Alan Cadman (Mitchell, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tonight I wish to raise the issue of water and in particular a case that has been brought to my attention by an orange grower in the Narromine district in central western New South Wales. Some of the nation’s finest oranges are produced along the banks of the Macquarie River and the Narromine district—particularly the property ‘Buddha’, formerly owned by the McKillop family, and other nearby properties—produces oranges of exceptional quality. The Commonwealth has taken exceptional measures to try to bring the states into a cohesive, comprehensive and comprehensible program of water conservation to ensure there is sustainability in water supply, particularly where primary production is involved.

Daryl Schofield has 300 hectares of citrus—it is a large property—and employs 10 people on the property, as well as many locals on a casual basis. He has a juice processing plant on the property. It is a substantial business valued, I would suspect, at some millions of dollars. The Schofield family has built this business over a number of years and I know the property well. This property has adopted all of the modern agricultural techniques, including trickle irrigation under the trees to minimise transpiration loss and to make maximum use of the water supply. All of the water he uses is groundwater; he does not use surface water or water from the Macquarie River as some properties in the district do. The provisions and the $100 million supplied by the Commonwealth to deal with these issues are basically administered by the states. The bureaucrats who are operating this water supply are nice enough chaps, I suppose, but they know very little about the practicalities of farming and the fact that a tree or a permanent crop, such as citrus, must be watered on a regular basis or the trees will die. It is not like a crop of oats, wheat or even lucerne, which are seasonal and do not require water all year round. With an annual crop, if there is no crop, no water is required.

When the rules applying to the use of groundwater were released, it was a shock to growers in that district to find that they had their reserve supply of water halved and an unreserved amount was then reduced by something over 10 per cent. After five years, they will have no reserve water whatsoever—that will cut out—and only a small amount of unreserved water. This is an absolute financial disaster for these farmers because they cannot revert to dry farming of citrus. They have outlaid hundreds of thousands of dollars on effective watering schemes. But the sad part of the application of this process is that farmers growing annual crops are being treated in the same way. Those that require a constant supply of water in order to maintain their livelihood, their employees and production for the fulfilment of contracts for juice supply will be treated just as if they were growing an annual crop of wheat, oats or something of that nature. It does not matter that they have trickle irrigation; they are treated the same way as people who have flood irrigation, which is the most expensive way of using water.

I am really concerned about the future of these farmers. It appears to me that the writing is on the wall for them, but it is death by a thousand paper cuts which has been prepared by the bureaucrats in the New South Wales government and their resources department. I am sure there is a far more practical answer than the one presented, and there must be consideration of the individual cases and the capital investment that will suffer due to the destruction of their livelihood by, firstly, the rationing of water and, secondly, the complete withdrawal of their water supply.