basin comprise almost 10% of the population yet currently own a mere 0.2% of available surface water. We assessed the publicly available water resource plans against the procedural requirements of the Basin Plan which refer to the five inter‐related sets of obligations: identifying certain matters; having regard to certain matters; specifying opportunities to strengthen and protect; providing a minimum baseline of legal protection; and consulting about certain matters. Our analysis highlights not only the limited nature of the provisions in the Water Act, but the poor performance of NSW in satisfying even these weak obligations. We argue that opportunities to redress the dispossession of Aboriginal water rights in NSW are being forgone through the implementation of this major reform and that Basin governments have a moral obligation to exceed the minimalist requirements of the current water allocation framework.