Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

The Murray-Darling Basin is the fertile crescent of Australia. It occupies some 14 per cent of the continent, including more than half of Victoria. The basin includes at least 65 per cent of the total irrigated area of Australia, making it one of the most productive agricultural regions. It is the food bowl of the nation.

The climate affecting the basin, of course, is highly variable, with years of higher rainfall and lush abundance, with rivers flowing and the wetlands bursting with life. The times of abundance, however, alternate with long dry spells, which over millennia have built up sand dunes, lunettes and natural salt lakes. Many of the flora species, like the great river red gums, have evolved to sustain long periods of drought as well as inundation. Many of the bird and fish species only breed en masse when there is a sudden abundance of water, and they are migratory, moving to billabongs, lakes or plains which might be hundreds of kilometres apart but which have received some recent rain, triggering this massive breeding event. Fish, birds, frogs, crays—it is an extraordinary ecosystem which, as I say, has evolved to be able to survive in one of the most variable seasonal climate cycles anywhere on earth.

The original owners of the country, the Indigenous Australians along the Murray River—for example, the Bangerang and the Yorta Yorta, who are in my electorate—were so often able to walk across the empty Murray that none of their country boundaries followed the river banks. Their territories actually straddled the Murray River. It was not a water barrier in all years at all.

One of the most vivid illustrations of the climatic variation and bust-boom cycles of drought and plenty in the basin came from the experience of the first Europeans who travelled across and down through the basin, setting off from around Sydney in the mid-1800s. In 1836 Major Sir Thomas Mitchell, the Surveyor-General of the colony of New South Wales, overlanded with wagons, crossing the Murray into the great northern plains of Victoria, a region of about 300 millimetres of annual rainfall on average. Mitchell wrote in his diaries—later to become a best-selling book—that this was ‘Australia Felix’. The grass was waving under his horses’ bellies and the land was ‘unencumbered with too much wood but possessing enough for all purposes’. He called himself Adam in this glorious Eden. He was astounded and astonished by the lushness of the growth and the quantity of the feed. He had no problems at all in imagining what close settlement would follow in his footsteps.

But then in 1842 Joseph Hawdon was bringing stock overland and he literally followed the tracks of the Mitchell expedition. Following the route through northern Victoria in particular was dead easy, because it apparently had not rained in the intervening six years since Mitchell went through. Of course, Hawdon was in great strife. His livestock was dying. He said that the country that Mitchell had called the Garden of Eden was in fact of ‘the worst possible description’—endless flat, bare plains with wind-blown roly-polies, and a type of pigface was virtually the only feed for his animals. Hawdon was unlucky. He was crossing the basin in the long dry spell of the seasonal cycles; Mitchell had most fortuitously seen it after plentiful rains.

The earliest European settlers in the basin needed water security to survive, to live in towns and cities but also in order to establish productive agriculture. The solution was seen in damming and diverting the Murray and its tributaries. Amongst the earliest state owned irrigation systems was the tapping of the northern Victorian tributaries to the Murray—the Loddon, the Campaspe and the Goulburn. And of course there was the Tragowel Plains Irrigation Scheme, near Pyramid Hill, now a part of the Goulburn Murray Irrigation System. The Governor of Victoria turned the first sod on that irrigation scheme in 1886.

With that irrigation scheme, the land did flow with milk and honey, not just when it rained but year after year after year. Drought proofed and with further damming—filling ephemeral swamps to establish permanent storages, threading thousands of kilometres of irrigation channels between and through natural waterways—northern Victoria became the pre-eminent food bowl within the food bowl of Australia, with the most intensive food-manufacturing sector to be found throughout the country. There were the dairy, fruit and tomato industries and the cropping, livestock and pig industries.

Northern Victoria boasted the closest settlement of any rural communities in Australia. Indeed, we had government policy further pushing closer settlement through soldier settlers and wave after wave of new Australians who began picking and packing fruit in the 1920s in this region. They soon moved up to own the farm and then the other businesses in the communities, and then their children became the next generation of Australians serving the region as the professionals.

The Victorian irrigation region of the basin until recently had the most secure water in Australia, despite the extraordinary bust-boom seasonal fluctuations. In the late 1980s, the Victorian government very radically reformed its water law and separated water entitlements from the land in order to introduce a market system which would make the water even more likely to go to agribusiness with the highest value.

Each of the states in the Murray-Darling Basin has its own history of trying to drought-proof or water-secure their communities within the basin—communities which provide most of the food for our country and its exports. The basin unfortunately continues to be a patchwork of different water laws, different water security entitlements and different water market regimes. The water is, however, traded between states despite this lack of harmony.

There has been a failure in proper and adequate governance across the Murray-Darling Basin for more than a century. It was the coalition under John Howard which finally said: ‘Enough is enough.’ The Murray-Darling Basin is a single ecosystem. It is a complex geographic region but it must be governed by a single authority and have an agreed harmonisation of water law, water security objectives and measures, some security of tenure to ensure ongoing agribusiness investment and a sense of a future that goes beyond bust-boom or the erratic water law applications of individual states. So on 25 January 2007 in an address to the National Press Club former Prime Minister John Howard announced the National Plan for Water Security. He in particular focused in on the Murray-Darling Basin. He said:

The existing mechanism for the management of the Basin … the current arrangements, have made some substantial contributions to Basin-wide … management over the decades—

but—

the shortcomings of the current model are of concern to the Commonwealth Government and, indeed, many others.

The decisions taken by the MDBC often reflect parochial interests and do not reflect the best interest of the Basin as a whole.

I would go on to say that those decisions do not reflect the best interests of the nation. Therefore, the coalition government put an extraordinary package of over $10 billion on the table, which was an inducement for the states to sign up to a cohesive management regime where in addition there would be significant investments in water-saving infrastructure, in water-monitoring and metering arrangements, in new investments to help address the overallocation problems that in particular blight New South Wales and in reforming the decision-making processes in the basin.

The Victorian government in particular said ‘No way’. They refused to sign on to this national water agreement even though they were to be the state which would benefit the most in terms of having additional investment for their decrepit, underresourced and poorly maintained state owned irrigation infrastructure. The Victorian government held out and held out, and at the time we were not really sure why. Tragically for us in northern Victoria, it was very soon made very clear why: Melbourne had a problem. It was having water restrictions.

Melbourne of course is not in the Murray-Darling Basin. It is hundreds of kilometres away from the basin. It is a much better watered place than northern Victoria, which is within the Murray-Darling Basin, but former Premier Bracks had a problem. Melbourne was on level 3 water restrictions and—guess what?—these water users were blaming the Victorian government for lack of investment in proper water recycling, stormwater harvesting or even a desalinisation plant. Melbourne people were aghast to think of the treated water pouring out of Gunnamatta outfall in a volume which would virtually meet their needs, in terms of the drought impacting on Thomson Dam, but there was no commitment from the Victorian state government to do anything about the water that passed them by, literally going out to sea around the corner from where the city is.

So what did Mr Bracks, followed soon by Premier Brumby, do about Melbourne’s water shortage? They looked, no doubt, at the political allegiances of those in northern Victoria. Of course these allegiances were with the National and Liberal parties because we are the parties that understand and care about rural and regional Australia. Our constituencies are the agribusiness producers in this country, and they long ago understood that Labor do nothing for rural and regional Australians and instead make token gestures from time to time. Unfortunately, Mr Bracks, and then Mr Brumby, had a solution to the political problem of Melbourne people saying the government had done nothing about their water security. Premier Bracks said: ‘We’ll pipe the water out of the basin—not a problem. It’s simple technology. Anyone can build a pipe, even the Victorian government. We’ll put a pipe into the Goulburn River a few kilometres down from the Eildon Dam, and the job’s right. We’ll do this because we’ll put some investment into our state owned irrigation infrastructure’—the Goulburn-Murray irrigation system, over a hundred years old—’which we own in entirety. We’ll invest some $600 million into that system and we’ll ask the Commonwealth to chuck in another $1 billion or $2 billion. Then we will find some water savings through this investment by, for example, replacing the dethridge wheels with water meters, plastic lining some of the channels or putting in total channel control systems.’

The Victorian government said: ‘We know that those measures don’t add up to significant water savings, particularly in drought years, but that doesn’t matter. If there aren’t the savings to deliver water through the Melbourne pipeline by 2010’—when the pipeline will start to flow, just before the state election—’we will use the environmental reserve in Eildon Dam, of 30 gigalitres. We don’t really think that’s a problem. The environmental reserve has been sitting there. It’s not used very often.’ But of course the point about the environmental reserve in Eildon is that it is tagged to be used in the Goulburn River when the blue-green algae blooms occur and kill murray cod, tortoises and other endangered species in the Goulburn River.

Does the Goulburn River, a tributary to the Murray, have any spare water capacity? Is it a river in great health? According to the CSIRO and the Murray-Darling Basin Commission itself, the Goulburn River is the most degraded tributary to the Murray in the system. It has extraordinary stress in terms of its wildlife and natural ecosystems. The water quality is significantly degraded and, of course, its quantity is hugely reduced due to the seven years of drought now impacting the region and the fact that with climate change there is an estimation of some 20 per cent reduced run-off into the catchment now and in the future.

But none of that fazed the Brumby government. They said, ‘We’ll take the environmental reserve. It will come first down the pipeline and then we’ll have the other 75 gigalitres a year from the savings that we have produced by investing in different meters, total channel control systems and a bit of plastic lining in the channels.’ This is, on the one hand, an enormous problem for the communities that produce the food for Australia, the northern Victorian communities. On the other hand it is an enormous problem, which I consider as significant, for the ecosystem of the Murray-Darling Basin itself. Now, fortunately, the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Mr Garrett, has said, ‘Hang on, Victorian government. I have decreed that this is a controlled action under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. You cannot use the environmental reserve—I’m sorry, you must not.’ He has also said, ‘You are not to send Goulburn system water to Melbourne if it has already been allocated to the Living Murray or Water For Rivers programs’—in other words, for the Murray-Darling Basin ecosystem.

On first blush, that would appear to be the end of the pipeline to Melbourne for Mr Brumby. There is no water if he is not allowed to take the reserve, and the few water savings that have been produced so far and that are due to be produced are already paid for and allocated to the Murray River itself—and have been committed for quite some time. Unfortunately, Mr Brumby and his minister for water said, ‘That’s not a problem either. We’ll decide where we designate water as allocated out of the Living Murray or Water For Rivers programs. It doesn’t have to be the long-known and website documented central Goulburn channels 1 to 4. It can be anywhere we choose it to be.’ I beg Minister Garrett to hold firm on the conditions that he has codified for this north-south pipeline.

I am disappointed that Mr Garrett did not simply say that no water is to leave the Murray-Darling Basin for consumption outside the basin, on the grounds that there is no superfluous or additional water at all in the Murray-Darling Basin. We know the system is dying. We know the red gums are dying from Echuca through to the mouth of the Murray. We know the lower Murray is in desperate straits in terms of acidification and rising salinity levels—the ecosystems there are dying. We do not believe it was an appropriate call for Minister Garrett to say, ‘You can do this, but here are some conditions.’ We believe the EPBC Act listed enough species which will be impacted significantly and that he should have simply said, ‘No go.’ But he said, ‘Yes, with wriggle room for the Victorian government; you can do this with conditions.’ I am asking him therefore to apply those conditions.

But it gets worse. While Minister Garrett has said that no environmental reserve may be taken out of Eildon to Melbourne, he has not said that the Bendigo pipeline must stop taking that environmental reserve right now. We have some 10 gigalitres for the Bendigo pipeline for the city of Bendigo coming from the environmental reserve. We are told, quite cheerfully, that Ballarat will sometime soon be hooked into that same pipeline and that Geelong will be hooked into the Melbourne pipeline out of the Goulburn system.

If you wrote this in a science fiction book people would laugh and say, ‘No governments in a parliamentary democracy would behave like that. That is absurd. You can’t have an elected government steal water from an ecosystem which is so stressed and documented to be in the worst state of anywhere in the entire Murray-Darling Basin. You can’t take water from that system across a mountain range and pump it using fossil fuel derived energy to a city that has options.’ What are Melbourne’s options? Stormwater harvesting, recycling or desalination, if it is carefully planned. There are a whole range of options. They can use pricing options in Melbourne. They can talk about more conservation of use in Melbourne. The same applies for Ballarat, Geelong and Bendigo. Instead, as I say, this democratically elected Victorian government has said, ‘No, we have an easier, quicker solution, and those people don’t vote for us anyway. Let’s take it out of the Murray-Darling Basin, particularly the Goulburn Valley, take it across the divide and pump it into Melbourne’—75 gigalitres a year, with carryover rights and, indeed, with no questions asked about the impacts on the Ramsar listed wetlands in the Murray, whose major tributary is the Goulburn River. In fact, I am disappointed to say that Minister Garrett refused to extend the EPBC Act referral beyond the pipe off-take. He refused to consider the downstream wetlands, which are served with water from the Goulburn. These are the Ramsar listed wetlands in the Barmah forest.

The Water Amendment Bill will have to serve us in a way that ensures the states are brought to heel. The Victorian government must understand that it cannot operate alone and for party political purposes when the Murray-Darling Basin itself will have its ecosystem further degraded and parts of it destroyed. This bill, therefore, has a very difficult job to do. I am not sure if the Rudd Labor government is up to it, quite frankly. It has not managed to convince me that the states have any sense of cross-basin purpose. (Time expired)

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