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

I want to congratulate our previous speaker, the member for Riverina. He is a champion for the whole of his community. He understands the triple-bottom-line multiple-benefit approach, and we have worked in partnership to try to bring about a better basin outcome for a long time, so I commend his remarks as important and necessary, and they should be taken on-board.

Let me say that the recent joint statement from Ministers Hunt and Joyce and Parliamentary Secretary Baldwin stated that the coalition sees the value in regional communities and the long term sustainability of these communities. The coalition acknowledged the contribution these communities make to Australia, first through supplying food for the nation through to the international trade benefits to the national economy. The coalition, it went on to say, will deliver the Murray-Darling Basin plan in a way that achieves a triple-bottom-line outcome focusing on investing in communities rather than just recovering water through an ad hoc buyback program. That was on 10 March; of course, that is the statement we are debating today.

I wholeheartedly embrace the remarks of our ministers and parliamentary secretary. The problem is that is not what is happening. That is our aspiration—that is what should happen with the Murray-Darling Basin plan—but unfortunately it is not what is happening. We have a crisis in the Murray-Darling Basin. In particular, unintended consequences of what should have been well-meaning and well-thought-through policies are not in fact giving our irrigators, in particular, any sense that they can even continue in the northern Victorian irrigation zones in my electorate. The temporary water price that at least half of them now depend on is beyond their capacity to pay, and I will come back to that issue.

The other point I want to make is that, while some of the plan's aspirations were good and some of the policies were reasonable, the reason why the member for Riverina and I moved that motion to disallow the plan was that some of it was nonsense. Some of it was not well thought through and it was not based on science. It still is not based on facts and real information, and that is a tragedy for those who need to make a living in the basin today.

It is also a tragedy for those who care profoundly about the environment and environmental outcomes, and that of course includes the primary producer community, because as a primary producer you cannot ignore the environmental impacts of your farming or your work in concert with your water system, your soils, your air, your riparian vegetation or your remnant vegetation and stay in business. So our best environmentalists are our primary producers, and they are now deeply alarmed and concerned about the unintended consequences of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan and the fact that the plan is still not delivering on the basis of science.

Since the plan was ticked off, there has been an extraordinary travesty of justice—a political short-term fix. The Premier of South Australia, when approached by the then Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, said: 'I'm not going to tick off as one of the states in agreement with the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. I want more water for South Australia—just more. Give us a lot more, please, or I'm going to take you to the High Court and challenge your very right to be standing there on behalf of all states. We challenge your use of the external powers in the Constitution.' So in a panic, with the help of the Greens, the Labor Party threw together what is colloquially called the Constraints Strategy. A piece of legislation was thrown into the Commonwealth parliament, without consultation with the Murray-Darling Basin community or even the authority itself, and that now requires an extra 450 gigalitres of water to be found on top of the agreed volume of sustainable delivery yields for the Basin Plan itself. The extra 450 gigalitres is—wait for it—to keep the mouth of the Murray open 95 per cent of the time without the aid of bulldozing, a nonsense idea, because it was never the natural way of the mouth of the Murray. A red gum forest rivalling Barmah would have been there had been a regular flow out of the mouth of the Murray, but it is an ephemeral stream. In fact the Murray River ends up pushing through sand dunes at the mouth. But we now have to have a channel flowing out to sea 95 per cent of the time without the aid of bulldozers.

The act dictates a high level of water for the lower lakes and a lower level of salinity. Instead of saying, 'How best can we achieve that? Through works and measures? Through better management? How can we improve the ageing, leaking inefficient barrages to deliver better outcomes to the lower end of the South Australian system?'—none of that was put in play—instead they said: 'Oh, we've got a good idea: we'll just flood the hell out of the upper reaches—the middle and upper Murray—and we'll put $1.77 billion on the table in this act, only $200 million of which will be used to ameliorate the 2½-yearly regular man-made flooding, which is going to take out the levees, the riparian zone, agriculture and a lot of the flood plain properties which have developed into the most productive agribusiness enterprises in Australia. They're now to be flooded every 2½ years.'

But it gets worse. This constraints strategy depends on knowing how the tributaries to the Murray actually behave. Take the Goulburn, for example. We do not gauge or monitor all the tributaries to the Goulburn, so we cannot tell the people on the lower Goulburn what the water levels will be when there is a huge flush of water thrown down from Eildon to keep the mouth of the Murray open. The Environmental Water Holder will give a message to the Victorian government: 'Open the Eildon gates; let it rip.' Unfortunately, for the people on the lower Goulburn, it takes 10 days for that water to reach them. They will just have to hold their breath, because we only have accurate weather forecasts for 10 days. There could be a rain event in the next five days on top of the river flow, and you could have those tributaries pushing water into the main Goulburn River. We have no idea what the Goulburn tributories would deliver. We do not gauge them. We do not monitor them. We are expecting towns and cities—Shepparton, Cobram, Yarrawonga, Echuca, Swan Hill, Wagga Wagga—to simply cop it because of this political fix that was thrown into the arena in the dying days of the Gillard regime. We are having to wear that. It is called the constraints strategy crisis in my part of the world. I want to put it on the record as an indecency that we have got to change. But it gets worse.

During the worst drought on record, Senator Penny Wong, then minister for the environment, offered my irrigators $2,500 a megalitre for their permanent water. The banks said, 'You must sell water or we will sell you up entirely.' The state government had separated land from water titles. The bank said, 'You can sell your water and you will get a million dollars worth of your debt back in order.' So about half my irrigators were forced to sell their water in the middle of the worst drought on record. For example, in the year 2000, we had 1,650 gigalitres in the Goulburn-Murray Water authority area; we are now down to just 1,000 gigalitres. Farmers believed that they could rely entirely on the temporary water market. That temporary water market is now a fraction of the size because all that permanent water went out of the system into the Environmental Water Holder's bucket. The Environmental Water Holder is allowed to trade, but he does not; only twice has he traded. I am glad about that, because at the moment the act says that, if he trades the temporary water, he has to spend every cent he makes on that trade on further buybacks—water out of the irrigator's pocket again. That is even though, through the on-farm water use efficiency grants, or least half of each project's savings goes into the environmental bucket, on top of what he has already got accumulated from out of direct water buyback.

My irrigators now cannot afford the $135 per megalitre the temporary market is commanding for temporary water. A dairy farmer cannot pay them more than about $80. A dairy farm wants to fight back from the drought, regrow its herds, grow its capacity to produce milk; it has got an export market waiting. It cannot pay $135 for temporary water. I have been told today—it might not be true; I hope it is not true—that the South Australian government is in my irrigators' market right now looking for eight gigalitres of water, half from New South Wales, half from my Victorian irrigators. What are they going to do with that eight gigalitres of primary producers' food- and fibre-producing water? We do not know, but I understand that tender closes on Monday. I am terrified about the impact of that. It is not right. A state government should not be in there buying irrigators' water. For what purpose? They are going to get 450 extra gigalitres to keep the mouth of the Murray open. Isn't that enough?

We must immediately amend the Water Act to make sure that when the Environmental Water Holder sells his water, it goes into environmental works and measures investment, not buying back more water. This has the support of the independent panel of the Water Act review. I hope Labor supports that. It is a sensible thing to do.

Half of my irrigators survived the drought. They are on their knees now because of the unintended consequences of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. We have had the constraints strategy, the temporary water market collapsing to only half the volume of water that was once there and the speculators playing in that market: VicSuper, Melbourne Water, and now it looks like the South Australian state government is wanting to make a dollar as well. It is not acceptable. We have got to fix this situation.

See this speech in context