Damian Drum (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today the Liberal-National coalition released the guidelines for the Water for Fodder program. The first instalment of this program is providing 40 gigalitres of irrigation water for primary producers, including dairy farmers, in the southern connected Murray-Darling Basin. The water must be used only for the production of fodder or pasture and cannot be traded.

This water has been made available through a historic agreement between our government and the South Australian government, which involves ramping up the Adelaide desal plant. Producers will be able to purchase this water for $100 a megalitre, which is a fantastic saving on the $600 a megalitre that it costs on the Goulburn system currently. Farmers can apply for units of 50 megalitres of water per access licence and can submit up to a maximum of two applications per farm business. Some farmers will get 100 megalitres out of this deal. This means there will be 800 separate parcels of water. Brokers and agents are going to be ineligible to purchase this water, and any entity that already has access to over 1,000 megalitres also will be ineligible to purchase this water.

The guidelines to the program are already on the Department of Agriculture's web page for the Water for Fodder program, and I strongly recommend that fodder producers go to the website as soon as possible to assess their eligibility and for further updates. Applications to purchase this water will be open next Monday or Tuesday. If the program is overallocated, a ballot system will be used to decide who gets this water and who misses out.

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