Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Murray-Darling Basin communities, which is are of course just out of drought or flood or locust damage, have been holding their breath waiting for the delivery of the Murray-Darling Basin guide to the plan that will either give them a future or seal their fate. They have been apprehensive because they saw the then Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, before the last election put the plan away to make sure it did not see the light of day before the election. They also were aware that on commercial radio in South Australia the then Prime Minister in August said that she had not seen the plan but she certainly intended to have it comprehensively delivered. She would sign up to it after the election and she had already budgeted for the four years of water buyback that she implied would be part of that scheme.

So the basin communities were holding their breath because, after all, they depend on the environment, the quality of the water system that gives them the potential to grow product, some of the best product in the world. They also depend on healthy communities and of course they have to depend on government policy that does not stymie their capacity to grow food and to raise their children in the expectation that they too will have a decent life. After all, they believe in the win-win scenario. They also believe in the triple-bottom line, which it seems the minister, Tony Burke, has just discovered. The triple-bottom line is of course what coalition policy was all about, as the minister acknowledged, and it is what we need in the basin community: a win-win-win outcome acknowledging the triple-bottom line.

They knew too that the coalition left $5 billion for the on-farm water use efficiency and infrastructure measures. We anticipated that this government would use, or indeed the last government would use, that $5 billion effectively, and we had said that 50 per cent of the savings that came out of that water use efficiency program would be put back to the environment. But the basin communities saw that program trashed by probably the worst minister for water there has ever been since Federation, Minister Penny Wong. She also presided over the non-strategic water buyback. That was her policy in relation to how to get more water for the environment. That non-strategic water buy-back, in the teeth of the worst drought on record, meant that farmers were pressured by their lenders to sell water, which of course reduces their production capacity in the future.

We saw stranded assets in the irrigation systems, where, in my part of the world, 20 to 30 per cent of the farms were forced to sell their water. We saw that the water market price was distorted, because the government has very deep pockets. We saw stranded assets in the irrigation systems, we saw the higher costs for those who have not yet sold their water or are resisting their banks and we saw the degraded environment as dried out farms blew in the wind—and the weeds, the feral animals, the uncontrolled diseases, the problems with dying remnant vegetation because they could no longer afford to fence out their trees. That is what happens when you take water out of an area that has a 15-inch rainfall and a highly variable climate.

We experienced the water buy-back scheme for three years. We had the basin communities suffering three years of water policy ineffectiveness. The former minister for water, Penny Wong, has to have been the worst minister on record. Her programs were inefficiently and badly managed. I suppose we should not be surprised. After all, this is a government that cannot even manage a free pink batts installation program without killing people and having houses burn down.

But, given the importance of a Murray-Darling Basin plan, the basin community was still hopeful of one that would finally bring better governance across the jurisdictions. The basin communities hoped that Labor might get it right. After all, they had had three years to produce the plan and they had spent many scores of millions of dollars in the process.

The basin is important because, although it covers only some seven per cent of the continent, it produces 40 per cent of the food off 40 per cent of the farms. And it is the biggest and driest catchment on earth. The community does a magnificent job. But what other government in the world in this century would deliberately set out to destroy their food security by making it impossible for their food-growing communities to survive? The basin communities rationalised that they could not possibly get a plan that would destroy their livelihoods by sacrificing their capacity to produce food and fodder, which could not necessarily even guarantee the improvement of the ecosystems or the natural resource base that they depended on. So they held their breath and then, on Friday, 8 October at 4 pm the Australia public was handed a 220-page report—I have it here—which they read with disbelief. If it were implemented, as Prime Minister Gillard has promised she would, word for word, it would spell out the end of viable irrigated agriculture across the basin. It would do immeasurable damage to the expectations and the faith in the future of the 2.1 million people across the basin. We heard today in question time the examples of basin businesses that will no longer be employing people in the coming days. The plan would increase personal poverty and impoverish communities.

What did this guide do? There was no cost-benefit analysis and in particular no modelling of the food cost impact from less food being available on the Australian market. It had totally inadequate socioeconomic impact analysis. In fact, it was admitted upfront and quite loudly stated, ‘Oh, well, the legislation would not let us do it,’ and ‘the data was wrong.’ The chairman of the authority, Mr Mike Taylor, who should have known better, said, ‘I personally know there are extraordinary socioeconomic impacts involved in our proposals here, which involve up to 45 per cent of irrigation water being taken from the food producers. I know there is a serious problem here and, yes, we think the assessment of 800 job losses is grossly underestimated.’ Yet here it is in our basin guide. This guide has gone out to the communities across the basin, the people who have just survived the drought, survived Penny Wong’s buy-back scheme, survived the floods and now have to survive the pestilence. They read in the document that there will be 800 job losses and then they heard Michael Taylor saying, ‘Oh, yes, but we got that wrong.’ And why did they get that wrong? ‘Well, we think the section of the act did not really say we should look at socioeconomic impacts.’ Yes it does. The coalition’s Water Act 2007 quite categorically expresses the need and it insists that the socioeconomic impacts on the basin must be taken into account. Indeed, the content of the plan mandates that social, economic, cultural and Indigenous factors be taken into account.

I thought it was amazing that today the minister had the cheek to come to the dispatch box and say, ‘Oh, he is now going to go back and look at the legislation.’ Sorry, Minister, that is just an excuse. Get on with the job and pull the authority into line and tell them they have got to do much better before more of the basin community’s despair about any future employment activity and before our older farmers say, ‘It is just too hard. We will sell our water, not to Penny Wong this time but to Minister Burke, and we will walk away.’ The trouble is that the rest of the nation depends on the provision of the food they grow and a lot of our export earnings are derived from the production of fruit, fibre, meats, dairy products and nuts. Our access to fresh food and produce will be extraordinarily different if this plan goes ahead as it is proposed.

In the plan it states that up to 45 per cent of the water will be clawed back from the irrigators by simply tapping people on the shoulder in the communities and looking for willing sellers. I have already described to you the experiences of this policy over the last three years under Minister Penny Wong. Under the willing-sellers policy, if communities contract and associated businesses go broke, who compensates those who used to sell things such as the silage? Who compensates the small town whose school is reduced from three to one teacher when the families have left because they have had to become willing sellers when the banks leaned on them? And who compensates the veterinarians, the people who sell shoes and the hairdressers in those small towns? Who is going to deal with those fallouts and impacts? No, this scheme is just going to look at buying the water at market prices from so-called willing sellers. Do you know what the market prices are right now, given that it has rained and the basin is awash with water? The market prices are some 30 to 50 per cent less than they were two years ago.

So we have a serious problem of further poverty for the farmers who are forced to sell their water; yet they are some of the world’s most innovative and productive primary producers. They also are the people who manage the environmental services: for example, soil nutrition, water quality and biodiversity protection—the people who actually produce the sort of effort that makes sure the Mallee does not blow away and choke the cities. Those farmers can do that only when they are viable—when they have a few dollars to rub together so that they can not only feed themselves but go out and buy sprays for Paterson’s curse, buy bullets for the foxes and fence the remnant vegetation. You are talking about beggaring those individuals and those communities so that they will not be able to produce those environmental services which are the public good that we all depend on.

Who is going to do this work? Maybe the Department of Sustainability and the Environment in Victoria will. Do you really think so? Or maybe, in New South Wales, those rangers and all those other beaut people the government employs to do some of that work will do it. Look at the roadsides. Look at the invasion of weed on public lands. Look at who is being told to fix the locusts right now. It is not the public sector; it is the farmers. The farmers do all the heavy lifting to keep our ecosystems in a healthy state. They do it willingly because they happen to want to pass on their land in a better condition than it was when they received it from their fathers and grandfathers. That is what farmers tend to do. But, even when the farmers are corporations, they still have the production of environmental services as a by-product from what they do for the rest of Australia, because it makes sense economically for them. They know that if their property is in good shape it has a greater value.

What you are talking about is taking water off irrigators to the extent of a magical number. The Living Murray came up with 1,500 gigalitres as an estimated need for the environment. The report has it both ways. It goes from 3,000 to over 7,600 gigalitres—maybe. What a range. It is not sure quite what might help the environment, but it has a stab at a number, then divided by your grandmother’s birthday and that will do. What are we going to do with that number of gigalitres? Who would know, because there is no description in here of any water plans. The states will do those. When will the states do those? In the case of Victoria, in 2019.

So what we have is incredible insecurity, no faith in this government being capable of improving its performance in the area of environmental management or regional economy management and no evidence at all in this document that the 20 volumes that are somewhere out there will have any better information, justification or evaluation. I know the Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities at the table has already panicked and said, ‘Oops! We’d better get the Murray-Darling Basin Authority out there now doing a socioeconomic impact assessment analysis, and they’d better report by March next year.’ Yes, that is what they are going to do—the minister is shaking his head..

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