Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Justice and Customs) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to make some comments on the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010 and the Appropriation (Water Entitlements) Bill 2009-2010. These programs have both been mismanaged by the government. I would like to address my remarks to the detail of that mismanagement and how it has played out in my electorate of Farrer. First, I will deal with the home insulation assistance package. I would like to quote a letter from John Simpson from Broken Hill. He is a registered installer under this program. He has become enormously frustrated by the changes that the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts has made that are unwarranted and particularly bad for rural constituents.

Mr Simpson wrote to me that he has had the communication that has changed the rules of how the home insulation package will work. Following that, he spent a whole night folding and addressing envelopes to 350 people on his quotation register. He mailed them out the next day to alert them to the changes. He said:

On 1/11/09 Mr. Garrett has changed the rules regarding these home insulation rebates.

Where a consumer was once eligible for assistance up to $1,600.00 that assistance has now suddenly been reduced to $1,200.00.

According to my latest email from Dept Env. the transitional arrangements for our consumers/customers who have accepted their quote prior to Nov 2/2009 will have until 16/11/09 to have their insulation installed or forfeit $400.00 of their rebate.

I have approximately 300 people who have loyally stood by me as their reputable installer, and believed/trusted me when I have told them to the best of my knowledge that the status quo will remain and as long as they are registered by me supplying them with a quote and them accepting that quote their home will be insulated according to what has been quoted.

My source for these comments is the Department for The Environment installers and consumers hot lines.

In October we received two deliveries of insulation product which enabled us to install to eight properties. The people that were lucky enough to have the installation completed were the next chronologically in our quotation book who would accept the drastically increased cost of the insulation. We have been given two weeks to stand by our Governments promises for the installation of insulation for the customers that believed they were getting a $1,600.00 rebate. An example of how this creates a major imbalance for us as installers is during the first week of July I inspected and quoted approximately 50 new insulation jobs that were accepted. That situation continued for about 3 more weeks then began to slow down a bit. Based on the price I was quoting at then about 95% of these properties were under the $1,600.00 rebate so word travelled like fire as it does in a regional community, and I had to hire someone to help me keep up with the demand to get our inspections and quotes done to satisfy consumer demand.

You would think that the rebate is working the way it is supposed to: people are getting their homes insulated and local businesses are getting a stimulus. My constituent said:

This means for the month of July & August I submitted and had accepted approximately 250 quotes. All of these people believed me, and so subsequently their Government, that they would be getting as assistance only enough money to have their home insulated.

Today they have to accept whether they like it or not that they now have to have their quotes not worth the paper they are written on, and that they will lose 25% of their rebate simply because they live in a regional area and cannot be supplied materials let alone at a reasonable rate.

The government authors of the program do not understand that you cannot provide materials in a town like Broken Hill at the same price as you can on the eastern seaboard. The letter continues:

What should have happened is that the coastal city people should have had their rebates reduced to $900.00 and regional Australians get a special exemption to apply for additional assistance to an amount of say $2,000.00 subject to their remoteness. This would have put the money where most of the increases have occurred and keep our precious tax money working to the maximum benefit of the majority of the population.

What is really annoying me—

says Mr Simpson—

is that to stimulate the Australian economy my east coast contemporaries are buying CHINESE product by the millions of dollars worth, and our Australian manufacturers are languishing behind because understandably they couldn’t put their expansion process in place in time, and if they had the money [it] would have been lost because the Government have and are causing a massive slow down and lack of confidence.

… how can I explain to the 300 people that have trusted me and their Government that they will lose 25% of their rebate, and have to find an additional 36% above their quoted price because the rules have changed and I can’t get stock at a reasonable price.

I could not have put it better myself, which is why I have included Mr Simpson’s comments in my remarks today. And there is another aspect to this: if you run a small business in a small town, you take very seriously the trust and the faith placed in you by the people who you meet down the street, who you play sport with and whose children your children go to school with. That trust and faith underpin your business. To have to turn around and say, ‘I’m sorry the rules have changed; I can’t do anything about it; like it or lump it,’ is a double whammy for somebody who takes their customers seriously and works very hard on their behalf.

The second part of this appropriation bill deals with water. I was in Hay on the weekend celebrating with that town their 150th anniversary, and it was a fantastic event. I think the events are going over three weeks. I watched the parade come past in what was probably 42 degree heat. It was certainly very warm for those involved. But every single float put in maximum effort, and it was fabulous. But Hay has been badly hurt by this government’s water buyback.

The opposition leader came down to Berrigan, a town not very far from Hay, a few days ago and talked to farmers, irrigators and rural community members about their experiences of this current buyback. The consistent message that we received was that, because the Minister for Climate Change and Water has approached this in a haphazard and ad hoc way, there is no planning relating to the buyback. So what farmers say to me is, ‘If the government had said, “We would like to acquire X gigalitres of water, because that is our policy and we believe we have important wetlands to water, but we will come to you as communities and ask you for a plan of how we might best recover that water,” then that would have been the way to go about it.’

Instead, what this government has done is ignore the structures that have been set in place to manage irrigation processes, the irrigation companies and small trusts—some are looking after only a handful of small irrigators—and ignore the architecture and the structure of water delivery and has gone straight to the farmers via an offer which essentially says: ‘We, the Australian government, would like to buy your water, and you may put in a tender price and we might buy your water.’ I will leave aside the extraordinary difficulties of the way that that tender process worked, which involved farmers having to second-guess where the government was coming from and being told, ‘The price that you have suggested is too high; if you go a bit lower we might take it,’ though that in itself was disastrous. Leaving the process aside, the effect is as follows.

Take an irrigation system or a company. Some of the farmers that are scattered throughout the channel delivery systems of such a corporation might, for example, want to sell their water, and others might not. The government, in purchasing that water, has no idea of the location, the delivery, the cost and the mechanism of transmission or the overall effect on the community. So we have what is commonly called the Swiss-cheese effect: some channels have sold their water; some channels have not; some people are left stranded at the ends of channels, and expensive water-delivery mechanisms have to be continued in order to get a small amount of water to travel a large distance to look after their interests.

If only the government had started from the premise of: ‘Let’s plan this. Let’s work out how we can cut off certain areas, or encourage people in a district to move out of irrigated agriculture’—and these would be the more marginal and difficult areas—‘then, if we take that approach, we can buy the same amount of water, own the same amount of water, under our current policy, but do it in a way that ensures the survival and the sustainability of rural communities and farmers and, of course, food production’—which is, as we know, the very basis of all of this; it is about producing food. So that was the message that we received and that I continue to receive as a local member for irrigated agriculture districts: that it is most unfortunate that the government has gone about its water buyback without a plan.

Not far from Hay is the Lachlan River. I have spoken in the House before about a decision, which was probably inevitable, to cut off the lower Lachlan at Condobolin, given the drastically low levels of water in Wyangala Dam, and my colleague the member for Parkes spoke very well about this earlier today. We are now finding some assistance being provided to the town of Booligal, which is good, and some bores being put in for the small communities along the lower Lachlan. But there is nothing for farmers who may have relied on that water for stock and domestic purposes. I would ask the government and the minister for agriculture to seriously consider introducing an emergency stock and domestic water grant for those who are completely stranded at the moment. We recognise that the lower section of the river has to lose out to save the water that would essentially be lost in being transmitted that great distance anyway. They have accepted that and recognise their role in that, but what they need is an emergency stock and domestic water grant that would enable them to have some government funding to, say, put in a bore for stock and domestic purposes. Otherwise, they do not know how they are going to get through the next few months. I am in communication with the minister for agriculture’s office, and such a grant is what I am very hopeful that he and his department will seriously consider.

It is similar to the irrigation grant that the previous government had, but in this case it is not aimed necessarily at irrigators but at people who rely on the channel and the river for their stock and domestic water. If you visit those areas you will see how people have had to lose their gardens, they have lost their access to watering points for their stock—and that often means they have to move their stock away—and they are facing three or four months of the sort of heat that we are experiencing out there today. I do not think it is too much for government to step forward with a very modest water grant, which would probably have to be matched by the farmer. It would work well to alleviate this great stress.

Irrigators are asking the New South Wales government for help with fair fixed charges. They are making the point that, in the Lachlan, the New South Wales government has waived fixed water charges. We thank them for that, but there are irrigators all over the state who are paying for fixed water charges when they are not actually receiving any water. As one farmer said, ‘Well, the government wouldn’t expect people in the cities to pay their water bill and only get some or none of what they paid for.’ The Murray Valley currently has an allocation of 10 per cent after being on zero allocations for several years. But during all of those years farmers were required to pay for the fixed cost of maintaining infrastructure. It comes back to my point: if the government water buyback was done according to a plan, we could probably downsize that irrigation infrastructure, but we cannot.

Facing farmers in the Murray Valley is the Basin Plan, which the minister talks about continually. We are quite anxious about what this plan, which is being developed in consultation with the CSIRO, will mean for local farmers because it will set limits. I make the point that, while we as a previous government initiated this planning process, I believe that we would have taken the contributions made by the CSIRO as advice and an input into government policy. I am certainly quite fearful that the present government will take that advice as gospel and it will involve a sudden and dramatic limiting of water allocations for farmers—again, with no planning process in place. It is coming up again in, I think, 2013. There are mega-millions of dollars that have been allocated to this process, so one would hope that it is thorough. But at no stage have I been assured that the perspective of food production, farmers, rural communities and sustainable rural communities will have any input into that plan or will be considered. It is purely about determining a limit on extractions from the southern Murray-Darling Basin. While we appreciate the need for those environmental planning processes to go ahead, it is very important that it is done in conjunction with input from the rural communities.

What we constantly see from Canberra and the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts is a very poor level of understanding about how water policy affects local people. I think one of the problems—maybe it is the budget—is that it prevents those who manage this environmental water from actually travelling to regions and seeing for themselves. You do not even have to actually talk to a single farmer if you do not want to, but you do have to take an engineer with you or somebody who can explain to you—and a very good map—how these river systems work. If that had happened, for example, with the water buyback purchase in the Lachlan, we would not have seen $500,000 being spent on water to return to the Murray when we know that the Lachlan almost never reaches the Murrumbidgee and, as a consequence, reaches the Murray. So while members of the government were trumpeting this as a great result for the Lower Lakes and a great result for South Australia, it was actually technically infeasible. I would therefore encourage those who have responsibility for water in the government to send out people from Canberra to make it their business to understand how the rivers run in western New South Wales.

It is not the tradition of the opposition to block bills that deal with supply. So, in spite of having very serious reservations about the purpose of these appropriations, we of course in the opposition make our remarks and will not block the bill. I thank the House.

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