Tony Pasin (Barker, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

Well, here we are. This is the point at which bipartisanship on the Murray-Darling Basin—pardon the pun—has evaporated. Until this point, we had both sides of the political spectrum in this country committed to a plan on the Murray-Darling Basin. History tells us that the basin has historically been over-extracted, so, as a nation, enlightened with that scientific reality, we developed a plan, which was about recovering water for the environment. The member for Boothby has just delivered what I can only describe as a typical metropolitan view of what the Murray-Darling Basin is about. I'll deal with some of the inaccuracies, because they're important, but the reality is that what the member for Boothby just spoke about was effectively the environment—about this plan being about the protection of the environment. It's a misunderstanding of the plan, with respect. The plan is about balancing the needs of the respective water users in the basin. It's about balancing production with the need to conserve important environmental assets.

Do you know what? What I've learned as the member for Barker, who represents the river in South Australia almost exclusively—with the exception of the member for Mayo, who has an interest around the mouth and Lake Alexandrina—is that you will never find stronger advocates for the environmental assets in the Murray-Darling Basin in South Australia than the irrigators who live on that river. Do you know what frustrates them? It's that they have to be lectured by the likes of the member for Boothby about a river system that they've lived on their whole lives and protected their whole lives.

While I'm talking about the member for Boothby, it's time for some home truths. The member for Boothby came in here and positively asserted that the former coalition government only recovered two gigalitres over its 10 years in government yet the Labor government has been able to recover 24 gigalitres in the 14 or 15 months it's been in government. That's interesting, because the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder—according to that search engine named Google, which presumably the member for Boothby has access to—currently, as of 31 July 2023, holds a total of 2.88 gigalitres. Sorry; I should say that's 2,888,695 megalitres. The reality is here that the recovery is well on track, and we're dealing with the 450 gigs of additional water.

It's important that we talk about additional water.

When this agreement was bipartisan, there was an agreement to recover 2,750 gigalitres with an additional 450 gigalitres, provided that we could do it in a way that met the socioeconomic neutrality test. What we're now seeing is that the Labor Party is going to remove that socioeconomic neutrality test. They're effectively saying: 'We're going to recover the water. Bugger the impacts for regional communities.' Well, I'm here to talk about those impacts and what they look like. Despite the fact that the Australian Labor Party during the last election assured people in my community that we wouldn't be using buybacks as a blunt tool to achieve this objective, here we are. I warned my community. I warned South Australians we would be in this position, and here we are.

So what does it mean? Well, South Australia's contribution to the target of 450 gigalitres will be 38 gigalitres. The Renmark irrigation district, before buybacks the last time, had a total allocation of 45 gigalitres. Today it's at 32 gigalitres. Water was removed the last time we did this, and there has been a series of other programs, which I supported, that were about maintaining production by having government provide capital in exchange for water savings, which were transferred to the Environmental Water Holder. That's the way you do this—you maintain production, you use less water with more efficient delivery systems, and you provide the dividend to the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder. It's a win-win. But I told you that the Renmark irrigation district's contribution is 32 gigalitres and South Australia's contribution to the 450 gigalitres will be 38. That's the whole of the Renmark irrigation district. Imagine sitting down with a farmer and saying: 'This land that you've invested in, this farm, this enterprise that you thought would be in your family for generations, for the grandchild that you christened, who you thought would be a citrus grower just like you—no; we're taking the water away.' An irrigation district without water is just a desert. Take the water away, and the people leave.

When this was done the last time, when buybacks were permitted—of course, we ruled out buybacks, or at least we capped them at 1,500 gigalitres, because we knew that buybacks kill communities—and the Renmark irrigation district went from 42 gigalitres, as an example, to 32 gigalitres, 30 per cent of the Riverland population got up and left—gone. I'm not suggesting that South Australia will make this contribution by simply wiping out Renmark and saying we'll move on. That's not what's going to happen. This recovery will be spread across those irrigation districts in my electorate, and it will impact the viability of all of them. The member for Boothby might well say, 'It doesn't matter; it's not my electorate.' It's really about winning the seat of Boothby for the Labor Party, isn't it? That's what this is about. But spare a thought for those irrigators and those communities. When you come in here and say that irrigators support this as good for horticulture, I'm telling you it's not.

Just as an example, we're talking about 50,000 to 70,000 hectares of prime horticultural endeavour. I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation before coming in here. It could be as many as 30 million orange trees. So those opposite want to save the environment by telling farmers they should pull out of 30 million to 35 million orange trees, pile them in the heap—because that's what happens—and set them alight. If you're not connected to the Riverland and you're not particularly passionate about irrigators in this country or, like those opposite, you hate farmers and farming, spare a thought—

I withdraw it.

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