Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

the Minister for Climate Change and Water, came to my electorate last week for a Murray-Darling meeting in Goondiwindi. There was quite a lot of excitement in town. At long last the minister was going to come to town, and people wanted to talk to her about this $500 million. How did she intend to spend it? She walked into the meeting, gave a speech and walked out. I would have thought that if she were fair dinkum about talking to communities—communities where the workers and families are dependent on water and agriculture—she would have spent some time talking to them, taking a few questions from the audience. No. She walked in, gave a 20-minute speech and walked out. If it is her plan and the government’s plan to spend this $500 million like they did buying Toorale Station at Bourke, it will devastate many rural communities not only in my electorate but across the Murray-Darling Basin.

As a coalition in government, we said that the appropriate way to deal with water entitlements in the Murray-Darling Basin was not with buybacks but through water efficiency measures. I was talking to a farmer in my electorate the other day about that very subject of water efficiency—investing in water efficiency, as opposed to just buying the water back, as they did with Toorale Station. They shut down the station and shut down the 100 jobs that were part of that enterprise. That is certainly going to impact on the Bourke Shire Council, because the station is now going to be a national park, and national parks do not pay local government rates. There has been no compensation for the people, the families or the small businesses that will lose their jobs or their businesses. The water has been bought as part of a buyback.

Had the minister spent some time the other day at Goondiwindi talking about water efficiency to farmers, who are very efficient in the first instance, she would have started to understand that we should invest this money—and this is what I plead with the minister for. We do not want you to buy water back and just take the water and run, leave town. We should be investing in water efficiency measures. This farmer I mentioned a moment ago grows cotton and a range of other crops—summer crops and winter crops but mainly cotton in the summer. He has invested, as some are now starting to invest, in lateral move irrigators. They are those irrigators that are large—they can be one or two kilometres long. They move down a laser levelled paddock. This is replacing the traditional method that has been used since irrigation commenced on the Darling Downs, which was flood irrigation. We have moved from flood to lateral move irrigation.

When they are growing a cotton crop, they will be growing it on stored moisture plus water they will put onto it when the crop needs it. If you were still using flood irrigation methods, you would have put 100 millimetres of water on—the equivalent of four inches in the old scale—because that is what flood irrigation would deliver. You cannot do anything less. It is going to flood down and it is going to be the equivalent of four inches of water on that land. By using the lateral move irrigator and knowing from probes in the ground that what the crop needed was about an inch and a half of water, about 37 millimetres on the new scale, it is able to deliver an inch and a half on this lateral move irrigator down the paddock and water the crop and finish the crop. That is a saving of 60 per cent of water by moving from flood irrigation to water efficient technology. If you apply that across the Murray-Darling Basin, not only do you get the savings from the farmers’ water entitlement; you can deliver part of that—not always all of it but part of that—as an environmental flow into the Murray-Darling Basin. That is a sensible way forward with this money. I urge the minister to forget about just going and buying an entitlement and having farmers bid to offer some water for some cash. Invest in water efficiency. Then we will start to see huge savings in water. As I demonstrated in what this farmer told me the other day, up to 60 per cent of water could be saved merely by moving from one form of irrigation, flood irrigation, to lateral move irrigation.

I know the Minister for Resources and Energy is coming to my electorate very soon. I will certainly be showing him the Warrego Highway when he is there and I will be calling on the government, if they want to really invest in hard infrastructure, to match what the coalition said they would do before the last federal election and invest some $126 million in the Warrego Highway. That is hard infrastructure which feeds right into the heart of the Surat coal basin. I know that Minister Ferguson will be interested in it and I would hope that he will be able to encourage Minister Albanese, the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, to ensure that there is investment in real infrastructure rather than splashing the cash around. That would certainly make a difference. The other thing I would like to mention is the Roma airport. I know that the Roma regional council would like some $6 million for an airport upgrade. That is the sort of infrastructure that will make a real long-term difference. It will underpin jobs; it will create an economic activity in the community that is slowing but certainly is not in recession. So when he is there I will be showing him those two projects as having the potential for real hard infrastructure spending rather than what we see as more of a cash splash. And I call on the government to look at my water proposals with great seriousness.

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