John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010 and the Appropriation (Water Entitlements) Bill 2009-2010. They are government supply bills for the ordinary, and not ordinary, annual services of the government in relation to water entitlements and home insulation. I am going to let others speak on the home insulation aspect. My main concerns—in which I guess I am on the record as having a very real portfolio interest as well as a personal interest, for me and particularly for my electorate—are to do with the nation’s water, in particular the Murray-Darling Basin, which is where I reside and which the whole of my current and proposed electorate is pretty much in.

I have always had grave concerns about the government’s approach to water reforms and, once again, I have to put on the record my disgust at the callous disregard that this government has for regional Australia when it comes to the use of water and, more than anything, the potential use of water. To look upon human beings and rural communities as ants that can be disposed of at will is not something I accept, having grown up in this country. The Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Wong, has time and again shown that she has absolutely no regard for the people who live in the basin—except for the people at the bottom of the basin, who are mostly not in it at all.

The second purpose of the main bill, which is the area I am mostly speaking about and concerned about in the first place, is to fund departmental costs—that is, costs of the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts—associated with the acceleration of the water buybacks within the Murray-Darling Basin system that are addressed in the water entitlements bill. That includes $4.9 billion brought forward from 2013-14 and 2014-15 under the so-called Restoring the Balance in the Murray-Darling Basin program, part of the Water for the Future plan, to provide the department with adequate resourcing to efficiently implement this government’s water purchase program. And therein lies the problem. It is not about water efficiencies, which the member for Forrest just spoke about. This government has very much shown that it is not about the better use of water; it is about the nonuse of it.

I will never forget what the minister, Senator Wong, said when she was asked whether she was aware that, in the purchase of Toorale station below Bourke, the water entitlements and everything it did there, she was purchasing 10 per cent of the business turnover of the Bourke Shire; and that she was purchasing four per cent of the water entitlements, which obviously in future would not be paid by national parks at the base rate for the Bourke Shire; and that that was the end of up to 100 part-time jobs in the Bourke Shire. Her reply, ‘What’s your point?’ is a rather chilling reminder that not everybody sees the Murray-Darling Basin in terms of the needs of the people who live in it.

The fact is that there are two million people who live and make their living producing for Australia in the Murray-Darling Basin, and that is not counting the one million or so people in Adelaide who are actually not in the basin, who do not live in it. Nobody, whether they are in or out of the basin, would ever deny Adelaide or anywhere else the domestic water that is necessary. But that has never really been seriously in dispute and no-one has ever denied that. And, given that Adelaide can actually store used water in the hills anyway and does not really call upon that much water out of the Murray River itself, I have never seen that as the issue for Adelaide or any other town along the river. I will come back to that, because there are some towns that are very much at serious risk of not having water—and not in the very near future; I am talking about now.

The Appropriation (Water Entitlements) Bill 2009-2010 will provide funding to the department to accelerate water buybacks within the Murray-Darling Basin system. Administered funding of $650 million will be brought forward from later years of the Restoring the Balance in the Murray-Darling Basin program, comprising $320 million brought forward from 2010-11 and 2011-12, and $330 million brought forward from 2010-11, 2011-12 and 2013-14, to provide for additional water buybacks in the current financial year. That has been decided since the announcement of the 2009-10 MYEFO on 2 November 2009.

I am very concerned about not just the future of the river but particularly the future of the community within the Murray-Darling Basin. One of the reasons that those two million people live in that community is to grow, process or be part of the production capacity of that basin, and, when I say that, I am talking about the rivers and the irrigation that they provide.

This bill is a further nail in the coffin of regional communities and will entrench what can only be described as a Rudd-made drought in basin communities once the climatic cycle returns to normal. You are not a climate change sceptic if you simply talk about drought instead of climate change, and undoubtedly we are in a drought. Climate change may exacerbate a drought, but it has not caused it. We have had droughts as bad as this before, and I just hope I am not around when the next one comes. We are still in a drought—very much so, particularly in my part of the world. On the basis of the current drought, Senator Wong has simply gone out and bought all the water that she can, and it is very plain that she does not plan to return any of it to productive usage—in other words, it is only for the environment. It is all very well to talk about the Lower Lakes. I accept the problems that some of our colleagues have down there with water. I myself have been there various times and I am in extreme sympathy with those people, whether it is in the Riverland or the Lower Lakes, and I am also in extreme sympathy with everybody from St George through the north-west of New South Wales, the central west, the Riverina, the Murray and the Goulburn—nobody is exempt from this. I think most of the productive capacity is in the high reaches of the Murray-Darling Basin.

I am a bit overwhelmed, and I suppose disgusted, that this government can find another $650 million to bring forward to spend on water buybacks in the next couple of years but is not interested in helping the people below Condobolin who are now facing the unprecedented reality of having their water flows cut off. I am not blaming people because the river or the dam is now at around six per cent or less—and at this time of year that is not a lot of water. Without doubt the New South Wales water authorities have some concerns about how much of that six per cent they can extract. Certainly things have to be done about that. But consider the figures. You would imagine that the largest purchase of water Senator Wong would have made would have been from the biggest river, the Murray, or maybe the Murrumbidgee, the second-biggest river. But, no, it is the Lachlan, which flows into the Murray-Darling Basin only once every 50 years at the height of a flood, at which time the last thing you are going to need is more water. In other words, the Lachlan is not really part of the system, except once in a lifetime. Yet Senator Wong has bought almost twice as much water from the Lachlan as she has from any other river system—75,000 megalitres or 75 gigalitres. The next highest is 47,000 megalitres, or 47 gigalitres, from the Macquarie river, which strangely enough, while it does flow more regularly into the system than the Lachlan—more than every 50 years—does not flow continuously into the system. That is the second biggest purchase. It is equivalent to what has been bought out of the second-biggest river, the Murrumbidgee, and slightly more than that which has been bought out of the Murray. I find this figure incredible. Why would you pick on the livelihoods of people near rivers to that extent when the rivers are not actually part of your system?

The Lachlan is the river that is in the most trouble now. Certainly the people below Condobolin are in trouble. If Senator Wong wants to get serious about helping people, why does she not say to the state government, ‘If you have got to shut the river off, I am doing my level best to make sure they do not have a future after the drought by buying an enormous amount of the water’? Why is she buying it there? Because she can get high figures because it is the cheapest water—not because it is going to help the Murray-Darling Basin but because that is where she can buy 75,000 gigs at about $600 a megalitre. She certainly cannot buy it for that sort of money out of the Murrumbidgee or the Murray. The second cheapest is the Macquarie, and that is why she is buying it there, not because she is going to help the Murray-Darling Basin system.

I challenge this government to do the right thing by the people of the Lachlan, particularly below Condobolin, and say to the state government, ‘If you have got to shut it off then you have got to shut it off, but here is $50 million to help people along that way put in bores and put in pipelines so that they can still do their stock and domestic.’ The state government is imposing fines of up to $250,000 on anyone who contravenes and pumps water on open channels and suchlike. I guess you have got to do something, but I would say to the state government: do not overreact as people do still have to water their stock and they do still have to have domestic water at their homesteads. That is what is going to happen and is happening below Condobolin on the Lachlan River. I think that if Senator Wong really is the Minister for Climate Change and Water then she should do the right thing by people in the Murray-Darling Basin area—she is claiming that the Lachlan is part of the system because she is buying all their water—and help them through this crisis, because crisis it is. My big worry is what she has done to the Macquarie and the Lachlan—the two smallest rivers, in a sense, in the whole system. That is where she has bought most of the water—because it is cheap, not because it is effective—and she has condemned them to a permanent productive drought.

Not one cent has been spent by the Rudd government to help landowners and struggling communities. The minister is yet to spend any money on water efficiencies on farms. She talks about it when she cannot avoid it but will not do it. There is the $100 million designated to help pipe water for the people on the Lower Lakes, in South Australia. I do not have a problem with that because they need help down there, but so do the people on the Lachlan, particularly those below Condobolin. It would be nice to see the department recognise that instead of ticking little boxes: ‘We’ve got another meg out of them. We’ve got another gigalitre out the Lachlan. We’re proud of that. We’re not worried about their future but we’ll get their water.’ They have faced years of drought.

I am not talking just about irrigation—far from it. I am talking about day-to-day livelihood, both stock and domestic. The water has never been shut off before. It has dried up before but, because it has been flowing out of the dam at Wyangala, it has tended to move through the sand. Even the last time that it actually ran dry, which I think was in the early 1960s, it was still moving through the sand. The waterholes from which people pumped for each individual station—and they were all on there in those days—were still able to be used to get water. But that will not happen this time.

As I said, I am absolutely disgusted that the two smallest rivers in the whole system, one that does not flow into the Murray system and one that does so periodically, are the biggest sufferers of the prime ministerial and ministerial effort to cut back future activity for the two million people who live in the basin. As I said, I have every sympathy for the people at the bottom of the system, in the Lower Lakes, and I do not deny them one iota of the $100 million to be spent there. But I want to know why the people on the Lachlan are not just as important. I want to know why the people at St George are not as important. I want to know why the people on the Macquarie, the Lachlan, the Gwydir and the Namoi are not as important. It is not just about the senator’s own state. It is not just about her own lakes. The New South Wales Irrigators Council put it pretty well in a media statement:

… Minister Penny Wong’s announcement today of the opening of applications for on-farm irrigation efficiency projects in the Southern Murray-Darling Basin.

… Chief Executive Officer Andrew Gregson says that the program design is so flawed as to be effectively useless.

“The Commonwealth provided no advance notice to irrigators as to when application guidelines would be available —and have today announced that applications will close in just six weeks.”

“That’s … ludicrous —and makes us wonder if the program is, in fact, deliberately designed to fail.

“The Commonwealth did not consult with us in designing this program —and appear to have come up with an involved and technical process that is highly unlikely to be given justice within 6 weeks.

The Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Penny Wong, has made only a handful of visits to a few basin communities, and they have been shrouded in more secrecy than a prime ministerial visit to Afghanistan. The Land newspaper’s report on Minister Wong’s latest mission behind enemy lines sums up the extreme contempt the Rudd government holds for our food producers. It says:

Meanwhile, back in the federal sphere, Water and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong’s mania for media control may not stand out much in Canberra, the home of spin, but it was glaringly obvious during her trip to the western Riverina this week. After copping flak from farmers for keeping a low profile in the water drained region, she went on-farm (no media allowed) with a few selected primary producers, mostly gathered from local shire councils. But Wongster went one further than the usual political tricks for avoiding or ignoring unpleasant questions - she specified that all queries be supplied ahead of time for vetting, before deigning to offer scripted answers for those regarded as acceptable. Welcome to open and accountable democracy, folks.

It was pretty much what happened when the Rudd cabinet came to Bathurst. You had to apply to go, and not too many were allowed in. If the Rudd government continues to buy the lifeblood of regional communities without increasing the productive capacity, without investing in the system, be it the transfer system or the on-farm system, there will not be two million people left in the Murray-Darling Basin.

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