Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010 and the Appropriation (Water Entitlements) Bill 2009-2010 have been hurriedly rushed into the parliament to take account of the Rudd government’s mismanagement and inability to implement its policy undertakings. These are supply bills for both ordinary annual government services and extraordinary services in relation to water entitlements and home insulation. The coalition will obviously be supporting these bills, following our tradition of not opposing government supply bills. That certainly does not negate the opportunity to highlight why we are here today and to make some, I think, measured, very helpful and informative observations about the way in which these programs have been administered.

In relation to the government’s Home Insulation Program, this legislation provides additional funding that reflects the conclusions announced in the government’s Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook report, which basically pointed to the fact that the allocated funding for this financial year will run out before year’s end. The administered funding of $695.8 million is to be brought forward from the next financial year into this one to ensure that people applying for grants under the Home Insulation Program can have those grants processed and payments made.

The second bill provides resources for water entitlement acquisition and the acceleration of water buyback activity within the Murray-Darling Basin system. Administered funding of $4.9 million for the Water for the Future, Restoring the Balance in the Murray-Darling Basin Program is to be brought forward—$4.4 million from 2013-14 and $500,000 from 2014-15—to provide the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts with adequate resourcing to efficiently implement the government’s water purchase program for this financial year. This will also provide funding to accelerate water buybacks within the Murray-Darling Basin system.

Administered funding of $650 million for the Restoring the Balance in the Murray-Darling Basin program, under the Water for the Future program, will be brought forward from later years. This includes $320 million from 2010-2011 and 2011-12—that is, $220 million and $100 million respectively. The Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook report in November also identified $330 million to be brought forward from 2010-11, $100 million from 2011-12 and $130 million from 2013-4 to provide for additional water buybacks this financial year.

The government’s stated objective is to restore the balance of the Murray-Darling Basin, to purchase water entitlements to restore the environmental health of the basin system and to smooth the transition—we are led to believe—through sustainable diversion limits anticipated in the new basin plan. So you can see some adjustment to water allocations to bring about the change in limits envisaged in the new basin plan.

To date the Restoring the Balance in the Murray-Darling Basin Program has secured the purchase of more than 600 gigalitres of water entitlements. For those people who are listening, that is water entitlements, not necessarily water. Water entitlements represent a right to extract and to divert water from that system when it is available. If it is not available, you are simply purchasing an opportunity to make that diversion, to take that extraction, at a time when it does become available.

In the current environment and with the current flows and rainfall situation in the Murray-Darling Basin, most of that purchase is for paper, not for water. It is actually buying air in empty storages, air in lower level riparian systems, air that surrounds water that may have been there at some point when the allocation was made but is not there now. Therefore, you are purchasing the paper that gives a right to water if and when it becomes available. The government believes that bringing forward the funding in the bill will enable it to accelerate that purchase program and provide for new purchases and new initiatives this financial year. Additionally the government believes that with the additional appropriation vendors will receive timely settlement of their water trades under the Restoring the Balance in the Murray-Darling Basin program. It is important that those water users who are making their entitlement, their right to extract when water is there, available for purchase by the government receive timely payment for it.

Essentially, though, these bills tell the story of the Rudd government—that is, a government that is poorly managing its legislative timetable, hence this has been rushed in; poorly managing its program design and implementation, hence you see these enormous overruns; and poorly managing the task of connecting policy action with public policy purpose. Here is an example of where the purchase of air and paper masquerading as water purchases needs to be seen for what it is. The work ahead for the nation, for the agricultural sector and for state and territory jurisdictions on the more sustainable use of water in the Murray-Darling Basin will require more than the purchase of paper and of air.

In relation to the insulation program, here we have seen a frenzied marketplace. I do not know how else you could describe it—a frenzied marketplace that has seen people leap at the opportunity to have up to $1,600 paid for insulating their homes and a lesser amount for investment properties or rental properties. I know personally people who have been in other career paths who have seen this as the modern-day equivalent of a gold rush. They have abandoned, let us say, a more modest ambition for income and personal economic security to rush headlong into the insulation business. A friend said, ‘A couple of years working on this and I will be able to pay off my mortgage.’ This is the gold rush but it is pink—pink batts. Much of this product has not been produced in Australia, and much of the work has been overpriced. Quotes for homes in my own electorate that were of $600-$700 prior to the announcement of this program have all of a sudden rocketed up to the maximum amount that can be claimed.

There are tragic examples. We see, again, another report in today’s media about the loss of a young life—a life lost way too soon. A young man involved in this program lost his life in a tragic accident in Queensland. There are calls from unions to say this program has been so poorly implemented and administered that the adequate training that installers should have has not been available in all cases to try to guard against tragedies like the one we have seen reported today and earlier events. Much haste, not a lot of thought—many people seeing this as a gold rush of their own that they want a piece of. It is quite an extraordinary program in that I think everyone in this House accepts that home insulation is one of the most cost-effective things you can do to improve the environmental performance of your home—far more cost effective than other more substantial investments with longer payback periods, like the pathway my family has been on, putting in solar hot water and things of that kind.

Rather than encourage people to consider the attractiveness of home insulation as a way of reducing energy costs and improving the environmental performance of a home, being one of the—sorry for the economic jargon—lowest of low-hanging fruits in that the gains are very easily within reach and the business case, the payback, is very attractive, the Rudd Labor government does not do the work to say, ‘What is the impediment to taking up this opportunity?’ It does not encourage or provide any incentive for people to consider their own self-interest and to act accordingly by having their homes insulated. It says: ‘Hang the cost. We have got the Commonwealth bankcard free of debt thanks to the Howard years. Rack it up on the bankcard!’ The Rudd government’s extraordinarily lazy, sloppy, careless, headline-hunting strategy of public policies will pay for the lot: ‘We will pay for the lot. We will make $1,600 available even if that is vastly more than what it costs to insulate a home. We will pay for the lot, even though a smaller incentive might bring about the greater public awareness and appetite for home insulation to achieve that goal where private householders will be playing a partnership role with a government incentive. No, no—don’t want to do any of that. Let’s pay for the lot and chuck it on the taxpayer’s visa card because the nation is in a position to do so. Don’t do the thoughtful thing about recognising that home insulation and the payback of your investment in home insulation is one of the smartest things you can do. No, no—don’t let that take its course. Pay for the lot.’

What hope have we got of getting households to do other things that might be slightly less attractive—still attractive but slightly less attractive in payback terms: about their glazing, about appliances and hot water systems, and about heating systems? What hope have we got when on one of the most attractive lowest hanging fruit, most cost-effective things a home owner can do, the taxpayer is paying for the lot? And in some cases they are paying twice the amount or even more that it actually costs to insulate them. What hope have we got encouraging families to think about energy efficiency in their lighting and electrical systems, even the use of natural light—thinking about more efficient refrigeration, the adoption of more efficient hot water appliances and hot water heating systems and solar hot water systems that may involve the private householder making a contribution themselves; the selection of appliances that have a stand-by function so that they are not sucking in more energy than they need when they are not actually being used; or even looking at some of the mechanical systems for heating and cooling in homes?

What hope have we got? We have created this mindset in the Australian public, borne out of the most extraordinarily lazy, headline-hunting government we have seen. It is happy to put the whole price of home insulation on the Visa card of the nation. We are seeing now the need to update the funding that is available. We are seeing now the need to reallocate and add to stimulus expenditure. I touched on the fact that the taxpayer is paying way over the odds for work that was attractive in payback terms anyway. As has been acknowledged, even Australia’s biggest manufacturers of insulation batts are having to go offshore to meet up to 30 per cent of their total orders. It is a stimulus of some kind, but it is not a stimulus too close to home. You are seeing millions of dollars being spent on overseas-supplied home insulation batts at a price that is many times the actual cost. Now we are seeing more money being put into that program.

The opposition have consistently warned the government about its impact on this sector. We warned it would induce an artificial level of demand—hysteria, a gold rush mentality—in the insulation sector, which the industry would not be able to respond to, and that supply would be far outstripped by demand. In spite of these warnings, the Rudd Labor government raced through its home insulation subsidy for homeowners with minimal industry consultation to address the issue of installation implementation safety. We have seen tragic examples. Again, my thoughts go to the family members of people who lost their lives as a result. It has forced Australian industries to buy more expensive overseas stock than they wanted and put an extraordinary price bubble into the cost of insulation.

People in one of the retirement villages in my electorate—where people go peaceably about their retirement years—have been getting a knock on the door from people offering to insulate their houses. These might be five- or six-square—and in some cases smaller—retirement homes. They are being told: ‘It will cost you nothing. Just sign here.’ Sure enough, they are signing an application to the Commonwealth to get $1,600 to insulate their property. Many of them just a few months earlier had been told it might cost $400 to $500. As I mentioned earlier, the displacement effect in the economy has created an enormous turbocharge in the energy efficiency and sustainability area within the building sector. There has been a rush to that area because the taxpayer is footing the bill.

The Minister for Finance and Deregulation, Lindsay Tanner, has acknowledged that $1 billion worth of Australian stimulus money went overseas. That is like a rounding error to this crowd, but a thousand million dollars went overseas to China to buy Chinese pink batts via this insulation program—which we are now putting more money into. When asked about this, Mr Tanner, in his thoughtful response, simply shrugged off the criticism and said, ‘So what?’ There is a big ‘so what’ here. It is about poor government policy program design, poor preparation for the impact of this government intervention, very poor accommodation of industry capacity to support this activity, very poor implementation of the program—including in some cases tragic results—and a very unwelcome and artificial inflation in the cost of a home improvement activity. It has a very attractive payback period anyway because the government is footing the bill. You could call it the ‘so what bill’. ‘So what’ is the attitude of the Rudd Labor government when $1 billion of the stimulus money, designed to add some vitality to the Australian economy, simply goes on Chinese pink batts.

The finance minister introduced these bills at the last possible minute. That underlies the legislative program, which is light anyway. The Rudd Labor government treats the parliament with contempt. It does not seek to be held accountable here. These days it uses it as a law-passing institution only. But even that is a challenge. These bills were introduced at the last minute—yesterday—and the government wants them passed today so they can be debated in the Senate next week, because the bills require immediate passage due to insufficient funding. In the lead-up to the MYEFO, the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, it should have let people know some action was required. It said so in that report. Yet here these bills are, having been dropped in the House yesterday. There has been a flurry of activity to try and accommodate the government’s mismanagement of the legislative program so the bills can get over to the Senate next week. Why? The government is running out of money. Funding for this Home Insulation Program is close to being exhausted. The 2009-10 appropriation will run out in late December, and that is why there is a need to provide for this debate in the parliament today. The opposition has been happy to accommodate and to help save the government from itself.

Funding for the water buybacks from the Murray-Darling Basin are not sufficient to cover the cost of the trades that the government anticipates will be offered to it under the water purchase program for this financial year. It does not give you a lot of confidence. I can understand why people are anxious about the Rudd Labor government. I can see why they are troubled by the broken promises, the inability to take tough decisions and the fact that there is no clear forward agenda. We get these bitsy bits of government activity and flurries of media releases and the like. Then there is very poor execution of the projects. We see understandable concerns about wasted expenditure. I have pointed to the poor program design that has made what should have been a positive program far more expensive than it needed to be and has created problems of its own. This is in an area where a better-targeted incentive could well have brought about the outcome that people were seeking to achieve. This is a carefree attitude to spending. We have been brought back into this place to try and put more expenditure on the Rudd credit card.

To reinforce the point about the very poor program design, when we look at issues around energy efficiency and insulation, what seems to be a very worrying lack of sincere commitment to sustainability and energy efficiency is evidenced by the government’s own behaviour. Look at promises made in the lead-up to the election about this house, the big house, the national Parliament House. Those commitments leading up to the election were very clear: Rudd Labor sought to convince people that it would lead by example and it would do so by powering Parliament House and all MPs’ electorate offices with renewable and clean energy. But Senate questioning has revealed that nothing of the kind has even occurred. The Rudd Labor government has buried its promise of a green powered Parliament House and opted for a 10 per cent green energy electricity contract to avoid significant budget costs, rather than honour its election commitment. How extraordinary. We saw the Prime Minister, the opposition leader as he then was, very pleased with himself going around saying that Rudd Labor would lead by example and making all these promises. Yet what we see is, again, promises that were short-sighted and confused, an inability to secure and implement any meaningful outcome from those headline commitments and another missed opportunity. So the big house, the Parliament House of Australia, supposedly powered by renewable and clean energy, is nothing of the kind. Another broken promise by the Labor government, and the justification for that was one of cost.

So here we have the Rudd Labor government making this commitment to the Australian public that the big house, the Parliament House, would be run on renewable and clean energy, and telling the Australian public through its flawed and friendless Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, so-called, that everyone else can accommodate the cost of cleaner energy through its lack of willingness to embrace the opposition’s very important benchmarking measure for the treatment of the energy sector where cleaner energy systems will actually be rewarded with carrots and those that are less clean will be punished. The Labor government is just too full of its own rhetoric to even understand its design punishes every kind of electricity generation. Even those that have modest greenhouse gas emissions will be punished under Labor’s CPRS. Those that are less clean will be punished more, but every energy generator that has any emissions at all will be punished. So if the Rudd Labor government says it will make the parliament of Australia a clean and green energy powered house and then walks away from it because it is too expensive and goes for a proposition that is a poopteenth, a very small percentage, of their undertakings on the basis of cost and then comes in here with a poorly designed emissions trading scheme that will impose incredible cost increases on everyone else’s electricity and says that is okay—there, writ large, is the hypocrisy of this government. It will not walk its own talk. It will not act in the way it is demanding other people act. Yet it goes out there expecting the Australian public to think it is for real on issues to do with sustainability, climate, energy efficiency and a better management of our economy.

I think it is writ large that the government is short-sighted and does not believe its own spin now. No-one else believes its spin in the Australian community. Now you are seeing the Rudd Labor government not believing its own spin because it is not even acting on it either. When there is an opportunity to improve the sustainability of the built environment, Australia’s existing building stock is very important. Minister Garrett made what was actually a cover version of an earlier announcement last week in Melbourne at the Energy Efficiency Council where he re-announced something that has been announced and announced, over and over again. He re-announced it again in a set-piece speech about what should be demanded of new commercial buildings, ignoring the fact that, at best, about two per cent of the commercial building stock is turned over each year and 98 per cent is not. So what do you do about the 98 per cent of the commercial building stock and its environmental performance? Under the Rudd Labor government some will get given money, a handout through a program in the Industry portfolio. Nobody knows how you get to succeed in that grant program and how you do not.

The very clear fact is that the few projects that will be funded through that Greening Your Building program in the Industry portfolio will be held up as if this is happening right across the commercial building sector, when we know that is not the case. They will have a few totemic cases that they will put into their ads, that they will use in the prefabricated speeches that now masquerade as answers in question time. They will say: ‘Look at this building—it’s doing this. They’ve got tri-gen, they’ve double-glazed it, the lift systems have been changed and they’ve got escalators that turn off when nobody is using it. Isn’t this great!’ as if that is happening everywhere, when it is not. There will be a few spotty examples to be held up as totemic evidence that something is happening. But 98 per cent of the building stock is not changed each year, and the vast majority of commercial building owners and operators will not benefit from the largesse of the government’s grants program. So what are you do? What you do is embrace what the opposition has been arguing for: green depreciation. You accelerate the depreciation, the writing off, of expenditure on investment in new plant and equipment, fixtures and fittings that actually improve the environmental performance of a building. You say to the building industry, ‘Here is encouragement for you to turn your mind to these opportunities, a number of which are quite attractive and have reasonable payback periods anyway, and we will accelerate and enhance that attractiveness so that you act now.’ Then you will get activity right across the sector, not this spotty stuff that you are seeing from the Rudd Labor government.

I say ‘spotty’ and I say that it is a government that does not walk the talk because we only need to look at its own activities. We have heard about the Building the Education Revolution. Prime Minister Rudd on 23 June went out to Trinity Christian School in Canberra, a set-piece opportunity where there was all the gee-whizzing that you could possibly have in relation to a project being undertaken under the Building the Education Revolution, so-called, program. But what he revealed in a set-piece speech is just how slack and appalling the Rudd Labor government is on implementing its own talk. Here we have got a bill to supplement the funding for the insulation in homes program that is out of control. It is the gold rush of this century as people flocked to that industry sector knowing that, even if it only costs 300 bucks to insulate a home you can get 1,600 off the Rudd Labor government, such is their ‘Ruddomics’. But then we look at the Building the Education Revolution program and we learn nearly one in 10 of projects approved under the first round of that program do not even have building insulation. Isn’t that extraordinary? These are new buildings, supposedly for the 21st century, and one in 10 do not have insulation. But it gets worse. One in five do not even use energy-efficient lighting, so committed is Rudd Labor to improving the sustainability and environmental performance of the built environment. Less than half have energy-efficient glazing. Less than a quarter have solar panels. A third do not even think about using shading. These are new buildings being funded by the taxpayer that do not even have basic attributes that the building industry says should be a part of every new building and that common sense says if you are going to build something new, build it to contemporary standards. So important is insulation that one in 10 do not even have any insulation! Yet we are here debating a bill that is providing hundreds of millions of dollars so that other people can be putting insulation in their places, and the Rudd Labor government does not even walk its own talk.

There is more evidence of it. The Green Loans farce—what a fiasco that is. Just in recent days the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Peter Garrett, finally responded to my question on notice. He admitted that of 18 August not one cent had been provided to households to undertake water and energy efficiency improvements in Australian homes, even though they were promised that would be what they would get help with in the lead-up to the last election. Despite reannouncement upon reannouncement and assurances from the Prime Minister as late as June in 2008 that the Green Loans Program would provide relief to Australian families under financial strain from rising energy costs—hello!—nothing has happened. This troubled and confused, unwanted, flawed and friendless program has not even got to first base. By 18 August, not one cent had been provided. Let us look at some of the statements in Labor’s election policy on 30 October 2007. It said Labor’s solar green energy and water renovation plans will:

• Offer low interest Green Loans of up to $10,000 to make 200,000 existing homes more energy and water efficient, with subsidised environmental audits and free Green Renovations packs.

On 13 May 2008 Minister Garrett, in his own press release, said—it sounds similar and I am sorry it is a cover version—that:

Up to 200,000 working families will be eligible for Green Loans over five years to improve the energy and water efficiency of their homes, as part of the 2008-09 Budget.

We are now talking about the 2009-10 budget. He went on to say on 8 May 2009:

Environment Minister Peter Garrett said Australian homeowners will be able to make their homes more energy and water efficient with 1000 home sustainability assessors ready to begin work and credit providers signed up to commence the rollout of Green Loans Program from July 1

That was 1 July. There is still nothing happening. And then you see in a prime ministerial statement on 5 June 2008:

Rising energy and petrol prices are already hurting Australian families and Australian businesses. That is why we are: helping Australian families take practical action …

The bottom line is that not a dime had been provided by 18 August. This is more evidence that programs that need care and attention, careful consideration of their design and their impact on the economy, on Australians and on the debt position and deficit of this budget do not get the attention they deserve. More effort is put into press releases and headline hunting than development and design. (Time expired)

David Bradbury (Lindsay, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise in support of the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010. I think the contribution from the member for Dunkley in so many ways represents the somewhat ‘schizophrenic’ approach of the opposition when it comes to the stimulus package and in particular the measures we are looking at under this appropriations bill. When it comes to the insulation component of the stimulus measures, we see the member for Dunkley getting hot and getting cold. He supports it but then he does not support it. It is low-hanging fruit but low-hanging fruit that someone else needs to pick.

When we look at this program, it is true to suggest that the take-up rate has far exceeded what the government had estimated. But that is not a bad thing; that is a good thing. That is a profoundly good thing. It is a good thing because it means that more and more households across this country are taking up the opportunity that this program presents, and that is an opportunity to ensure that their home is installed with insulation to derive the benefits that come from that in lower cooling and heating costs. It is estimated that by installing insulation in your home you can reduce those heating and cooling costs by 40 per cent. That is a significant cut in energy costs for households. I know that many households in my electorate are taking advantage of this opportunity because they recognise the need for us to be taking action on climate change at the local level—indeed at the household level—but they also recognise the upfront costs of being able to invest in the measures that will reduce their emissions and, indeed, the costs associated with the energy of running their household.

I do not see it as being a problem, but there was one aspect of the program that the member for Dunkley failed to address at all and that was the issue of jobs. We heard the Leader of the Opposition say not all that long ago—a lot of water has passed under the bridge in that time—that this was about jobs, jobs, jobs. You do not hear a lot of talk from the opposition about jobs any more. But let us talk about jobs when it comes to this program, the Home Insulation program. When it comes to this program, it is estimated that some 4,000 jobs are going to be created. These are jobs that span across the manufacturing of the batts, the installation of the insulation and, indeed, also all of the associated logistics that are required in order to fund and support this industry.

The member for Dunkley spoke about the modern-day gold rush. I think he is getting a little bit carried away. If there is a modern-day gold rush, I would think that description is more appropriately labelled towards the need for labour to be shifting towards the resources sector in this country. We have seen that, and I do not think that in itself is something that we should be critical of, but in suggesting that there is a modern-day gold rush the first point to make is that I would rather be talking about gold rushes than great depressions and that is where we were six months ago, as indeed all countries in the world were.

The second point I would make is that right throughout the country, but in particular in my region in Western Sydney, I am seeing many people who were not able to keep on making a decent living in their own trades turn their hand to trying to support this emerging industry, this industry the government has invested in. You see it very often. You just have to drive along the M4 out in Western Sydney or the Great Western Highway, anywhere, and you see ute after ute with pink batts stacked on the back. One of the things that I notice as I drive through my community is that sometimes the ute is one that has just been leased and you can tell that this is someone who has moved into the industry in more recent times. Sometimes you see that the signage on the ute actually reflects that the tradesperson now installing the insulation was previously a tradesperson in some other sector. That is not a bad thing at all. The member for Dunkley suggests that somehow we should be disturbed by this. The disturbing thing from my perspective is this: had the government not acted with programs like the household insulation program then those people driving those utes who were in other trades where they were noticing the effects of the downturn and were struggling to get the business that they needed in order to pay their household expenses and meet the demands of raising families in communities like mine would not have had the financial capacity to continue to support their businesses and their families. This program is delivering that financial support to people such as those that I see driving around in the utes, that support for their jobs that is necessary in order for them to continue to make a decent living. So, far from being disturbed about this like the member for Dunkley, I see it as being a very positive thing.

I turn my attention to some of the detail of the bills, but in particular I want to address the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill. This bill provides urgent funding to cover, firstly, the rebate payments made under the government’s successful Home Insulation Program but, secondly, to cover the increased departmental costs associated with the acceleration of the water buyback scheme within the Murray-Darling Basin system. I want to make a few specific points on the Home Insulation Program. The Midyear Economic and Fiscal Outlook 2009-10, MYEFO, included the bringing forward of some $985.8 million to ensure that the very successful Home Insulation Program could continue and would have sufficient funds to continue to keep up with demand. Of that $985.8 million, this bill urgently brings forward $695.8 million. The remaining $290 million will be included in the 2009-10 additional appropriation bill. It is important that these measures pass now, and the member for Dunkley alluded to the urgency of this. And it is important to have a look at the take-up rates and the practical difficulties associated with ensuring that the money is available in a timely fashion.

The first point that should be made is that the program has experienced unprecedented demand. In my view, that is unprecedented success. The member for Dunkley’s view is that that is somehow a measure of failure, but in my view this is a measure of success. We have already seen half a million homes insulated under this program, so 500,000 homes insulated in a very short space of time. Think of the energy cost savings for the households that are benefiting from this particular measure. I would make as an aside a point that I think is not often made. I notice in my community that often people who have older houses who do not have the financial capacity to buy into the new housing estates are the ones who benefit most from these proposals. Proposals like this are not necessarily assisting those who have moved into the brand-new home—that already has insulation. They are very much targeted towards people looking to retrofit existing dwellings. I have to say that by and large in my community the benefit of this program has been delivered to those that we would deem to be more in need from a financial perspective. I think that is a point worth making.

To return to the take-up rates, the original take-up rate was estimated to be approximately 90,000 households per month. What we have seen since the implementation of this program is that the rate of households under the program has now reached 135,000 houses per month having insulation installed. So from 90,000 up to 135,000 per month—once again, a measure of the success of the program. Based on the current take-up rate, the 2009-10 appropriation will be exhausted by late December. That is why we are debating this bill as a matter of urgency. It is not because of some bungling, as the member for Dunkley would suggest. It is about ensuring that sufficient funds are brought forward, funds that are already budgeted for, to make sure that a very successful government program can continue, to ensure that funds are available to allow that program to continue. Normally additional funding of this type would be dealt with through the additional estimates process, but to do so would not allow those funds to be made available before April next year. So it is imperative that we deal with this as a matter of urgency, and that is why the government has brought this forward in the fashion in which it has been brought forward.

I would like to make some more general points in terms of the success of the stimulus measures. Apart from the success in this particular case, the Home Insulation Program, I know that right throughout my community many households and many individuals are telling me that they have personally benefited from the stimulus measures. Many of them are telling me that they would not have been able to sustain the levels of income that they currently have, would not have secured the work orders that they currently have or maintain the client base and they currently have, had it not been for the stimulus measures.

Recently, I was very pleased to see some real life examples of this when I visited a local tradesman, Mr David Barry. David runs his own business, DB Carpentry, and is based in Emu Plains in my electorate—currently the business has four carpenters and two apprentices. I visited David Barry with the Parliamentary Secretary for Employment and we had a good chat out on site with Mr Barry, who was a living, breathing, walking, talking advertisement for the stimulus. It started with the cash payments. He recited specific orders that he had taken, at a time when business was starting to slow down quite markedly, and specific examples of individuals and households that had sought his services as a carpenter using the cash payments that had been made available to them. He said that often these were the small jobs, but they were jobs that corresponded with the amount of money that had been made available through the cash payments. He said that at the time he did not make the connection but, now that he has been asked about, it he recalled quite clearly that there was a pickup in a number of those small jobs from households who had received a cash payment under the stimulus measures and were looking for a way in which they could spend that money and support local jobs. That was the first example.

Mr Barry also told me about how, as a subcontractor, he was involved in a number of the local community infrastructure programs that were funded by the Commonwealth government to Penrith City Council under the stimulus measures. Indeed, as we had a good chat about his involvement in the community infrastructure program, I became aware that Mr Barry and his business had been involved in undertaking some of the works that led to the improvements at the Penrith Quarterdeck function centre, which is based at the Penrith Swimming Centre. I am very familiar with this project because I was recently at the opening. In my view, this is one the great examples—a localised example but one of the great examples—of what the stimulus has been delivering. If you listen to the opposition, who chose not to vote for the stimulus, the stimulus is something of a two-headed monster. But out there in communities such as mine, far from being a two-headed monster the stimulus is delivering real improvements to local communities and supporting jobs and local economic activity at the same time.

Let us have a look at the example of the Quarterdeck function centre. A number of improvements were secured as a result of the $150,000 that was allocated by Penrith City Council—money received from the Commonwealth government. I take the opportunity to acknowledge the Mayor, Councillor Kevin Crameri, who officiated at the opening, and his councillor colleagues. The council showed leadership in spending the funds in this way. The $150,000 was allocated to improvements that included providing disabled access and improving amenities as well as to a general refurbishment and some shade structure provision. The significance of this was not lost on the people who were there at the opening, one of whom was Sherrille Stephens. Sherrille Stephens is a local disability advocate in our community. She is wheelchair bound—she has her own disabilities to deal with—but she is a great advocate for people with disabilities. She is a great Australian in my view. Sherrille Stephens told me the story of how two years earlier she had attended an annual general meeting that was held at the Quarterdeck, the facility that has now been improved and includes disability access as a result of the stimulus. Mrs Stevens told me that two years ago she could not access the venue in her wheelchair. A group of about five people had to lift her up to try to get her to the top of the stairs so that she could get into the venue for this annual general meeting. She raised the issue, as the advocate that she is, with Penrith City Council. They acknowledged it to be an issue but could not fund it out of their existing provisions. They put it on the list of priority works to be undertaken but they could not fund it because they did not have the money. As soon as the stimulus payments came in, in the form of the community infrastructure program, the council, wisely in my view, used those funds to deliver improvements to disability access. And there on the day of the opening was Sherrille Stephens, someone who had virtually been denied access to this facility two years earlier, recognising the work that had been undertaken by so many to deliver improvements in access to this facility. That is what the programs have achieved on a human level and at the community level.

I return to Mr Barry who as a carpenter was involved in some of the works. That is but one of the projects under the community infrastructure program that he and his business have benefited from. Other measures that Mr Barry and his business have benefited from include the government’s investment in educational improvements to Nepean Community College—he has undertaken some of the work at that facility. He has also undertaken some work in our local schools as part of the Building the Education Revolution. He told me that he has taken advantage of the small business investment allowance. He bought a new vehicle, some new plant and some equipment because the investment allowance provided him with an opportunity to invest in the future of his business and receive some upfront tax relief in doing so. He also drew to my attention that he is intending to take advantage of the Apprentice Kickstart initiative, which the government has recently announced. Here we see at the micro level, in one business in one community, the impact that the stimulus is having. It is having an impact not just in supporting jobs and cushioning the Australian economy from the impact of the world recession but in delivering community facilities; delivering infrastructure that our country needs today and will continue to need tomorrow. That is why it is so critical that we maintain the measures that have been announced.

The measures set out in the other bill which is being debated today, theAppropriation (Water Entitlements) Bill 2009-2010, will enable $650 million for water buybacks to be brought forward from later years under Water for the Future. As with the earlier bill, these measures are urgent because of the time considerations. The minister has brought these matters before the parliament in a very timely fashion, given when MYEFO was announced. These measures are now before the House. Hopefully, if I am interpreting the member for Dunkley’s comments correctly, this will receive the support of the opposition and make passage through this House and the Senate in a timely fashion to deliver the funds needed to continue these programs. I support the bills.

Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to rise to speak on the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010 and the Appropriation (Water Entitlements) Bill 2009-2010 and follow the member for Lindsay, who I do acknowledge is one of the more thoughtful members on the other side. It is pleasing to see the member for Lindsay speaking from some notes but without a written speech, which is an unusual event for those on the other side, and I congratulate him for doing so. He did a reasonable job in defending what is very difficult legislation to defend. The member for Lindsay is right: the opposition will support these bills, as has been the history in this place of supporting appropriation bills, except for some time ago when a famous one was not supported.

I thought the speech of the shadow minister, the member for Dunkley, was a cracker in the sense that it very much highlighted the problem with this government that it does not think through the consequences of its policies; it does not think through the policies it is implementing. We have seen this across a wide variety of issues, such as the home insulation of pink batts from China policy; the water policy, which is particularly pertinent to my electorate and is a very important issue in my part of the world; and the disaster which is the Julia Gillard memorial halls project, the $17 billion that has been thrown out of the window at a rate of knots. We saw another good example last week on the front page of the—

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

How are those school openings going, Jamie?

Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is interesting you mention school openings. I will briefly touch on that. At the Meadows Primary School, for instance, the school is now having to knock down a building, move another and close down a playground because the government will not build on the land next door. The state governments in South Australia and also Queensland, the state of the member for Moreton, are simply incompetent. We are seeing policies which are not well thought through and we are having to clean up the mess, like we are today, by rushing through appropriation bills. This is an unusual event, as is the tradition in this place, but we will support the bill so that the programs are funded.

I will touch briefly on the Home Insulation Program, the pink batts program, which is the first part of the bill. There are two aspects to this. There is the macro policy level, which we have seen the member for Lindsay defend on the basis that it has created thousands of jobs—I think that was the suggestion—

Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There are more utes!

Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is right. It has created a lot more utes, but we will not get into utes again in this place.

Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs and Settlement Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Laurie Ferguson interjecting

Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will take the opportunity to also congratulate the minister at the table, the Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs and Settlement Services. I was on your side. You heard during question time that I was making my support known for you very clear, Minister. I congratulate you and I am very pleased to see you will be here for some time yet. The member for Lindsay was talking about the pink batts policy—

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Perrett interjecting

Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is right, it is probably good to read your speech. The pink batts policy was about jobs and about getting insulation into Australian homes. We know this program was suggested to the previous governments as part of the wish list in the ERC process. The former Treasurer was never particularly keen on it, for very good reasons, because it does create a false market in a sense. It has bumped up the price. We have seen example after example. The most famous, of course, is in the electorate of Griffith, which is the Prime Minister’s electorate. It has bumped up the price significantly and therefore the money is not effectively or well spent. Thus, we are seeing again not well thought through policies which are impacting enormously on today’s economy. They will also impact on the economy and budget situation in the future, with a massive debt that our children and future generations will have to pick up, because of these badly thought through decisions.

So this is not working at the macro level, but it is also not working at the micro level. I have a great example in my electorate of that. I wrote to the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts. He is not responsible for climate change, which we should make very clear in this place. Don Purvis lives at Woodside Lodge in a beautiful part of my electorate. He lives in a retirement village type situation and the whole village applied for the rebate for solar panels. He signed in the wrong spot. He signed in the installer’s section rather than the recipient’s section. The rest of them signed in the right spot. He has been denied the funding. So I have written to the minister. Presumably, the minister will overrule that decision, because it does highlight the bureaucratic nature of this. They are not thinking through the policy implications of their decision. I think it is an example, which is very similar to this case, of where the policy was rushed out the door, not well thought through. We are seeing the results by having to debate these bills today.

I thought the shadow minister addressed the pink batts policy quite well. He made some comments about water. It is the biggest issue in my electorate. It is the biggest issue in South Australia and I think it will be a major election issue come March next year and, potentially, an election loser for the Rann government. People will send them a message about how they have handled this issue over the last eight years. In South Australia today we still have a real and genuine problem with water security because the government has not invested in it over a long period of time. In relation to the Murray-Darling Basin, we have seen just a complete hotchpotch of an approach from the Rann government and we are seeing, unfortunately, from the Rudd government a similar policy approach.

Members would remember that on Australia Day in 2007 the then Prime Minister and the then minister for the environment made a historic announcement about a $10 billion water plan to address the problems which face the Murray-Darling Basin. It was a visionary plan and it was the right plan. It focused on two very particular policy initiatives. The first one was the buyback of over allocated water licences throughout the Murray-Darling Basin, particularly those in eastern states. Importantly—and I emphasise this point—it focused on getting water back into the system through the smart use of infrastructure investments in the Murray-Darling Basin.

South Australia in the early 1990s went through a lot of this process, particularly in the Riverland, by investing in pipes, getting rid of open channels and lining dams et cetera. These actions save real and genuine water which can be used for environmental flows and by irrigators. Unfortunately, other states have not invested. So in January 2007the Howard government, as part of the Water for the Future plan, as part of the Howard-Turnbull plan, allocated large amounts of money to address water infrastructure issues.

Unfortunately when the Rudd government came in in 2007 they were ably assisted by the Bracks-Brumby government in stopping a national system from being formed. That was a major part of it and an absolute goal that needed to be fixed. I am very pleased that my leader, the Leader of the Opposition, when elected as Prime Minister is committed to finishing the job he started in January 2007 so that we have a truly national system, not the half-baked solution we have today.

Importantly, what we really need is the upping of the ante on investment in the infrastructure. Minister Wong is not really focused on water; she is focused on the ETS issues. Given the importance of the Murray-Darling Basin to South Australia and to my electorate, I think it is a disgrace that the minister has let water go by the wayside. The member for Moreton, being from Queensland, probably does not realise that I have half the Lower Lakes in my electorate. Patrick Secker, the member for Barker, has the other major part—Lake Albert and the Coorong. Those lakes are in dire need of a drink. Unless we take immediate action to address the Lower Lakes, we will lose that environmentally historic site to action which I do not support—flooding them with saltwater.

One of the things that can be done is genuine and fast spending on infrastructure to prevent loss of water through open channels and to deepen the Menindee Lakes. I understand that the engineering work that has been done will save approximately 200 gigalitres of water a year. It would be just fantastic to get that water back through the system to help irrigators in the Riverland and the southern half of the basin and also to get some environmental flows into the Lower Lakes through the Gawler channel and down the Coorong to really give that system a boost and save it from the terminal decline that it is in at the moment.

We have seen from this minister an approach of just buybacks. She is purely focused on buybacks and, again, this is what this bill addresses today—bringing forward some of the allocated money from the original Turnbull plan for the buybacks. Buybacks are part of the answer—buybacks with regional plans to help those workers in the affected towns to manage the changes. Labor is simply forgetting workers in those towns. When they buy back the water they are not assisting these people find new industries and adjust to the situation. It is okay for manufacturing businesses in large cities. They get assistance packages and dedicated government resources, but if it happens in rural communities in New South Wales, there is nothing. They just come in, buy the water and walk away. Of course there need to be buybacks. I support the buyback program. Some on this side of the House are not as supportive about it, and I understand their reasons for that. I do support the buyback program, but with focused support.

More important is investment in the infrastructure which can save real water today without destroying jobs. It can mean that we can continue to grow our own food in this country, which of course is the major issue that we face. I am thankful for the work Senator Heffernan has done which focused on the food security issue in particular and raising Australians’ awareness of the challenges facing Australia and the world in growing enough food to sustain our way of life.

We need to do more on infrastructure investment. I plead with this government to focus on investing in this infrastructure and spending some dedicated money—and not just on another study. I understand that the Menindee Lakes project up to about its third study. It is quite insane. They should be getting on with this today. We get a bill rushed through to do the easy bit. The buyback is simply the easy bit. It is buying back licences. Much of the water is not being returned to the river system right now because it is not there. But there is the water there for the infrastructure investment. There would be savings with the infrastructure investment, but it takes a bit more dedication and a bit more work.

I suspect it is an ideologically different approach from what this minister wants to do. I do not think that she has a lot of respect for the rural communities and what they deliver for our country. In that respect she is focused on the buyback. She thinks it is the easy answer—that is her approach on this issue. We see that through this bill. It is not well thought through. Again, it is a consistent problem with this government. They are not thinking things through before they implement their policy. They do not see the consequences of their policy. We on this side of the House stand up for regional communities. We stand up for the communities that need their water and their local jobs and we see the effects of the water crisis day after day. We want to see some real action on this issue—not just rhetoric, not just a focus on the water buybacks, which we have seen. In the first two years of this government we have seen that buybacks buy a lot of air and not much real water, because the water is not in the system. The water is there with infrastructure investments. So rather than debating today another $650 million for the buybacks, which are of course part of the answer, we should be debating how the infrastructure can assist to get real water back into the system.

Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Instead of using taxpayers’ money in private roofs!

Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is right; it is not well thought through.

I will make some comments in respect of the other issue troubling South Australia, that being water security. This government has spent so much money over its first two years. It borrowed money to hand out $900 cheques. We saw last week that even its advertising about the borrowed money for the handouts misinformed people as well, so that is another issue about the approach of this government. It borrowed $23 billion to hand out. Imagine what we could have done for the water security challenges this country has by investing that money, rather than just handing it out to the punters. We could have seen a real investment in water security, as we have done in Adelaide, in South Australia, throughout regional New South Wales and Victoria and so forth. Instead we have seen that money disposed of up a wall, so to speak! Again, it is a badly thought through decision that will be costly for us in the future. It will cost Australian taxpayers when we start paying higher taxes; we are seeing interest rate increases already. It was a such a missed opportunity. It is such a pity that we are now lumbered with this huge debt with nothing to really show for it.

In conclusion, and as I said at the start, we support the passage of these appropriation bills. We are disappointed that the government have to rush through bills. They are not thinking through these policies, they are not thinking through the consequences, and it is high time they started to do so.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak in support of the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010 and the Appropriation (Water Entitlements) Bill 2009-2010. Before I go to the heart of the legislation before the House, I want to address some of the remarks made by the member for Dunkley and the member for Mayo in their contributions. It is good to see that they are supportive of this legislation and that they are not revisiting past opposition performances like those from the mid-seventies! I am comforted by that. However, I did want to address the member for Dunkley’s comments. He seemed to focus on Parliament House like a bogong moth, on some of the things that were not happening in Parliament House. I have only been here two years, so I do not have the knowledge of the place that he does, but I thought that Parliament House was run by the parliament. So it is actually run by the member for Dunkley, not by the Rudd government—unless you are looking at changing those things!

This building celebrated its 20th birthday last year. It was designed in the seventies and built in the eighties, and, as seventies buildings go, it is actually an incredibly energy efficient building. It helps when you put a building inside a hill; it makes for a lot of energy efficiencies. Obviously, some of the technology from the seventies and eighties has changed, and a lot has been done over the years. After the member for Dunkley made his comments, I had a look at the Department of Parliamentary Services’ energy and greenhouse gas emissions webpage, which is publicly available. It shows that, despite having more sitting hours this year, greenhouse gas emissions have actually gone down.

Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It’s not bad for a—

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is not bad. They have purchased 25 per cent green electricity. So there are a few things that can be done. I just wanted to make sure the member for Dunkley was aware of that before he starts purchasing pink batts to put on the lawn to protect the building. It might spoil the aesthetics of it a little bit!

The member for Mayo also made some interesting comments about insulation. He seemed surprised that we had rushed out this insulation program and seemed to forget something called the global financial crisis—that little thing that those opposite tend to forget about, that little dip in the world’s GDP growth that occurred, the most significant economic downturn in the last 75 years. That is why we have these programs. That is why we were able to combine looking after jobs with looking after the long-term future of the planet by bringing insulation into our homes—bringing it together.

The member for Mayo did not want to talk about insulation; he was happy to talk about water. There is such irony in someone talking about insulation briefly and then going on to talk about water and glossing over the fact that John Howard, the former Prime Minister, rushed in this $10 billion water plan that he had not even taken the time to take to Treasury for them to consider. The member for Mayo said, ‘No, that was okay,’ for the $10 billion but something done during a global financial crisis is ‘rushed’. Of course it was rushed. It had to be rushed because we wanted to protect jobs.

Also, as a member for South Australia he did not see that connection between water and climate change. He just totally ignored that. He went on and on about Minister Wong’s focus on climate change—and a little thing called the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme that we are trying to get through the Senate!—as if it was a bad thing and we should be focusing on water. He did not get the fundamental science right. I think the member for Mayo is an intelligent guy. He is well read. He has got a vision for the future. I would hope that he is not one of the coalition gang of 10 that do not believe in climate change. But obviously water and climate change are interconnected. The Goyder line in South Australia is heading south, and we need to do whatever we can to ensure that we prepare farmers, communities and Australia for climate change.

The bills before the House direct urgent funds to meet the demand for two of the Rudd government’s very timely and very popular stimulus measures. It is interesting that, when you have a program that involves ordinary Australian households in a practical response to climate change, they put their hands up in record numbers. Hundreds of thousands of them put their hands up to be a part of it. The industry is cooking, with more than 135,000 homes insulated every month—far exceeding expectations. The initial forecast was for up to 90,000 homes to be insulated per month, but we have gone far beyond that. In my electorate of Moreton we had already received more than 3,000 home insulation applications as at September. That is 3,000 homes. If you have, say, at least three people per house, that is 10,000 people who are more comfortable in summer and 10,000 people who will be less cold in winter. We actually do have winters in Queensland! There will be fewer kilowatt hours of electricity, which obviously contributes to dangerous climate change, and savings of up to 40 per cent for households that have insulation put in.

The constituents continue to contact me to let me know just how much they appreciate this funding. In fact, in Brisbane a few years ago we had a real problem with water supply. Dams were down to nearly 16 per cent, so a lot of people who wanted to maintain their gardens went about installing rainwater tanks that had drifted out of favour in the seventies due to a council bylaw. A lot of people now, if they have gardens, often have a sign out the front saying ‘rainwater tank in use’ or ‘rainwater in use’. I have got one out the front of my place. Maybe it would be appropriate for us to fund a similar sign for people who have batts in their house, such as ‘I am not a sceptic’ or ‘No dinosaurs live here’ or something like that. We should perhaps fund some of those alternative signs to show that people are forward thinking.

The insulation factories in Brisbane are running 24/7 because installing insulation has been so popular. However, obviously there are employers and employees who have been supported by this program—and we heard from the member for Lindsay who talked about the utes and trucks that he sees everywhere. I see a similar thing when I go for a walk every morning in Salisbury and Moorooka; I see trucks going from the couple of factories near there loaded up with batts as well, off to do good work and save the planet. It is also interesting that when you provide funding to help restore one of the nation’s great waterways the nation’s farmers are also happy to get on board. In fact, the program has already secured more than 600 gigalitres of water entitlements. That is 600,000 million litres, or about 1.6 million swimming pools.

So, sensible Australian households want to be part of the national solution to climate change. Sensible Australian farmers want to be part of the national solution to climate change. But—and it is a big but—the opposition do not want to be part of the solution. Unfortunately they—or some of them; not all of them—are not particularly sensible. The home insulation program is helping to keep thousands of Australians employed. It is also helping thousands of Australian households to play a part in our collective efforts to combat dangerous climate change. The opposition are opposed to these schemes. They vote against them in the parliament and they continue to voice their opposition, leaving them at odds with most Australians. It is strange to see that disconnection between people like the National Party and the farmers whom they normally represent.

These bills will bring forward an additional $700 million for the household insulation program and an additional $330 million for the Water for the Future: Restoring the Balance in the Murray-Darling Basin program. These additional funds will help meet demand up until the end of April next year, when further funding will be available through estimates appropriations bills. Tenders for water entitlement purchases are proposed in the lower connected Murray system and in the lower Condamine and Balonne region in Queensland. I know this section of our waterways very well. I grew up in St George, so I spent my childhood swimming in the Balonne River, where most people went to cool down in summer. It was a very important part of the town for providing irrigation for the cotton farms and now for rockmelons and table grapes and a few things like that. In fact—and I am sure the parliamentary secretary will be happy to hear this—in my novel, The Twelfth Fish, the river is actually called the Jude River, but it is really—

Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Sustainable Development and Cities) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Where can you get it from?

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Not many places! It is still on sale at the parliamentary bookstore, member for Dunkley. I am happy to sign a copy for you. In my fictional book I call the river the Jude River. As all good Catholics would know, St Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. However, when it comes to looking after the Murray-Darling system, the Rudd government does not see this as a lost cause. We actually have faith in the fact that we can restore flows to the Murray, that we can restore as much water as possible so that hopefully the member for Mayo will see water flowing back down into South Australia. These bills will ensure that the government can continue to accelerate environmental water purchasing.

As we reflect on the success of these two schemes—both important planks of the Rudd government’s stimulus package and response to dangerous climate change—it is important for the parliament to recognise just how important our response to the global financial crisis is. The unemployment rate has crept up to just 5.8 per cent, nowhere near what was initially forecast and lower than in every other major advanced economy. Unemployment is 10.2 per cent in the United States of America, 8.6 per cent in Canada and 7.8 per cent in the United Kingdom. They are easy figures to roll off the tongue but we well know the misery that comes with those sorts of figures—the misery and heartache and life-changing circumstances that come with unemployment. The Australian economy is now expected to grow by 1½ per cent in 2009-10 and 2¾ per cent in 2010-11. Not only that, but a recent IMF report showed that Australia’s debt and deficit are among the lowest in the world. This is not a fact touched on by those opposite in their fear and smear campaign. Without the Rudd government’s decisive response to the global financial crisis—injecting fiscal stimulus—combined with the Reserve Bank’s monetary stimulus, we would not be in a position to quote such encouraging figures today. Surely the dole-queue schadenfreude of those opposite would dry up if we were approaching unemployment levels of 10.2 per cent like the United States. As I have said previously, caring is doing. If you do not do, then you do not care. Those opposite seem to have an absence of caring.

I turn again to water. I note that the member opposite responsible for negotiating on behalf of the coalition is the member for Groom, Mr Macfarlane, who lives on the edge of the Great Dividing Range in Toowoomba—I think his home is right on the edge of the Great Dividing Range. That is where the Murray-Darling system basically starts. Water just to the east of Toowoomba flows down into Brisbane, and water to the west flows all the way down to South Australia. If you go further along that river you get to the Balonne and Condamine rivers and we find Senator Joyce, whose office is right on the banks of the Balonne River in St George—one of the few National Party senators who actually has an office in the country. I think he might be the only one who has an office in the country. Every other National Party senator seems to be glued to the city.

Senator Joyce—I will give him his due—has his office on the banks of the Balonne River. However, he has a slightly different approach to climate change from the member for Groom, Mr Macfarlane. Senator Joyce’s approach to climate change has all the science of alchemy, or phrenology or something like that. He can throw lots of figures around but they do not actually have any scientific basis. We go further and further down the river, away from Senator Joyce’s destructive populism towards one of the senators for South Australia, Senator Minchin. The water flow takes a long journey through the waterholes, dams, weirs, irrigation pipes et cetera all the way down to South Australia. By the time it gets there, it has all but dried up. This is where the Murray River is not even able to make its way out to the sea—and this is were we find people like Senator Minchin, whose belief in science and climate change has dried up as well. This is a dangerous situation..

Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Water Resources and Conservation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I acknowledge the contribution made by the member for Moreton to this debate. I find it somewhat incredible that, with schemes that are supposedly as popular as these are, and with the need for extra appropriations, the government has only two speakers on this legislation. I suppose it is because of the member for Moreton’s good country upbringing in St George that he has a sense of duty to defend the indefensible. But if he turns around to find out who his support troops are, he will find that he is it. The member for Bradbury has shown equal courage in debating something that is very hard to sell to the community. However, I sometimes wonder whether we live in the same country. The member for Moreton spoke about how popular the pink batt program is. He obviously has not been speaking to the people in my electorate. I will touch on that in a little while.

We are here to discuss the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010 and the Appropriation (Water Entitlements) Bill 2009-2010. The fact that the coalition will not be opposing this legislation follows a long-held convention and does not mean that we offer support for the situation that the government have found themselves in through their mismanagement.

I will start with water. The government has brought forward $650 million from future budgets to fund the water buybacks in the Murray-Darling Basin. This has to be one of the most ill-conceived and sinister schemes ever administered by this government. The previous government allocated $10 billion to the Murray-Darling water plan, and $5.8 billion of it—nearly $6 billion—was for replumbing and a smaller amount was for water buybacks. In the last two years, this government has focused purely on the buybacks. There are, of course, plenty of willing sellers. Rural Australia is in a very tight position at the moment. Cash-strapped farmers are selling their water entitlements to make ends meet. It is certainly not something of their choosing and it is certainly not something that they would do with a long-term view; rather, it is something which they have had no choice in.

The interesting part about the water buybacks policy is that there is no water to buy. The government has been spending billions of dollars on buying air and making no difference. The full implications of this policy will not come through now because there is no water in the river; it will not be until the season turns, when the dams fill up and the rivers flow, that we will find that we have lost the ability to feed ourselves. We will be sitting on the riverbanks, with fertile farming land all around us, watching the water flow out to sea, and we will have no ability to use it. With Australia’s population possibly to reach 35 million by the year 2050, I think it incredible that food security—not only securing the nation’s ability to feed its population but also growing its ability to feed the world’s population in the years to come—has been very much put in jeopardy.

While there is this lazy approach to water management of buying out water licences that contain no water, this government is ignoring the possibilities of saving billions of litres of water through infrastructure. On the very day this extra $650 million is being brought forward the Lachlan River in western New South Wales has ceased to flow. If you live downstream from Condobolin, you will find that there is no water in the Lachlan River. The communities that live along that river, the individual property owners on that river—many hundreds of people—are now struggling to find alternative sources of water. Can any of the members who sit in this place imagine what it would be like to live in a community that has no water? Apart from the air we breathe, water is the second most important substance we need for human survival. Something that we have taken for granted for years and years has been taken away from those people. But is there government assistance to help them sink bores or run pipelines to find alternative sources? Not a cracker! I was out in the lower Lachlan area two weeks ago and I saw a great amount of sadness, unrest and fear among that community about their future. That might not seem like much to us as we work in these wonderful conditions, but I have to tell members that, as we speak, the people of western New South Wales who are living in the lower Lachlan River area are hurting greatly.

The water buybacks are having a devastating effect on communities right across the Murray-Darling Basin. There are two very well known cases. One is the purchase of Toorale Station near Bourke in western New South Wales. That took 100 jobs out of that community, and the amount of water that was returned to the river was minimal at best. So now there is a large property of over 100,000 acres that will be turned into a national park. This property produced fibre and food and fed thousands of people, not only in this country but around the world, but now it will lie idle.

When Toorale was purchased I made an offer to my colleagues opposite to buy them a camera. I asked for the first member who could take a photo of the water purchased from Toorale station making its way into the Murray River to give me evidence of that. I said that I would eat my words if I was wrong, that I would apologise for saying something that was not correct. But I know that is not going to happen.

There has been a devastating effect on a community and we have reduced our country’s ability to feed itself. Food security is not just for the 21 million people we have in Australia at the moment; Australian farmers feed 70 million people around the world. So the first people who will go hungry because of the policies of this government will not be Australians; it will be the people in other countries that rely on our grain, our beef and our mutton for their staple diet. They will be the first to suffer.

Not far east of Toorale Station at Bourke is Collymongle Station, in my electorate, a property owned by the Twynam Pastoral Company. The government has purchased the water entitlements from the Twynam Pastoral Company, so the town of Collarenebri pretty well ceases to have a reason to exist. I am not much of a one for conspiracy theories but things are starting to add up. The government does not appear to have the funds to put into infrastructure to pipe water to the lower Lachlan, but it has been splashing billions of dollars around on Building the Education Revolution and the so-called ‘Julia Gillard memorial hall projects’. But with the $1.7 billion overspend, guess which projects were cut back? In my electorate, 18 central schools. Guess which was the first one? Collarenebri central school, where 85 per cent of the students are Indigenous. And one of the major employers in the area is now closed down because of government buybacks.

Collarenebri central school has a science lab in a demountable—a very shabby, ancient, leaking demountable. The cruel irony is that they had pegs driven into the ground for a promised new science lab. With a $1.7 billion overspend on BER, I guess the government figured Collarenebri had no future. They are just a bunch of Indigenous kids and a few farmers’ kids; they won’t miss not having a science lab; they don’t need the same standard of education as everywhere else—and the government pulled the funding.

There are schools in the leafy suburbs of our capital cities which are having multimillion dollar stadiums and the like built, but Collarenebri not only now has no water to sustain students’ parents in employment but the school has less of a facility to empower students. Education is the one thing that will improve their standard of living, and maybe their community and their education has been disadvantaged at the expense of others. This is the mismanagement of this government and it is the scandal of our time. I have just about had enough of watching speakers in this place stand up and say that black is not white—and say it with a straight face and a clear conscience. I do not know how they do that. Rural Australia is hurting because of the policies of this government.

We had a plan for water security that included $6 billion for water infrastructure. Part of that money was announced a few years ago—$300 million for on-farm irrigation efficiency programs with a time frame of six weeks from announcement to application. I was in Griffith about a month ago speaking with the Young Irrigators Forum. They are very keen. Young irrigators in the Murray-Murrumbidgee system are a very switched on, productive group of individuals. I have seen some of the work they have been doing to improve the efficiency of their farms. They were very keen to take part in the $300 million program, but there is no way they could prepare a proposal which would do justice to meeting the criteria in six weeks. There is a great belief that this time frame was set up so that there would not be a complete uptake, so that the government could then say, ‘There cannot be that much need for on-farm efficiency; we can wind that program back.’ The truth is that there is a great need for on-farm efficiency, but we need to be realistic about its implementation.

The minister in charge of this is Senator Wong. Perhaps it is useful to understand the mindset of this minister—a minister who seems to be using climate change as an excuse to decimate regional Australia. Long before climate change was the buzz that it is today, in a previous life Minister Wong was a staff member for the environment minister in New South Wales, one Kimberley Yeadon. In that capacity, she took part in what was known as the south Brigalow bioregion, where the New South Wales government locked up a productive, vibrant living forest which was nurturing many communities and turned it into an environmental wasteland in the pursuit of Greens preferences. Two years after 350,000 hectares were locked up and the foresters were removed, 50,000 hectares of it burnt to the ground—koalas, kangaroos, all the natural fauna and flora decimated. That was for Greens preferences.

I find the politics of this astounding—the dishonesty that is coming into the debate here and the speeches at the doors. We have heard some bizarre comments. The member for Corangamite was this morning talking about the Great Ocean Road in his electorate going under water as a result of climate change. We have heard the member for Makin saying that we need to pass the CPRS legislation because of the heatwave in South Australia. We have not had an explanation of how their policies are going to reduce the temperature of the globe. Indeed, if you accept the full premise of global warming, we are talking about half a degree over 50 years. That is not a heatwave. That is long term and we need to look at productive ways of dealing with that. Rural Australia does offer a lot of the answers but is not being given the ability or the financial incentive to do that.

Another part of this bill is the almost $1 billion being brought forward for pink batts—the Home Insulation Program. I found it amazing that the member for Moreton should say how popular it is. In the last couple of weeks in my electorate I have been overrun by people complaining about this program. In Dubbo, I believe many people—quite often elderly people—have been conned by this program. But, more sinister than that, the Australian taxpayers have been conned by this program. People are selling insulation door to door, signing people up and saying, ‘Your house is bigger than average.’ Having seen some of these houses, I find that hard to believe. Salesmen are saying, ‘You just pay another $200 or $300 more and we will do your whole home with the $1,600 rebate from the government.’ At one home—a timber cottage occupied by a young married couple with a baby battling to get ahead—from what I could see, the installer stood in the manhole with some sort of a hose and fired what appeared to me to be chewed-up newspaper around the hole, over the exhaust fan and over the downlights but possibly at best covering 20 per cent of the ceiling area. Many other people in the street signed contracts with the same mob. Through public pressure, the management of that company did come good, but I think there are many people who will be disgusted when they get into their roofs and find that many of the batts have been thrown and laid about in a haphazard manner. Anyone who knows anything about insulation knows that, unless the complete cavity is covered and all the gaps are closed, it is worthless.

In regional Australia, if people had a choice about where the money was to go, I do not think home insulation would be a big one. Yesterday we had the Deputy Prime Minister in here saying that the government did not have the funds to properly fund the education of country kids at universities. This $985 million that has been reallocated to the pink batts program would educate a lot of country kids at university. As the 17-year-olds across my electorate are just finishing up the HSC and contemplating their very uncertain future next year, they are wondering whether the world has gone mad when we are allocating funds in the billions for people to put insulation in their roofs when we do not have enough money to fund their education.

Reluctantly, I will not be opposing this legislation, but it saddens me that, from a few years ago when we were a country that had cash reserves, we are now borrowing money to put into a very poorly managed program such as the Home Insulation Program and the buyback program, which is the easy way of managing water in the Murray-Darling, while we are ignoring the plight of rural communities. There have been no social studies and no economic study done of the effects on this community. Hopefully, this government will soon wake up and realise what it is doing to the people of this country.

Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Whilst there is a practice in this place not to oppose appropriation bills, these bills—the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010 and the Appropriation (Water Entitlements) Bill 2009-2010probably represent an example of where that tradition, that convention, should be broken. It should be broken in the public interest and, more particularly, in the environmental interest, and I want to address those aspects during the 20 minutes that are available to me. It is worth putting on the record in the first instance that the spin doctors on the frontbench of this government have yet been unable to meet their projected budgeted targets for any significant program they have put to this House. Let me start with the election promise of a computer for every secondary school kid. That has run $1 billion over. But that was only the first billion. There is $2 billion or $3 billion that was suddenly discovered as an impost on the Australian taxpayer relevant to the funds that state governments must find to service and install and provide software updates for the management of those computers once they got them into their schools. To the best of my knowledge, the New South Wales government said, ‘Thanks but no thanks,’ and that situation is unchanged.

So not only is the cost blowing out but half the kids are not going to get one. I have been told that in many schools the computers supplied have not been taken out of the boxes. They are still sitting in cardboard boxes. So that was a great help! That was the economic outcome. Then all of a sudden we were going to have the Building the Education Revolution. They are very strong on names but very poor on arithmetic. The reality of that program is that they had hardly erected a building before the costs had blown out from $14-odd billion, with the need for another $1.7 billion. As I said, our environment and the challenges of climate change are so often spruiked in this place without any reference to a worthwhile response. Then it gets even worse: $1.7 billion. There were no environmental measures in that.

I picked up the West Australian newspaper the other day, and there was a volunteer group of parents running before- and after-school care and managing a facility—a 100-year-old hall—on the school premises. It was apparently treated with great kindness and was quite weatherproofed. It was run by a volunteer group. If you had to leave home at eight o’clock to get to work, as a working mother—which may be of some interest to the minister at the table, the Minister for Housing and Minister for the Status of Women—you could leave your kids there. There were volunteers there to look after them until school started. If you did not leave work until half past four or five o’clock you could go back to that facility and there were the kids, safe and sound. They have been evicted. Why? The reason is that, under BER, they are going to pull down that hall so they can build another one. There is nothing wrong with the existing building. That volunteer group will disband. For the minister’s information, those parents will have to go to some costly alternative—if it is available. That is a measure of the success of the scheme. It is stupid. It is another $1.7 billion blow-out in a $14 billion program.

We are now being asked to approve another $695.8 million of expenditure—previously budgeted for some time in the future. That gap will have to be filled at that time from revenues from somewhere. What are we approving it for? It is for a dodgy scheme to put insulation in houses. It has been so hurried that it is a clear scandal. We have now had two fatalities, the second being a 16-year-old boy, because the industry was totally incapable—as the opposition warned at the time—of meeting the deadlines proposed. Everybody overnight has become a pink batt installer. They have been scratching around in the roofs, stepping on live wires, putting down insulation with an aluminium base upside down. That is typically used—and I am a frustrated builder—above the rafters. When you are constructing a new house, you put that up there and put the cladding or whatever it might be on top of it. That has been rolled out. Why? For want of something, we have had to import huge quantities of this stuff. The minister just shrugged off the effects of the manufacture of fibreglass or rock-wool.

The member for Parkes told us, and it has been reported, that one bloke got up in his ceiling to find his entire space was full of plastic bags full of newspapers. Just imagine the fire hazard and the potential to cook an entire family. Remember that, because of the lack of law and order in Australia today, people have to lock themselves in their houses and frequently cannot even escape before they are consumed by smoke and other things. There are no regulations. There is no nothing and nobody knows. In an anecdote told to me a fellow was the owner of two houses. The ceiling of one had been partially insulated on a previous occasion. The contractor came in, wandered around, had a quick look and said, ‘Yeah, $1,600 each.’ The fellow said, ‘But the second house is half done.’ The bloke asked: ‘What are you worried about? It’s the government paying the money.’ That is what he said. And we are supposed to approve $690 million to extend that dodgy process.

This is not very environmentally successful and certainly will not have a long-term effect. The reality is that, by the rules applicable, it is going into older-style houses. What is happening all around Australia to older-style houses? They typically sit on the traditional quarter-acre block, which by modern planning rules can accommodate certainly two and up to three residences. What is happening throughout Australia? The members present would all know, when they go into the old suburbs in their own districts, that those older houses—many of them public housing—are being purchased. The blocks are being aggregated and smaller, modern buildings—frequently two storey—are being put on blocks of an area as small as 350 square metres. There has been a case of one subsidy being paid in exactly those circumstances: the house was insulated in the ceiling and knocked down within a couple of weeks. We know how often that has happened in some of the other government programs. Schools have been given grants when their state owners want to close them. Why would you do that?

What is more, why would you ignore the fact that a lot of those old houses were very well designed to manage climate change throughout the year when they were constructed because air conditioning, certainly for many at that level, was not even invented? So what did they have? They had verandahs and things that shaded the walls of the house and reducing the climatic effect, because those were the only options they had. By the way, for 1,600 bucks you can buy an evaporative air conditioner which would be a lot more effective and efficient for most of those houses than a few ceiling batts ever would be. But how many of those houses will be in existence in 10 years time as a result of the massive re-organisation under the infill argument that is so often promoted by Labor state governments? For how long will those houses be there—so where is the long-term benefit of this initiative?

The member for Parkes mentioned buying water entitlements when there is no water there, as compared with maximising the return on the water that is available, and if I have time I will come back to that. But let us first take this $695 million. As I said in the beginning, this is a bad investment in environmental benefit in the reduction of carbon emissions. For a start-off, there is a huge emission factor in making fibreglass and in making rock-wool, the two most effective insulations. It is not called rock-wool for nothing: you create it by melting rock. And do you do that with a magnifying glass getting a little bit of heat on a rock? No, you burn hydrocarbons in huge quantities to do so. And what is fibreglass? It is fibres of glass. And how do you make glass? You melt sand. How much energy does that consume? And, of course, the established local industries would have been very comfortable with a slower program, where they could have manufactured the product in Australia, but, no, it all has to be done in a couple of years and so there are imports from China and other countries. Who knows what the efficiency is of those plants? Who knows how many scrubbers they have on their chimneys for particulates, for sulphur and for all those other things associated with the melting of rock? Who knows? Who cares? Certainly not the Australian bureaucracy or this government: ‘Spend the money.’ And suddenly they have not got enough, so it is: ‘Ask the parliament to give us another $690 million.’

Let me come back to that $1.7 billion overrun in BER. It is a very interesting fact that in the state of Western Australia, as an example for all Australia, we are pumping a lot of gas from the North West Shelf to the industrial and residential areas of the south-west of Western Australia. Everybody says, ‘Isn’t it lovely, we’re generating low-emission electricity from that gas.’ But, in fact, there are 700,000 tonnes of emissions per annum being generated by the gas pipeline in the pumping process, and that is not added in. Furthermore, there is no need for it. By the simple act of commencing to generate the gas fired electricity in the Pilbara, where the gas comes ashore, and transmitting it into the network—which commences in the mid-west of Western Australia at the town of Geraldton, presently in my electorate—by high-voltage DC transmission, only about five to six per cent of the electricity generated would be lost in the journey.

The Chinese are building a 2,000 kilometre 6.2 gigawatt HVDC line to bring their renewables out of the west into the east where they manufacture and employ people. But the Europeans at the highest practical level—not the scientific level but the highest business level—have done a study on producing solar energy in the North African desert, which is the best place to make solar energy because you maximise the radiation effects of the sun, and then having to shift it 3,000 kilometres. They did three tests. They looked at making hydrogen on site and worked out that in the process of transport they would lose 75 per cent of the energy. Then they looked at what runs all around this city and interconnects our country towns—AC transmission, the standard for Australia, with just a couple of exceptions—and found they would lose 45 per cent of the electricity. Then they looked at high-voltage DC—which just happens to interconnect Victoria with Tasmania to good effect—and found they would lose 10 per cent over that 3,000 kilometres.

For $1.1 billion that power that could be generated in the Pilbara could be interconnected to the south-west network. For $1.7 billion you could interconnect the eastern states network with the growing energy demand of the west. And of course if you extended those two wires up north of Broome to where the Browse gas comes ashore you could be bringing down Browse-gas electricity and the product of tidal power in that region sufficient to replace all of Australia’s energy consumption, with a highly predictable resource and technology that, in France, is 40 years old. That is what you could do with the money that is being chucked up in the ceilings of old houses that within 10 years, in many cases, will not exist.

HVDC is an underground system and it can be an undersea system. In fact, when you look at Browse, nobody is yet talking about the potential of actually generating the gas at sea and transmitting it by these wires—which the Europeans are going to put under the Mediterranean Sea in their project. But you could be shipping electricity from that gas resource into northern regions—into Malaysia, into the growing Asian regions—and selling them something. That is in comparison with us going to them, as proposed by this government, to buy certificates to continue to pollute—which is the only product the government emissions trading scheme will deliver.

What is the fight about? What are the opposition doing lobbying and being lobbied for more free certificates to pollute under the ETS? What a great idea that is if you have a genuine interest in the environment and in the climate. Why are we allocating this sort of money to a dodgy scheme that is being abused and exploited throughout the nation, as typically occurs when you rush into things of this nature, when that same money could have delivered massive reductions in energy losses in transmission and interconnected the growth state with these states?

Just think of it, one of the reasons these batts have gone up is to reduce the amount of air-conditioning used in houses. The houses defined for the work typically will not have an air-conditioner. Air-conditioning is now a very significant drain on the electrical system, and it is not base load. It is peak load. Western Australia, I think for the last time, has decided by referendum that daylight saving does not suit the state of Western Australia and there is good reason for that. We have a three-hour time difference between when it gets hot in Melbourne and when it gets hot in Perth. So why are we not installing, for $1.7 billion, an HVDC interconnection between the Western Australian system and the South Australian system, which is interconnected by HVDC with the rest of the eastern states network? Why are we not interconnecting them and keeping the highly efficient generating system in the Latrobe Valley on full load for another three hours, saving the building of a 200 or 300 megawatt coal fired power station in Western Australia? Why are we not doing that?

Any form of machinery always has an optimum level of performance. When you have got to start running your coal fired power stations below that level, your emissions ratio to energy produced is not good. These are the issues. That is where this money should be being spent, but of course it is just going to go up in the roof. Let us hope there is not another fatality but the score is now two, and all because of a government that could not run guts for a slow butcher. These are the sorts of problems we have. They have not achieved budget estimate on any major project they have so far implemented. If you read today’s paper, you see what the AAPT fellow says about the national broadband network. As he says, it is just a process to try and renationalise Telstra. You can see why there is plenty of money around. (Time expired)

Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010 and the Appropriation (Water Entitlements) Bill 2009-2010. Both are government supply bills. The coalition will not oppose 2009-10 appropriation bills, in keeping with the convention of passing government supply. However, I have great concern about the purposes for which these appropriations are sought. They are, I think, a real indictment on this government in terms of its mismanaging the nation’s finances and failing to understand the impacts of bureaucratic mismanagement and a failure to take good advice about the consequences of what they do.

There are two purposes of the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010: firstly, to provide additional funding to cover rebate payments made under the government’s Home Insulation program. Administered funding of $695.8 million is to be brought forward from the 2010-11 financial year. This was announced as part of the government’s 2009-10 Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, MYEFO.

The second purpose of the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010 is to provide additional departmental costs to the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts associated with the acceleration of the water buybacks within the Murray-Darling Basin system. Departmental funds of $4.9 million are to be brought forward—$4.4 million from 2013-14 and $0.5 million from 2014-15, from the Water for the Future: Restoring the Balance of the Murray-Darling Basin program—to provide the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts with adequate resourcing to efficiently manage, they say, the government’s water purchase program in 2009-10. The Appropriation (Water Entitlements) Bill 2009-2010 will provide funding for the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts to accelerate water buybacks.

We in my part of the world are extraordinarily concerned about the whole business of water buybacks. To date the Restoring the Balance in the Murray-Darling Basin program has purchased more than 600 gigalitres of water entitlements from what is now struggling to be the food bowl of Australia. The government believes that bringing forward the funding in this bill will enable a further acceleration of environmental purchases and provide for new water purchase initiatives in 2009-10. We who live and produce food and fibre in the basin, who raise our families and support our communities and who are looking to a future in what was the most fertile and best watered crescent in Australia, are in despair about the consequences of a further acceleration of this failed policy. I will return to this point.

The government also believes that, with the additional appropriation, vendors will receive timely settlement of their water trades under the Restoring the Balance in the Murray-Darling Basin program. I am pleased to see that at least this government acknowledges the fact that the water buyback scheme has been grossly mismanaged and bungled from day one. People’s lives have been destroyed by broken promises about the timing of offers made, the timing of funds delivered into their bank accounts and the withdrawal and mismanagement of what they believed was, in writing, a contract of sale with the government.

A lot of this bungling is a consequence of very poor coordination and cooperation with state governments, the Victorian state government in particular. I would like to read, for example, a letter from one of my constituents which points out just the sort of problem people are facing. It says:

Dear Sharman

I would like to bring to your attention the most recent problem we have encountered with water trading. We have sold 300 megalitres of water to the government, held up firstly by the 10 per cent cap. Now that this cap has been removed we received notice that the sale was rejected because of an unpaid Goulburn-Murray Water invoice. With the importance of this sale to us, I was not going to leave it at that, it turns out that there were many sales rejected for this reason. The reason for the non-payment? The invoices had not been sent to the customers.

That is by Goulburn-Murray Water, a Victorian state-owned water authority.

We hope that our sale is now back on track but, as you can see, trading water is a moving minefield. I urge you to support uniform water trading rules across the Murray-Darling Basin.

Of course that is what is needed, but that is not what is being addressed by this government in its mad panic to appease so-called green elements in their mythical buyback water solution. This is a case where people did sell their water to the government and were rejected on the basis that a state authority had not been paid. In fact, the bill had not been sent. How can that be fair and decent? And what are the consequences for a drought stressed family totally dependent on that income?

These bills reveal the true story of the Rudd government’s poor policy and mismanagement of the legislative timetable, mismanagement of government funding and destruction of irrigated agriculture’s future in the Murray-Darling Basin. Let me tell you that the Murray-Darling Basin has long been understood to be in urgent need of better governance arrangements. It certainly represents some 40 per cent of farmers across Australia who produce 30 per cent of Australia’s food supply and much of its fibre. When we were in government, the Liberal and National Party coalition under John Howard took a historic step with the $10 billion 10-point plan, the Australian national water plan. We understood that since Federation the six constituencies covering the basin had failed to cooperate and there was no universal water law. We also knew in particular that New South Wales had overallocated diversion licences in streams, that this had been going on for generations and that that overallocation needed to be addressed. We therefore put the $10 billion on the table. Some of it was for on-farm water use efficiency measures. We knew that there was no point in requiring a reduction in water use if farmers could not afford to put more work in place, for example subsurface irrigation or converting to drip and trickle processes in horticulture. So that on-farm water use efficiency funding was essential. Unfortunately the Labor government has ignored that dimension until very recently when a very piecemeal offer was made far too late, when most farmers have already gone to the wall.

We also understood the importance of buyback from the overallocated streams and therefore that particular buyback element of the package was targeted. It was not the piecemeal, ad hoc so-called buying from willing sellers approach taken by the minister, Senator Penny Wong. What happens when you go into a drought stressed environment, and in this case the Murray-Darling Basin has been in drought for more than a decade; when you have farmers who are also receiving below the cost of production prices for their products, for example dairying, and you say to them and their lenders also say to them, ‘You have in your possession a water entitlement worth hundreds of thousands of dollars: what are you going to do? If you do not sell and there is an offer on the table from the government, we will require you to shut up business, your intergenerational farm or your farm enterprise that you have purchased with great risk having perhaps invested an earlier lifetime in developing up your career.’ So this government is buying water off farmers who are drought stressed and wish to continue very often in agribusiness but who are forced to sell their water entitlement as a means of just surviving another year. I have another letter from a constituent. In this case this particular water user points out:

We have taken steps to protect ourselves by selling 20 megalitres of water to the government buyback, which paid our debts for the fodder from last year.

That is how desperate many of our farmers are. If this particular dairy farmer had not sold 20 megalitres to the government they could not pay for the fodder which kept their dairy cows alive in the year before. They go on to say:

We have just received a letter from Murray Goulburn Water to say the further 25 megalitres which we were selling to help our cash flow will have to wait until the four per cent cap is lifted.

She ends up saying:

Does the government know how desperate people are? Is there any hope of help?

This is the situation being acted out over and over again across irrigated agriculture in the basin, where desperate farmers are being forced to sell their means of production in order to survive another year of drought. I have to say that any government that has the cynicism to talk about those people as willing sellers really has to re-examine its moral compass. I have to say that this business of buyback of water is so serious because environment cannot be seen to be positively impacted at all. When you are buying back an overallocated entitlement, say in one of the New South Wales streams, you are not actually buying high security H2O which can be applied to the wetlands or the river stream itself. You are simply assisting with an administrative problem created by previous New South Wales state governments. What should have taken place was a combination with on-farm water use efficiency support. There should have been more efforts to bring into line something like the state-owned water authorities in Victoria, in particular Goulburn-Murray Water, which has been inefficient and not attending to best practice for decades.

The pricing structure of Goulburn-Murray Water, for example, depends on so-called water sales, which is the additional water that is available when the dams are full. They are sales above your 100 per cent water entitlement allocation. If you do not understand the water industry, as the Labor Party does not, I can understand your being mystified by such language. But everyone in the irrigation industry in Victoria understands this terminology and the fact that Goulburn-Murray Water, a state owned authority, is in deep financial strife because of the drought. How is it overcoming that strife? It is ‘reconfiguring’ the irrigation system itself. It is shutting down hundreds and hundreds of kilometres of earthen channels which have served the irrigation industry for the last 120 years. Only what Goulburn-Murray Water is calling the main parts of the system—the trunks of the irrigation channel system—are supposed to be survivors in the future. It is plastic-lining a lot of those channels now in order to stop seepage and leaking. It is plastic lining all of the system as far as it can go, even though there was evidence around to show which sections leaked and which did not.

Modernisation of the irrigation system is long overdue, but not in the way it is being progressed. It is supposedly being paid for by northern Victorian irrigators giving up over 75 gigalitres of water a year to Melbourne via a pipeline which will go out of the Eildon Dam across the Great Dividing Range, with huge energy inputs to push and pump the water across that range. The water will then be delivered to Melbourne and Geelong. In those two cities, of course, there are alternatives to reduce water consumption: recycling, storm water harvesting, desalinisation plants, different pricing structures and better conservation measures. But, no, the state government has said that, because it is investing in contracting the irrigation system to some half of its previous area and the people it can serve, irrigators must part with their very water security.

The Goulburn River—which is tapped or, if you like, has its catchment dammed by Eildon Dam—is designated the most stressed in the Murray-Darling Basin. This is a CSIRO annual assessment of its condition. The murray cod has recently been assessed as one of the most endangered and vulnerable fish species in Australia. The murray cod’s habitat is the Goulburn River. Despite that, we have this federal government ignoring an EPBC controlled action over the north-south pipeline. The pipeline itself is virtually completed and we are told triumphantly by Mr Brumby, the Premier of Victoria, that he will stand beside this pipeline for the first gushing delivery of water by the end of this year. We believe it cannot quite happen, but he will certainly be doing it long before the Victorian state election is held later next year.

We have the EPBC controlled action with its first annual report on what was adhered to or was taken into account in terms of the conditions for the building of that pipeline. We find that there have been a number of breaches of the conditions described as necessary by the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Mr Garrett. What has happened about those controlled action conditions being ignored? Absolutely nothing. Nothing has occurred in terms of a ‘Please explain’ to the Victorian government, which is responsible for building this pipeline through its agency Melbourne Water. At the same time the so-called food bowl modernisation project—plastic-lining so many of the channels, which means less groundwater accessions and less groundwater to wetlands—must now be subjected to an EPBC controlled action consideration. The point about that is that the food bowl modernisation project stage 1 is already virtually completed. Another farce.

What does this government really know about environmental protection and sustainability? You would have to believe very little when you see that all it can do is bring forward through a supply bill further expenditure on water buyback and make a further effort to try and get their administration right in speeding up this water buyback process. The whole thing is obscene. The problem is that it will cause great environmental damage to the Australian continent as well. Australian farmers produce environmental services in the form of protecting biodiversity, water quality protection, soil fertility protection, and feral animal and weed control. All those environmental services are delivered by farmers as a by-product of their food and fibre production. I said before that the Murray-Darling Basin contains some 40 per cent of Australia’s farmers, who produce over 30 per cent of Australia’s food and fibre supply. Those farmers do an extraordinary job in guaranteeing, preserving or producing environmental services for the rest of Australian society. When they are beggared by poor policy—something like this water buyback policy which exploits their current vulnerability arising from drought stress and poverty—those farmers cannot continue to supply the environmental services that I mentioned a minute ago. I was pleased, I have to say, when Sydneysiders and people in Canberra actually had a taste of a dust storm the other day, because what rural communities fear most is that dust storms will become a common occurrence as the top soil of Australia, particularly in the Murray-Darling Basin, literally blows away due to the ongoing drought and farmers having to sell their water. Previously the vegetation growth held down the soil.

We have a serious environmental degradation issue in Australia, particularly across the basin, which is being exacerbated and stimulated by Australian federal Labor government mismanagement and misunderstanding. A lot of my constituents say it is deliberate and that they ‘just hate farmers’. I do not know if they do hate farmers. I think it is ignorance. I think it is cynicism. I think it is pandering to the so-called green vote without an understanding that the real environmentalists of Australia are your food and fibre producers. Every farmer knows that if you do not protect the environmental values of your property you degrade your own productivity and the chance for your children and grandchildren to continue in that line of work. So it is a nonsense to suggest that farmers are not the guardians of the environmental resources of this nation.

This bill is an acknowledgement of the failures of this government to fully understand. In terms of the home insulation program, that farce is well known. It is an echo of the water entitlement melt-down. Here we have $1 billion spent in a few months at the beginning of the program.

Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010 and Appropriation (Water Entitlements) Bill 2009-2010 as well. These are government supply bills for both ordinary and non-ordinary annual services in relation to water entitlements and home insulation. There are two purposes of the appropriations. The first is to provide additional funding to cover the rebate payments made under the government’s home installation program; and the second is to provide additional departmental costs to the Department of Environment, Heritage and the Arts and the Department of Climate Change and Water, associated with the acceleration of the water buybacks within the Murray-Darling system that are addressed in the water entitlements bill.

These bills are typical of the Labor government’s mismanagement not only of the legislative time frame but of the government funding process itself. The 2009-10 funding allocation for the installation program will be exhausted by late December 2009. The Labor government has spent billions of dollars. A lot of this stimulus money has gone overseas with the Chinese pink batts and I would question how this protects or addresses the interests of Australian workers or business in relation to any impacts of the global recession.

I read an article in the Farm Weekly, which quoted the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry as saying that the Labor government’s economic stimulus package boosted pork sales in the lead-up to Christmas. However, Mr Burke’s theory was dismissed by Australian Pork Limited, who stated in the same article that market data concluded there was only a minor rise in sales compared to the previous years.

The Labor government’s reckless spending has resulted in a massive underlying cash deficit of $57.7 billion for 2009-10, and the government’s home insulation program typifies this carefree attitude to spending. We hear, day after day, of the waste and mismanagement. We look at the $1.7 billion blow-out in the BER program, with over $7 million wasted on signs and plaques whilst, at the same time, we are seeing the slashing of the cataract rebate. This is really an incredible comparison.

The home insulation program has been riddled with waste and mismanagement, as we hear, and also with issues of safety. Quotes and invoices are being fudged and it is very interesting that the quotes happen to match a number of the government rebates. My office recently contacted six registered insulation installers in my electorate, to ask for their opinion on the program. They had very similar issues. The waiting time for payment is usually two weeks but for jobs at houses that have an address not registered with Australia Post—usually a rural address—the installer cannot process this online, and must fax all the details to the department, which can take from four weeks, at least, for them to get the payment. This is an issue of cash flow for small businesses, particularly at this time.

Secondly, all of them have difficulty in getting the insulation itself. Some are being told to wait for several months. They have also said that big businesses have had the buying power and independent small businesses have been unable to match this—they were unable to match the demand and had lost customers in the process. They also informed me that the price for bats had increased between eight to 27 per cent and, in one instance, from $54 to $69 per bag. Mr Garrett has opposed our calls for a full Auditor-General’s inquiry into the program, but this billion dollar blow-out demonstrates why the investigation is certainly warranted.

I also note that some of the issues in relation to insulation providers in respect of training have affected long-term businesses within my electorate—people who are very seriously trained. They also expressed concern in relation to ongoing business once the program has ceased and the bulk of the work has been done. Exposure to major building companies is also a concern.

Mr Garrett has been opposing our calls for a full Auditor-General’s inquiry. The appropriation and water entitlement bill will provide funding for the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts to accelerate water buybacks within the Murray-Darling Basin system, as I said earlier. We know that the Labor government received $10 billion from the coalition under the National Plan for Water Security, which included nearly $6 billion for water infrastructure. That included, as we heard previously from the member for Murray, on-farm water use efficiency measure. There is no doubt that we need a re-plumbing and we need to be working with farmers on water use efficiencies, and I am sure the member for Calare would agree with this. On-farm efficiencies are a critical part of what should be happening in relation to irrigation and water use.

The Productivity Commission is currently reviewing the water buybacks, but the government is bringing forward funding. Would the member for Calare say that is a contradictory circumstance?

Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Water Resources and Conservation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Coulton interjecting

Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The member for Forrest will make her speech.

Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. To date, the Labor government has spent millions of dollars buying a range of things, from paper to dust, and not necessarily water that will actually reach the Murray itself. Real water purchases have not been bought in strategic areas and little attention has been paid to buying water in the area where the water is actually needed for the environment. DEWHA has unfortunately not treated growers well. Growers who are distressed, growers who are in extreme financial difficulty and growers who have offered their water for sale have often been treated very badly by DEWHA. They have waited months for contracts and often have not been treated with common courtesy. Farmers will sell to third parties because of the attitudes and delays they have faced when dealing with Commonwealth officials.

No-one has costed the impacts on the Australian economy or those regional economies. Where are the regional cost-benefit analyses? We should be seeing those and having access to those. What are the broader regional cost-benefit implications? What are the costs for these communities and the areas? What will it do to Australian food and fibre production and what will the multiplier effects be, even of the purchase price of water, and how will those losses be carried forward? Will they continue for decades? The government has unfortunately not focused, as we have heard frequently, on infrastructure upgrades and retooling of irrigation schemes.

Applications are due by 27 November—next week. The parliament should be aware of those time lines for the approval of this important scheme given the chronic delays in the buyback program administered by the same officials. The combination of on-farm water use efficiencies and water buybacks is a critical part of what is needed in this system.

A flow-on issue from this legislation is the issue of food security—and it ties in with the regional cost-benefit analyses—ensuring, through the farmers and growers of this region, that people in cities and regional centres actually have access to food that is grown by Australians. As I said, the issue of food security is one that unfortunately does not receive the attention that it should. It is about self-sustainability and food security. It is a very serious issue and it is something that certainly does not receive the attention that it should, as you can see through this process.

On Monday the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts released the tender for the Carbon Register. Applicants have only six weeks to respond and must have an international carbon register partner. This will severely limit responses to the tender because of the unrealistic time frame and the international partner provision. Why is the time frame so constricted? There has to be an implication in that one. Is it accurate that to fund an increase in the buyback from $1.5 billion to $3 billion there will be a corresponding decrease of $1.5 billion directed to on-farm efficiencies? By default, will farmers therefore be actually paying for their own water buybacks?

Which agency analysed the social impacts of water buybacks on regional communities? That is what we have not seen. There has been no regional cost-benefit analyses, no multiplying of the effect that this is going to have. Which agency analysed the social impacts of these water buybacks on the regional communities prior to the actual water purchases and what were the projected impacts that were identified in that process? I would really like to know.

The Labor government should not repeat the devolution experience of the Owens Valley in the Californian irrigation area. As we all know, the Owens River was the source of rich farming in the valley with experimental irrigation, orchards, fruit and grain. The US Reclamation Service proposed careful studies preparatory to some dams and a control system to ensure irrigation and water security to the whole district. People enthusiastically welcomed the idea and actually gave up some of their rights to advance the study, only to find new interest altered the future of their lands and water. This saw water from the first 375-kilometre gravity-fed aqueduct, believed to be for irrigated agriculture, acquired by the government and directed to Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power owned 90 per cent of the water property rights in the Owens Valley and agriculture in the valley was effectively dead, ending the development of the Owens Valley as a farming community. Farms went dry, farmers had no choice but to leave, and Los Angeles County bought up the property.

A second 220-kilometre aqueduct in 1970 diverted more surface water, as well as groundwater, which affected groundwater to such an extent that natural vegetation died as well. Groundwater pumping continued at a higher rate than the aquifer could recharge, with the long-term trend of desertification of the Owens Valley and falling water tables. Owens Valley, which was once a thriving agriculture and food producing area, became desolate with empty farmhouses, dusty fields and a succession of ‘ghost towns’. I have really serious concerns that some of our communities will be similarly affected.

We all know—and we have heard about this from the member for Murray—about the enormous benefit of what a number of farmers are doing for biodiversity management, environmental management and food security. They manage the soil. They are some of the most progressive farmers with some of the most sustainable practices in the world. They do produce excellent food and fibre, the quality of which is almost incomparable. They are extremely sound environmental managers and they provide that continuous environmental management. I note that one of the major problems in the Owens Valley was the monopoly position of the single buyer and the fact that farmers were forced out directly or by default. This brings into question the weak bargaining position that farmers find themselves in, which we have heard about here in this chamber today in relation to our farmers in the Murray-Darling area.

We also have not heard about the efficiencies that are possible through town water schemes. We do not hear about that through this process. We only hear about water buybacks from farmers. We really need effective stimulus spending and we do need both on- and off-farm developments to address Australia’s water security issues. This parliament should have had access to the regional cost-benefit analyses of the effects of water buybacks on regional communities and centres. As we all know, or should know, food security is a critical issue for Australians. Thank you.

John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010 and the Appropriation (Water Entitlements) Bill 2009-2010. They are government supply bills for the ordinary, and not ordinary, annual services of the government in relation to water entitlements and home insulation. I am going to let others speak on the home insulation aspect. My main concerns—in which I guess I am on the record as having a very real portfolio interest as well as a personal interest, for me and particularly for my electorate—are to do with the nation’s water, in particular the Murray-Darling Basin, which is where I reside and which the whole of my current and proposed electorate is pretty much in.

I have always had grave concerns about the government’s approach to water reforms and, once again, I have to put on the record my disgust at the callous disregard that this government has for regional Australia when it comes to the use of water and, more than anything, the potential use of water. To look upon human beings and rural communities as ants that can be disposed of at will is not something I accept, having grown up in this country. The Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Wong, has time and again shown that she has absolutely no regard for the people who live in the basin—except for the people at the bottom of the basin, who are mostly not in it at all.

The second purpose of the main bill, which is the area I am mostly speaking about and concerned about in the first place, is to fund departmental costs—that is, costs of the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts—associated with the acceleration of the water buybacks within the Murray-Darling Basin system that are addressed in the water entitlements bill. That includes $4.9 billion brought forward from 2013-14 and 2014-15 under the so-called Restoring the Balance in the Murray-Darling Basin program, part of the Water for the Future plan, to provide the department with adequate resourcing to efficiently implement this government’s water purchase program. And therein lies the problem. It is not about water efficiencies, which the member for Forrest just spoke about. This government has very much shown that it is not about the better use of water; it is about the nonuse of it.

I will never forget what the minister, Senator Wong, said when she was asked whether she was aware that, in the purchase of Toorale station below Bourke, the water entitlements and everything it did there, she was purchasing 10 per cent of the business turnover of the Bourke Shire; and that she was purchasing four per cent of the water entitlements, which obviously in future would not be paid by national parks at the base rate for the Bourke Shire; and that that was the end of up to 100 part-time jobs in the Bourke Shire. Her reply, ‘What’s your point?’ is a rather chilling reminder that not everybody sees the Murray-Darling Basin in terms of the needs of the people who live in it.

The fact is that there are two million people who live and make their living producing for Australia in the Murray-Darling Basin, and that is not counting the one million or so people in Adelaide who are actually not in the basin, who do not live in it. Nobody, whether they are in or out of the basin, would ever deny Adelaide or anywhere else the domestic water that is necessary. But that has never really been seriously in dispute and no-one has ever denied that. And, given that Adelaide can actually store used water in the hills anyway and does not really call upon that much water out of the Murray River itself, I have never seen that as the issue for Adelaide or any other town along the river. I will come back to that, because there are some towns that are very much at serious risk of not having water—and not in the very near future; I am talking about now.

The Appropriation (Water Entitlements) Bill 2009-2010 will provide funding to the department to accelerate water buybacks within the Murray-Darling Basin system. Administered funding of $650 million will be brought forward from later years of the Restoring the Balance in the Murray-Darling Basin program, comprising $320 million brought forward from 2010-11 and 2011-12, and $330 million brought forward from 2010-11, 2011-12 and 2013-14, to provide for additional water buybacks in the current financial year. That has been decided since the announcement of the 2009-10 MYEFO on 2 November 2009.

I am very concerned about not just the future of the river but particularly the future of the community within the Murray-Darling Basin. One of the reasons that those two million people live in that community is to grow, process or be part of the production capacity of that basin, and, when I say that, I am talking about the rivers and the irrigation that they provide.

This bill is a further nail in the coffin of regional communities and will entrench what can only be described as a Rudd-made drought in basin communities once the climatic cycle returns to normal. You are not a climate change sceptic if you simply talk about drought instead of climate change, and undoubtedly we are in a drought. Climate change may exacerbate a drought, but it has not caused it. We have had droughts as bad as this before, and I just hope I am not around when the next one comes. We are still in a drought—very much so, particularly in my part of the world. On the basis of the current drought, Senator Wong has simply gone out and bought all the water that she can, and it is very plain that she does not plan to return any of it to productive usage—in other words, it is only for the environment. It is all very well to talk about the Lower Lakes. I accept the problems that some of our colleagues have down there with water. I myself have been there various times and I am in extreme sympathy with those people, whether it is in the Riverland or the Lower Lakes, and I am also in extreme sympathy with everybody from St George through the north-west of New South Wales, the central west, the Riverina, the Murray and the Goulburn—nobody is exempt from this. I think most of the productive capacity is in the high reaches of the Murray-Darling Basin.

I am a bit overwhelmed, and I suppose disgusted, that this government can find another $650 million to bring forward to spend on water buybacks in the next couple of years but is not interested in helping the people below Condobolin who are now facing the unprecedented reality of having their water flows cut off. I am not blaming people because the river or the dam is now at around six per cent or less—and at this time of year that is not a lot of water. Without doubt the New South Wales water authorities have some concerns about how much of that six per cent they can extract. Certainly things have to be done about that. But consider the figures. You would imagine that the largest purchase of water Senator Wong would have made would have been from the biggest river, the Murray, or maybe the Murrumbidgee, the second-biggest river. But, no, it is the Lachlan, which flows into the Murray-Darling Basin only once every 50 years at the height of a flood, at which time the last thing you are going to need is more water. In other words, the Lachlan is not really part of the system, except once in a lifetime. Yet Senator Wong has bought almost twice as much water from the Lachlan as she has from any other river system—75,000 megalitres or 75 gigalitres. The next highest is 47,000 megalitres, or 47 gigalitres, from the Macquarie river, which strangely enough, while it does flow more regularly into the system than the Lachlan—more than every 50 years—does not flow continuously into the system. That is the second biggest purchase. It is equivalent to what has been bought out of the second-biggest river, the Murrumbidgee, and slightly more than that which has been bought out of the Murray. I find this figure incredible. Why would you pick on the livelihoods of people near rivers to that extent when the rivers are not actually part of your system?

The Lachlan is the river that is in the most trouble now. Certainly the people below Condobolin are in trouble. If Senator Wong wants to get serious about helping people, why does she not say to the state government, ‘If you have got to shut the river off, I am doing my level best to make sure they do not have a future after the drought by buying an enormous amount of the water’? Why is she buying it there? Because she can get high figures because it is the cheapest water—not because it is going to help the Murray-Darling Basin but because that is where she can buy 75,000 gigs at about $600 a megalitre. She certainly cannot buy it for that sort of money out of the Murrumbidgee or the Murray. The second cheapest is the Macquarie, and that is why she is buying it there, not because she is going to help the Murray-Darling Basin system.

I challenge this government to do the right thing by the people of the Lachlan, particularly below Condobolin, and say to the state government, ‘If you have got to shut it off then you have got to shut it off, but here is $50 million to help people along that way put in bores and put in pipelines so that they can still do their stock and domestic.’ The state government is imposing fines of up to $250,000 on anyone who contravenes and pumps water on open channels and suchlike. I guess you have got to do something, but I would say to the state government: do not overreact as people do still have to water their stock and they do still have to have domestic water at their homesteads. That is what is going to happen and is happening below Condobolin on the Lachlan River. I think that if Senator Wong really is the Minister for Climate Change and Water then she should do the right thing by people in the Murray-Darling Basin area—she is claiming that the Lachlan is part of the system because she is buying all their water—and help them through this crisis, because crisis it is. My big worry is what she has done to the Macquarie and the Lachlan—the two smallest rivers, in a sense, in the whole system. That is where she has bought most of the water—because it is cheap, not because it is effective—and she has condemned them to a permanent productive drought.

Not one cent has been spent by the Rudd government to help landowners and struggling communities. The minister is yet to spend any money on water efficiencies on farms. She talks about it when she cannot avoid it but will not do it. There is the $100 million designated to help pipe water for the people on the Lower Lakes, in South Australia. I do not have a problem with that because they need help down there, but so do the people on the Lachlan, particularly those below Condobolin. It would be nice to see the department recognise that instead of ticking little boxes: ‘We’ve got another meg out of them. We’ve got another gigalitre out the Lachlan. We’re proud of that. We’re not worried about their future but we’ll get their water.’ They have faced years of drought.

I am not talking just about irrigation—far from it. I am talking about day-to-day livelihood, both stock and domestic. The water has never been shut off before. It has dried up before but, because it has been flowing out of the dam at Wyangala, it has tended to move through the sand. Even the last time that it actually ran dry, which I think was in the early 1960s, it was still moving through the sand. The waterholes from which people pumped for each individual station—and they were all on there in those days—were still able to be used to get water. But that will not happen this time.

As I said, I am absolutely disgusted that the two smallest rivers in the whole system, one that does not flow into the Murray system and one that does so periodically, are the biggest sufferers of the prime ministerial and ministerial effort to cut back future activity for the two million people who live in the basin. As I said, I have every sympathy for the people at the bottom of the system, in the Lower Lakes, and I do not deny them one iota of the $100 million to be spent there. But I want to know why the people on the Lachlan are not just as important. I want to know why the people at St George are not as important. I want to know why the people on the Macquarie, the Lachlan, the Gwydir and the Namoi are not as important. It is not just about the senator’s own state. It is not just about her own lakes. The New South Wales Irrigators Council put it pretty well in a media statement:

… Minister Penny Wong’s announcement today of the opening of applications for on-farm irrigation efficiency projects in the Southern Murray-Darling Basin.

… Chief Executive Officer Andrew Gregson says that the program design is so flawed as to be effectively useless.

“The Commonwealth provided no advance notice to irrigators as to when application guidelines would be available —and have today announced that applications will close in just six weeks.”

“That’s … ludicrous —and makes us wonder if the program is, in fact, deliberately designed to fail.

“The Commonwealth did not consult with us in designing this program —and appear to have come up with an involved and technical process that is highly unlikely to be given justice within 6 weeks.

The Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Penny Wong, has made only a handful of visits to a few basin communities, and they have been shrouded in more secrecy than a prime ministerial visit to Afghanistan. The Land newspaper’s report on Minister Wong’s latest mission behind enemy lines sums up the extreme contempt the Rudd government holds for our food producers. It says:

Meanwhile, back in the federal sphere, Water and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong’s mania for media control may not stand out much in Canberra, the home of spin, but it was glaringly obvious during her trip to the western Riverina this week. After copping flak from farmers for keeping a low profile in the water drained region, she went on-farm (no media allowed) with a few selected primary producers, mostly gathered from local shire councils. But Wongster went one further than the usual political tricks for avoiding or ignoring unpleasant questions - she specified that all queries be supplied ahead of time for vetting, before deigning to offer scripted answers for those regarded as acceptable. Welcome to open and accountable democracy, folks.

It was pretty much what happened when the Rudd cabinet came to Bathurst. You had to apply to go, and not too many were allowed in. If the Rudd government continues to buy the lifeblood of regional communities without increasing the productive capacity, without investing in the system, be it the transfer system or the on-farm system, there will not be two million people left in the Murray-Darling Basin.

Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010 and related bill here today. As most others seem to have done, I will mention a number of points that I believe are significant in the overall water debate, not just in relation to the buyback issue. I was pleased to hear the member for Calare announce that he has some concerns for the Namoi system. I do share some of his concerns and will relate those concerns, which he may well be interested in, in terms of policy in the future, because I think some work needs to be done, particularly in the Senate, to tidy up some issues that directly impact on the Namoi system.

I recently attended a carbon farming conference in Orange, and I think you may well have been interested in some of the issues there yourself, Madam Deputy Speaker Saffin, given some of the meetings that we have attended. A whole range of issues were debated at that conference, but probably the most striking and common thread in the deliberations that took place was in relation to our landscape management and how we are going to repair some of the damage that has been done in the past. Also discussed was how we are going to wrestle with potentially less rainfall in some areas and more intense rainfall in others, general landscape management and some of the positives that are out there at the moment. I found it an invaluable conference to attend.

One of the things that I was particularly very impressed with was the role that the former Governor-General Michael Jeffrey is taking in relation to redressing some of the landscape issues. He happened to be the guest speaker at the evening function. The former Governor-General is now heading up a task force for what is being referred to as Australia’s water emergency. I probably would not go so far as to call it an absolute emergency. There is an emergency in some areas, which the member for Calare pointed out—in the Lachlan, for instance—but I think the former Governor-General is looking at ways in which we can adopt some of the technologies that are out there now so that in the future we have a better landscape that is more able to handle some of the adverse impacts that it has been wrestling with in recent years.

One of the issues that came up at the conference was how, with the legislation before the House, the newly formed Murray-Darling Basin Authority will have to come to grips with, essentially, a water audit, a water budget and the end of alley caps in extraction and come up with a system that it believes will work long term. One of the terms in the legislation that crops up from time to time, which I do not believe has been defined adequately yet, is ‘interception’—or ‘diversion’. In its simplest form, we would imagine that means that if someone is extracting water from a system outside the legislation it would be deemed to be an interception of water that would in fact have gone to someone else had it not been intercepted. We have the simplistic view that some of that water will eventually flow out of the Murray mouth and cure the long-term ills of the Murray-Darling system. One of the questions that was raised on a number of occasions is: what if interception or diversion impedes some of the newer technologies which actually slow down water flows and put water into the soil? There are various no-till technologies, for instance, and many grazing technologies for greater grass cover et cetera.

Part of the secret in the accumulation of humus and organic matter in the soil is that it allows more moisture in and embraces a better soil-water-carbon relationship, in a sense. Some of the landscape techniques are showing astonishing results. There is one that I intend to visit in the near future, Mulloon Creek, which is under the guidance of a person who many people would know of: Peter Andrews. Are some of the techniques which are being tried to restore the hydrology of particular landscapes going to be considered interceptions in the way in which the Murray-Darling Basin Authority deals with them? I do not know the answer to that. But, in the simplistic way in which the debate has gone, at the end of each valley we are going to have a number, and there will be arrangements within those valleys to account for the amount of water so that, theoretically at least, there will be some water at the end of the system. The buyback arrangements that we are voting the appropriation of today are part of that process. We are buying back water because the government believes that there was too much allocated and that the system is stressed. What system is stressed? That is the question. Is the system that we determined back in the mid-nineties as being the line in the sand in terms of the overallocation issues et cetera the system that is stressed? Or is the system that was there 100 years ago the system that is stressed? Or, if we return some of those landscapes essentially to where they were, and the hydrology and other things are better managed, will that system actually stress the accounting system that we are going to put in place through the Murray-Darling Basin Authority?

Again, I do not know the answers to those questions, but I think we need to at least have the debate because some  farming systems have enormous capacity to slow down volumes of water. We seem to think of interception as building another dam. There are many things that the farm sector—and I am a farmer myself—can do to slow down water. In the carbon debate, the food debate, the soil erosion debate, the salinity debate and the whole range of other environmental debates, they are good things to try in order to slow down the pace of water, reduce soil loss, and other things. So again there is a collision course between a fairly simplistic policy, some sort of water accounting process and a landscape management process, and we really have not decided which way we are going to go on that.

I congratulate those who organised the conference in Orange recently, particularly the former Governor-General and others for displaying leadership in this debate, and I urge all members of parliament and the bureaucracy to look at some of the things that these people are saying. Whether it be in the carbon debate or in the water debate, there is a degree of guilt being expressed by the bureaucracy for their lack of work in the last two or three decades. It was just assumed that soil and water are there, you grow things occasionally, people eat them, there is not much point in getting too excited about it and we will put our research dollars into a whole range of other things—and we have neglected the basics of life.

If one positive has come out of the debate on emissions trading and climate change, in terms of those who want to eat, breathe and drink, it is that the basics of life are fairly significant. I think that not only the scientific community, in particular, but also the political community in terms of their potential to address many of the issues out there have very much ignored the non-city areas. Some of the policies that have come through in the last decade have been fairly simplistic in nature.

Another issue that I want to raise is in relation to the Namoi Valley, and the member for Calare mentioned his concerns about the Namoi Valley. As you would be aware, Madam Deputy Speaker Saffin, the broader Namoi Valley, particularly the Liverpool Plains portion of it, has one of the greatest groundwater systems in Australia. It is part of the Murray-Darling system. We believe, but we do not have the scientific evidence in place, that the groundwater systems actually do relate to the surface water flows within the Namoi system, which eventually flow into the Darling system and part of the Murray system. We do not as yet really understand the science of that water. There was a very good program on Four Corners a few months back that looked at the issue of mining on these alluvial flood plains that are underpinned by these groundwater systems and at the lack of scientific knowledge of the way in which the planning process, which is a state based planning process, actually addresses that issue. There are two applications for mines on the Liverpool Plains, and they will be the first in those sorts of systems in the Murray-Darling system.

In particular, I implore the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and others, particularly the political dimension that is interested in this issue, to have a look at what is going on here. Essentially, we have a state based planning process, which normally oversees the approval of mining plans. A difference has occurred in the last 12 months, and it concerns the Murray-Darling legislation that we passed—the 2008 or the 2007 Water Act that came through here—which gives the Commonwealth a much greater role in the determination of an activity such as mining in an area where it could have an adverse impact either environmentally or in other ways downstream. I would ask the parliament to note very carefully what is happening on that issue. If we leave that matter solely to a state based planning process under part 3A of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act, then that particular planning instrument, in this case, will only look at the localised impacts of the mine. Just picture it for a moment: the top of the Murray-Darling system is the so-called Liverpool Range. About 120 kilometres of catchment along that range funnels to a point in a triangle, some 80 to 100 kilometres away, where it all has to go past all the surface water—and we believe that is mirrored by the groundwater—past a neck about six kilometres wide. Then it spreads out again across these vast flood plains for another 70 or 80 kilometres until it gets to Gunnedah, through to Boggabri, Narrabri, Walgett and eventually into the greater system.

We have absolutely no idea what a longwall mine site will do to the hydrology of that system. We have no real understanding of the connectivity between those groundwater systems and the surface water. And here we are in this place making decisions about the end of valley caps that will accrue to these various valleys when we do not understand the science of what is going on underneath them. On top of that, we have a state based mining minister in New South Wales, who has recently been sacked—and for Premier Rees to have done that, I think, is a positive—who had carriage of agriculture and mining which, to start with, is a bit of a conflict, with income coming from exploration licences from mining. These licences on the Liverpool Plains should never have been granted without the full knowledge of what is going on with those groundwater systems.

In the parliament earlier this year I moved an amendment to the Commonwealth Water Act which provided that, before exploration licences are granted, an independent scientific study is done to find out what is happening with the water and how it relates to the flood plain within the overall ambit of the act. It relates to what the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, Senator Wong and others are attempting to do. That legislation was passed by the coalition and the National Party in this chamber. It went to the Senate, and an amendment was moved by Senator Bob Brown which was supported by the National Party and the Liberal Party. That gave them the numbers in the Senate for that amendment to come back to this place. The very next morning, after the Minerals Council of Australia got to the National Party senators, in particular, they changed their mind, reworked the wording so it duplicated the state based planning process and it has achieved absolutely nothing.

So maybe Senator Brown and others could revisit that amendment again because there is now quite a degree of evidence showing that mining companies consider it an absolute joke. I would just like to spend a little bit of time on that. The then NSW mining minister, Ian Macdonald, who has just been sacked, only a few weeks ago refused to put money into an independent scientific study—which will go ahead, I am certain of that, irrespective of his money. Senator Wong, to her credit, was one of the first at the table in relation to putting money into this study, to actually study the science—$1½ million is on the table. The New South Wales government has said, ‘We’re not interested. We’re not putting any money in there.’ I would suggest that maybe Nathan Rees should have a good look at this matter again because the state does need to be part of this. If we really care about our water assistance, we have to find out what is happening in these various relationships within those systems.

On top of that, I happened to attend one of the Senate committees that met in Gunnedah. The New South Wales Minerals Council’s Director of Environment and Community, Rachelle McDonald, answered a question from Senator Williams when he asked the Minerals Council delegate:

You are familiar that the federal parliament has passed a regulation that before mining can be carried out in that country—

referring to Liverpool Plains—

a fully independent water test must be carried out on those underground aquifers?

On behalf of the Minerals Council—and I think this is the appropriate part because Senator Williams was trying to play himself up as having been part of some amendment in the Senate that actually meant something—Ms Macdonald said:

I do believe that the majority of the NSW regulations actually meet the requirements of what was requested.

She actually stated to a Senate inquiry that the very amendment that the Senate had put in place was just a joke; it had restated part 3A of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act, which is a NSW act, and it is a tragedy that that has occurred.

In terms of the third piece of proof that alludes to how weak that particular amendment has now become—and anybody who has taken the time to get legal opinion on it would know anyway—the Chinese company Shenhua, which has been granted one of these licenses on the Liverpool Plains—the other one being BHP—have said, in answer to questioning, that they will not comply with the federal legislation anyway; it means nothing to them and they are just going to proceed with part 3A of the state act. So we have an absurd situation developing where the New South Wales act used to be in place, but now we have the Murray-Darling Basin Act, and the two are not talking to each other. There needs to be an accounting process that takes into account the lack of science before we allow activities to occur in some of these very sensitive areas, otherwise the damage we do is done to not only the piece of land that they are talking about. I am not against coal mining; I live 800 metres from a coal mine. I am not opposed to coal mines, but I am opposed to potential damage being done before we understand the science of the water within this very delicate system. I think that is further complicated by the potential of climate change to impact on the inflows into that system. (Time expired)

Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak today on the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010 with special reference to both the pink batts program and the water issues. The insulation program—the pink batts program—has been a shemozzle since day one.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Very popular.

Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Very popular indeed with many of the shonks that are out there practising in this industry at the moment. It comes down to a situation where we have the good guys and the bad guys in the insulation industry, and I would like to take my hat off to those good guys who have been around for some time, providing good service to people in their communities. But the unprecedented rush has unfortunately led to some bad guys coming into the industry, people with no qualifications or prior experience. We have seen a flood of imported products into Australia, and Australian producers have had no hope of keeping up with the demand for insulation products, so we have seen much of this stimulus package go directly out the door, to South-East Asia. We have seen an influx of unqualified workmen. I have heard of people having as little as one hour of training, backpackers being sent into people’s ceilings. We have had house fires. Installers have covered up down lights without shielding them, leading to house fires. So really it has been a program out of control.

A number of constituents have contacted me with serious issues regarding the quoting arrangements. One person showed me a quote for the removal of the old insulation, which is clearly contrary to the guidelines of the package—in fact, when they asked for the quote back, it had been altered, removing the line stipulating the old insulation be removed. That was the quote sent to the department. This is not an isolated case at all.

One the other side, I spoke about the good guys—the fellows with the white hats—who have been providing service for years and who have entered into this scheme in good faith. Now, because of mismanagement, we are making another precipitous change to the legislation: $400 has been lopped off the top. This has left suppliers with unfulfillable contracts. Because of the shortage of supplies, they have not been able to complete the contracts before the cut-off date. I have in front of me a letter from one of my contractors, who states he has 140 accepted quotes and outstanding installations booked on the basis of the $1,600 rebate. It is not possible to facilitate all of these by 16 November 2009. Material supply has been problematic and scarce, particularly in the remote locations of Eyre Peninsula. Combined with the current extreme hot weather conditions, the 16 November 2009 cut-off is not practical. This particular company has spent more than $20,000 in printed literature, website content, vehicle signage, TV commercials and partnerships with third parties that made representations for the $1,600 rebate in accordance with the government eligibility criteria. In the letter he says:

We have promoted our home insulation services in the $1,600 rebate to a significant number of customers in the belief that, should they meet the government’s eligibility criteria, they will then be entitled to a rebate of up to $1,600 as per the energy efficient homes program.

The Trade Practices Act requires these traders to ensure that reasonable quantities of goods are available for a reasonable period of time and price, if the goods are advertised on sale. It makes no difference whether the business had intended to mislead or deceive the consumer; it is how the conduct of the business affected the consumer—their thoughts and beliefs—that matters. This is not the only contact I have. Another company that has over 200 outstanding contracts are wondering what their legal position is. Are they going to wear losses? Are they going to be compelled to complete these contracts? It is just a sign of the absolute mismanagement of the contract from day one forward.

I turn my attention to the issues of water and the failures of water policy throughout Australia by this government. My electorate does not border the Murray, even though it goes very close, but it is largely supplied by Murray water. Murray water feeds the cities of Port Pirie, Port Augusta and Whyalla and certainly most of my electorate to the east of Spencer Gulf, so we have a great interest in the way the Murray is managed. It is with some bemusement that we remember how the premiers and the Prime Minister gathered to make the grand announcement about national control of the Murray. It reminded me a little of Chamberlain’s presentation after he went to prewar Germany and pronounced, ‘Peace in our time.’ It was a great breakthrough, this national management of the Murray! Why then, if it is such a wonderful arrangement that is working so well, is the South Australian government taking the Victorian government to court over the matter of water trading? It would appear that this wonderful national management is in fact highly deficient. We have national management on the never-never.

That brings me to specific issues. In particular, if we are looking at water policy, the city of Port Pirie had proposed—along with the operators of the lead smelter in Port Pirie, Nyrstar—a water-recycling project which would have made an extra 1.3 gigalitres of water available and almost removed Nyrstar, as a major drawer on the Murray, as a consumer. In the lead-up to the last election, the coalition made a commitment to put $5 million into the project. Of course, it became an electoral issue in my electorate. In the period leading up to the election, the now Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, Minister Albanese, actually made a commitment on local radio that, if elected, he would give the government’s most urgent attention to the water-recycling program in Port Pirie. He was recently on local radio again, and I rang up and asked the question: when were we expecting this urgent attention? To my great surprise, he chose to evade the question altogether and not give an answer. You would not want to be on the slow list if that is the urgent list. Two years on, it still has not received any attention at all.

Just to give you a little background, I refer to a speech I gave earlier on this issue. Port Pirie has a long history in the lead- and zinc-smelting industry and has had a historical problem with blood lead levels in children. As I said:

The current operator of the Port Pirie smelter, Nyrstar, is fully committed to its ten by 10 clean-up program, which aims to have the blood lead levels of 95 per cent of the children under five in Port Pirie below 10 milligrams per decilitre by 2010. Nyrstar’s commitment to this goal has seen the company invest $56 million towards the project, some $12 million in the local community. However, the company has made it clear that it must have the tools to do the job. The overriding issue to achieve this aim is the availability of an adequate water supply.

Lead is transferred in the environment as dust, and the most important element in any dust abatement scheme is water. The greening of Port Pirie cannot continue without adequate supplies of water. At the moment one would have to assume that without significant action the city is more likely to face tightening water restrictions, not an increased supply. Port Pirie is currently 100 per cent reliant on the River Murray. The Port Pirie Regional Council and the Southern Flinders Ranges Regional Development Board, in conjunction with Nyrstar, have proposed a water-recycling project aimed at capturing the city’s two effluent streams, industrial and household, and returning 70 per cent of this water for reuse. This will produce 1,349 megalitres per annum.

I once again ask Minister Albanese to come back to the commitment that he made in November 2007 and have an urgent look at this project.

Another issue that I would like to bring up in conjunction with government water policy is the highly successful Community Water Grants program run under the previous government, which supported small communities in their efforts to capture and save water. This program was an enormous success. Just off the top of my head, I can name a couple of projects. At Arno Bay, in my electorate, where they have captured all the water off the local silos, they have lined dams with covers on them and now water all the playing surfaces in the town—the bowling green and the football oval—with that water. There is a similar situation in Kadina, where, on a council sponsored scheme, they have lined dams with covers. We have seen bowling clubs replace their turf surfaces with synthetics which leads to great savings in water.

We now have the government’s program. Basically, if you do not have $4 million, do not apply. I cannot really believe the government intended to do this—to knock off a scheme that elicits so much community support, where people are prepared to produce so much more for the money because they will give in-kind support to their communities and their local clubs and where, for $50,000, you may well get a $200,000 project in the community. I ask the water minister to go back and have another look at that program and see if they can design something similar to support these small communities again, because, in the end, if they are drawing water off the Murray, it does not matter where you save the water; it will have the same effect. It will leave more water in the Murray.

This is an appropriations bill, and many of those programs that I have talked about—in particular, the insulation program—lead you to wonder whether the government have the ability to manage the programs that they are currently implementing. I believe we have gone past $100 billion worth of net borrowing. On latest estimates, we are heading for $170 billion of net borrowing, and at this stage we still do not even have the $43 billion committed to the National Broadband Network factored into that, so there is a quite high possibility of passing $200 billion of debt.

That brings me to some of the programs which are falling off the rails in a bad way. There is the Building the Education Revolution funding, which no doubt schools have been welcoming. Who wouldn’t welcome money being thrown in their direction? We have seen an inflation factor of 30 to 50 per cent in the building of those facilities. We have 30 per cent loading for upcountry installation in my electorate. We have local communities accepting buildings that they do not really want and tearing down buildings they did not want to tear down just to make sure they fall in line with the government’s commitment and get the money, which in the end they will have to pay back because they are taxpayers like the rest of us and they will be responsible for the debt. They are accepting these projects with a gun at their head.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You didn’t have to apply.

Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Of course, they did not have to apply. Looking gift-horses in the mouth, though, is not something any of us can afford to do. I explained to the school communities that they should try to get their share because they will certainly get their share of the debt and it is unlikely that any amount of money will be coming to schools again in the near future because we will be so far in debt for so long a while paying off this round.

It comes back to the question: are we getting value for money? When we have seen the blow-out in the BER, the $900 cheques and the pink batts program—and I can do sums on the back of an envelope that will show you that the National Broadband Network will not stack up—are we getting value for money? The government has signalled it is going to put $43 billion into this. I pointed out to the House in a speech that in Finland, where 40 per cent of houses have 100 megabytes per second available, the take-up rate is 1.5 per cent and in Singapore, where 100 megabytes is available to 100 per cent of households, the take-up rate is one per cent. People are not prepared to pay 2½ or 3½ times the price of a monthly service so they can have 100 megabytes. They would prefer to have 10 megabytes for a cheaper rate.

What is the government’s answer to this? The answer is the compulsory takeover of Telstra. There is no other way of reading the act—it is the compulsory takeover of Telstra.

Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The honourable member for Grey might like to return to home insulation.

Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I can return to home insulation, but these are appropriations bills. I think even you, Madam Deputy Speaker, would rule it fair that mismanagement of government programs in other areas actually limits their ability to present on water and insulation programs. In effect, the mismanagement is impacting on those schemes that I started on. But I can wind up my speech on this matter and return to insulation.

We do have a shemozzle on our hands, as I said at the outset. It would appear that the minister has not paid enough attention to the design of the program and now is having to make changes, and those changes will severely disadvantage the good installers, who were there all along, and place them in a position where they may be liable to complete jobs that they will lose money on. That is a great concern to me and a great concern to them, and I bring their concerns to this chamber.

Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Justice and Customs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to make some comments on the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010 and the Appropriation (Water Entitlements) Bill 2009-2010. These programs have both been mismanaged by the government. I would like to address my remarks to the detail of that mismanagement and how it has played out in my electorate of Farrer. First, I will deal with the home insulation assistance package. I would like to quote a letter from John Simpson from Broken Hill. He is a registered installer under this program. He has become enormously frustrated by the changes that the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts has made that are unwarranted and particularly bad for rural constituents.

Mr Simpson wrote to me that he has had the communication that has changed the rules of how the home insulation package will work. Following that, he spent a whole night folding and addressing envelopes to 350 people on his quotation register. He mailed them out the next day to alert them to the changes. He said:

On 1/11/09 Mr. Garrett has changed the rules regarding these home insulation rebates.

Where a consumer was once eligible for assistance up to $1,600.00 that assistance has now suddenly been reduced to $1,200.00.

According to my latest email from Dept Env. the transitional arrangements for our consumers/customers who have accepted their quote prior to Nov 2/2009 will have until 16/11/09 to have their insulation installed or forfeit $400.00 of their rebate.

I have approximately 300 people who have loyally stood by me as their reputable installer, and believed/trusted me when I have told them to the best of my knowledge that the status quo will remain and as long as they are registered by me supplying them with a quote and them accepting that quote their home will be insulated according to what has been quoted.

My source for these comments is the Department for The Environment installers and consumers hot lines.

In October we received two deliveries of insulation product which enabled us to install to eight properties. The people that were lucky enough to have the installation completed were the next chronologically in our quotation book who would accept the drastically increased cost of the insulation. We have been given two weeks to stand by our Governments promises for the installation of insulation for the customers that believed they were getting a $1,600.00 rebate. An example of how this creates a major imbalance for us as installers is during the first week of July I inspected and quoted approximately 50 new insulation jobs that were accepted. That situation continued for about 3 more weeks then began to slow down a bit. Based on the price I was quoting at then about 95% of these properties were under the $1,600.00 rebate so word travelled like fire as it does in a regional community, and I had to hire someone to help me keep up with the demand to get our inspections and quotes done to satisfy consumer demand.

You would think that the rebate is working the way it is supposed to: people are getting their homes insulated and local businesses are getting a stimulus. My constituent said:

This means for the month of July & August I submitted and had accepted approximately 250 quotes. All of these people believed me, and so subsequently their Government, that they would be getting as assistance only enough money to have their home insulated.

Today they have to accept whether they like it or not that they now have to have their quotes not worth the paper they are written on, and that they will lose 25% of their rebate simply because they live in a regional area and cannot be supplied materials let alone at a reasonable rate.

The government authors of the program do not understand that you cannot provide materials in a town like Broken Hill at the same price as you can on the eastern seaboard. The letter continues:

What should have happened is that the coastal city people should have had their rebates reduced to $900.00 and regional Australians get a special exemption to apply for additional assistance to an amount of say $2,000.00 subject to their remoteness. This would have put the money where most of the increases have occurred and keep our precious tax money working to the maximum benefit of the majority of the population.

What is really annoying me—

says Mr Simpson—

is that to stimulate the Australian economy my east coast contemporaries are buying CHINESE product by the millions of dollars worth, and our Australian manufacturers are languishing behind because understandably they couldn’t put their expansion process in place in time, and if they had the money [it] would have been lost because the Government have and are causing a massive slow down and lack of confidence.

… how can I explain to the 300 people that have trusted me and their Government that they will lose 25% of their rebate, and have to find an additional 36% above their quoted price because the rules have changed and I can’t get stock at a reasonable price.

I could not have put it better myself, which is why I have included Mr Simpson’s comments in my remarks today. And there is another aspect to this: if you run a small business in a small town, you take very seriously the trust and the faith placed in you by the people who you meet down the street, who you play sport with and whose children your children go to school with. That trust and faith underpin your business. To have to turn around and say, ‘I’m sorry the rules have changed; I can’t do anything about it; like it or lump it,’ is a double whammy for somebody who takes their customers seriously and works very hard on their behalf.

The second part of this appropriation bill deals with water. I was in Hay on the weekend celebrating with that town their 150th anniversary, and it was a fantastic event. I think the events are going over three weeks. I watched the parade come past in what was probably 42 degree heat. It was certainly very warm for those involved. But every single float put in maximum effort, and it was fabulous. But Hay has been badly hurt by this government’s water buyback.

The opposition leader came down to Berrigan, a town not very far from Hay, a few days ago and talked to farmers, irrigators and rural community members about their experiences of this current buyback. The consistent message that we received was that, because the Minister for Climate Change and Water has approached this in a haphazard and ad hoc way, there is no planning relating to the buyback. So what farmers say to me is, ‘If the government had said, “We would like to acquire X gigalitres of water, because that is our policy and we believe we have important wetlands to water, but we will come to you as communities and ask you for a plan of how we might best recover that water,” then that would have been the way to go about it.’

Instead, what this government has done is ignore the structures that have been set in place to manage irrigation processes, the irrigation companies and small trusts—some are looking after only a handful of small irrigators—and ignore the architecture and the structure of water delivery and has gone straight to the farmers via an offer which essentially says: ‘We, the Australian government, would like to buy your water, and you may put in a tender price and we might buy your water.’ I will leave aside the extraordinary difficulties of the way that that tender process worked, which involved farmers having to second-guess where the government was coming from and being told, ‘The price that you have suggested is too high; if you go a bit lower we might take it,’ though that in itself was disastrous. Leaving the process aside, the effect is as follows.

Take an irrigation system or a company. Some of the farmers that are scattered throughout the channel delivery systems of such a corporation might, for example, want to sell their water, and others might not. The government, in purchasing that water, has no idea of the location, the delivery, the cost and the mechanism of transmission or the overall effect on the community. So we have what is commonly called the Swiss-cheese effect: some channels have sold their water; some channels have not; some people are left stranded at the ends of channels, and expensive water-delivery mechanisms have to be continued in order to get a small amount of water to travel a large distance to look after their interests.

If only the government had started from the premise of: ‘Let’s plan this. Let’s work out how we can cut off certain areas, or encourage people in a district to move out of irrigated agriculture’—and these would be the more marginal and difficult areas—‘then, if we take that approach, we can buy the same amount of water, own the same amount of water, under our current policy, but do it in a way that ensures the survival and the sustainability of rural communities and farmers and, of course, food production’—which is, as we know, the very basis of all of this; it is about producing food. So that was the message that we received and that I continue to receive as a local member for irrigated agriculture districts: that it is most unfortunate that the government has gone about its water buyback without a plan.

Not far from Hay is the Lachlan River. I have spoken in the House before about a decision, which was probably inevitable, to cut off the lower Lachlan at Condobolin, given the drastically low levels of water in Wyangala Dam, and my colleague the member for Parkes spoke very well about this earlier today. We are now finding some assistance being provided to the town of Booligal, which is good, and some bores being put in for the small communities along the lower Lachlan. But there is nothing for farmers who may have relied on that water for stock and domestic purposes. I would ask the government and the minister for agriculture to seriously consider introducing an emergency stock and domestic water grant for those who are completely stranded at the moment. We recognise that the lower section of the river has to lose out to save the water that would essentially be lost in being transmitted that great distance anyway. They have accepted that and recognise their role in that, but what they need is an emergency stock and domestic water grant that would enable them to have some government funding to, say, put in a bore for stock and domestic purposes. Otherwise, they do not know how they are going to get through the next few months. I am in communication with the minister for agriculture’s office, and such a grant is what I am very hopeful that he and his department will seriously consider.

It is similar to the irrigation grant that the previous government had, but in this case it is not aimed necessarily at irrigators but at people who rely on the channel and the river for their stock and domestic water. If you visit those areas you will see how people have had to lose their gardens, they have lost their access to watering points for their stock—and that often means they have to move their stock away—and they are facing three or four months of the sort of heat that we are experiencing out there today. I do not think it is too much for government to step forward with a very modest water grant, which would probably have to be matched by the farmer. It would work well to alleviate this great stress.

Irrigators are asking the New South Wales government for help with fair fixed charges. They are making the point that, in the Lachlan, the New South Wales government has waived fixed water charges. We thank them for that, but there are irrigators all over the state who are paying for fixed water charges when they are not actually receiving any water. As one farmer said, ‘Well, the government wouldn’t expect people in the cities to pay their water bill and only get some or none of what they paid for.’ The Murray Valley currently has an allocation of 10 per cent after being on zero allocations for several years. But during all of those years farmers were required to pay for the fixed cost of maintaining infrastructure. It comes back to my point: if the government water buyback was done according to a plan, we could probably downsize that irrigation infrastructure, but we cannot.

Facing farmers in the Murray Valley is the Basin Plan, which the minister talks about continually. We are quite anxious about what this plan, which is being developed in consultation with the CSIRO, will mean for local farmers because it will set limits. I make the point that, while we as a previous government initiated this planning process, I believe that we would have taken the contributions made by the CSIRO as advice and an input into government policy. I am certainly quite fearful that the present government will take that advice as gospel and it will involve a sudden and dramatic limiting of water allocations for farmers—again, with no planning process in place. It is coming up again in, I think, 2013. There are mega-millions of dollars that have been allocated to this process, so one would hope that it is thorough. But at no stage have I been assured that the perspective of food production, farmers, rural communities and sustainable rural communities will have any input into that plan or will be considered. It is purely about determining a limit on extractions from the southern Murray-Darling Basin. While we appreciate the need for those environmental planning processes to go ahead, it is very important that it is done in conjunction with input from the rural communities.

What we constantly see from Canberra and the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts is a very poor level of understanding about how water policy affects local people. I think one of the problems—maybe it is the budget—is that it prevents those who manage this environmental water from actually travelling to regions and seeing for themselves. You do not even have to actually talk to a single farmer if you do not want to, but you do have to take an engineer with you or somebody who can explain to you—and a very good map—how these river systems work. If that had happened, for example, with the water buyback purchase in the Lachlan, we would not have seen $500,000 being spent on water to return to the Murray when we know that the Lachlan almost never reaches the Murrumbidgee and, as a consequence, reaches the Murray. So while members of the government were trumpeting this as a great result for the Lower Lakes and a great result for South Australia, it was actually technically infeasible. I would therefore encourage those who have responsibility for water in the government to send out people from Canberra to make it their business to understand how the rivers run in western New South Wales.

It is not the tradition of the opposition to block bills that deal with supply. So, in spite of having very serious reservations about the purpose of these appropriations, we of course in the opposition make our remarks and will not block the bill. I thank the House.

Kay Hull (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010. I want to focus on the issue of water as I come from the Riverina, which is a highly irrigated area and a highly successful area. I want to commence my contribution today by reading from the Coleambally Observer dated Wednesday, 25 February 2009—an article which commences:

The Federal Government’s $2 billion water buyback scheme is a taxpayer-funded “tsunami” that threatens to wash away jobs and clause in the terrible damage to local farming communities, according to the Riverina and Murray Regional Organisation of Councils (RAMROC).

RAMROC have pretty much got it right. I have the letter that RAMROC sent to the Prime Minister of this country, dated 1 July 2008, in which they succinctly put the problem. I am going to quote from this letter to the Prime Minister from the chair of RAMROC because something has got to twig the conscience of the government on this issue. Rather than me constantly standing in the House and appealing for common sense for the electorate I represent—and other electorates, of course—I will talk to this letter. I am going to quote from this letter substantially. The letter is, as I said, dated 1 July 2008 to the Prime Minister:

Dear Prime Minister,

Murray Darling Basin —Water for the Future Program and Acquisition of Irrigation Water Entitlements - COAG Meeting Thursday 31rd July 2008

It was a major concern at that time. The reason I raise this is that nothing has changed. The concerns that were outlined in this correspondence were:

• The buyback program currently is not substantiated by any detailed business planning, milestones, benchmarks or performance measures;
• There has been virtually nil consultation with irrigators, councils and affected communities;
• There seems to be no scientific justification of how much water actually needs to be acquired for environmental purposes.

That is still a fact. The letter continues:

The Living Murray programs initially targeted 500 GL as being sufficient to meet environmental demands, but these have now advanced to an estimated 1500GL, with recent indications from environmental groups suggesting that up to 3,000 GL may be required;

• Furthermore, Government officers can give no indication of how much water needs to be acquired from the various irrigation areas throughout the MDB system. Surely these are the basic and fundamental starting points to be determined before any further acquisitions are to take place;
• In perspective terms, 3,000 GL is equivalent to the whole of the normal annual diversions in the Murrumbidgee and the NSW side of the Murray;
• If used for rice production, 3,000 GL is equivalent to feeding 53 million people one full rice meal per day each year—a significant impact against the backdrop of world wide food shortages and spiralling food prices
• To transfer 3,000 GL from agricultural production to the environment is estimated to remove $28 billion annually (2.9%) of Australia’s GDP. It could very well decimate irrigated agricultural production in the Murray and Murrumbidgee valleys, with consequent repercussions of business downturn, reduction in employment, stranded assets, loss of critical community services and inevitable population decline;

The letter goes on to say:

• Huge advances have already been made in irrigation efficiency over recent years. Therefore, opportunities for achieving additional water savings for the environment from irrigation infrastructure and operational practices are declining. Unfortunately this has resulted in a stronger focus towards water entitlement acquisitions, but with scant regard for the other non-environmental consequences;

Further, the letter says:

There simply has to be an opportunity provided for honest and transparent scientific debate and comprehensive community consultation and input. Certainly healthy river environments are important, but equally important are the long term sustainability of the nation’s agricultural production, regional development and the future wellbeing of our rural communities.

There needs to be full and detailed studies carried out on the socio economic impacts on communities, including such issues as investment confidence, business sustainability, regional development, loss of employment, stranded irrigation assets, reductions in government and private facilities and services, effects on Australia’s food production capacity vis-a-vis worldwide food shortages and other third party flow on effects.

The letter then says that there needs to be ‘an acceptable balance between the environment, water related agricultural development, regional economies and sustainable prosperous rural communities’ and that we should be looking at ‘alternative options’. As I said, this letter is dated 1 July 2008 and nothing has changed—except another year of pain, heartache and uncertainty for the irrigation entitlement holders in the electorate of Riverina.

I bring to the attention of the House that not one of these irrigators has done anything wrong. John Oxley, when he made his first expedition into the Riverina, said: ‘This is a wild and dusty area. Nothing could be developed here. Nothing could grow here. It is just a wilderness. It is a dry and dusty bowl.’ That was his first impression of the area. He could not wait to get out of there. And then, with the advent of the Snowy hydro scheme, past governments had a vision for this area. The scheme had two purposes: to generate electricity and to ensure agricultural production through the provision of downstream irrigation from the Murrumbidgee River. That ‘dry and dusty bowl’ was converted into one of the greatest areas of food production in Australia and became one of the greatest contributors to Australia’s GDP. It is undoubtedly the food bowl of the nation—but it has been struggling, and it is painful to watch that struggle year after year.

We heard today of the possibility of growers and government both contributing to projects. The idea is that the government would give some money and the growers and the entitlement holders would put in place certain measures. Might I say that the efficiencies gained in the Riverina over the past 12 years have been significant and it is now virtually impossible to get further efficiencies from on-farm use. The Riverina has had the worst 10 years since the forties. The people who remain there are the best of the best in the world. They have created the on-farm irrigation efficiencies and they have received absolutely no credit for it. They have spent billions of dollars, as have the New South Wales and Commonwealth governments, on efficiency programs. There is an investment in regional Australia worth billions and billions of dollars.

Growers and producers who have been in drought year after year have eaten so far into their equity that they will not have enough money to match any federal funding. Federal funding must not be tied to matching funds. If federal funding is on a dollar-for-dollar basis, if there has to be matching funding from growers, restructure and modernisation simply cannot happen. The pain that these growers have endured must be recognised. Growers need to give themselves a future, and that future is to produce food that will feed a starving world.

Hundreds and thousands of orange trees and fruit frees have been pulled out of the ground in my electorate. I have vineyards whose water has been cut off. We have planted rice this year—for the first year in four or five years—and maybe we will get 174,000 tonnes. Rice is a sensational crop. It uses water only when water is available, but from the Riverina alone it feeds over 40 million people a day. Rice is a crop which has been badly maligned; instead, it should be recognised for the contribution it makes. I support what the chair of RAMROC said. They have implemented a water for food program, a sensational program. They have got off their collective behinds and are doing something constructive to try to convince the government that the production of food is very important.

I turn now to ‘Secure Future for Food’, a presentation made by Professor Bill Bellotti, the Vincent Fairfax Chair in Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development at the University of Western Sydney. In that presentation, Professor Bellottie said rural communities are at breaking point, irrigation communities are without water and there is an issue with food security. He talked about the estimated population shifts in rural and urban regions—the massive growth in urban population and the decline in rural population. He talked about how greater urbanisation will increase global trade in basic food commodities. He also talked about future food production imperatives—as outlined in a CSIRO report in 2009. Some weeks ago, I attended a dinner in the Speaker’s Office with the head of CSIRO, who said the challenge to produce enough food will be greater over the next 50 years than in all human history. The fact is that that is the case, but what are we doing about securing food for the future?

Professor Bellotti talked about Australia’s role in global food security. Australian farmers feed 60 million people. We export up to 80 per cent of what we produce. We also export agricultural technology and know-how—farming in variable climates, in fragile and infertile soils, and science and practice partnerships. Professor Bellotti said food security was about the ability of individuals, households and communities to acquire appropriate and nutritious food on a regular and reliable basis using socially acceptable means. Food security is determined by the food supply in a community and whether people have adequate resources and skills to acquire and access that food. Professor Bellotti talked about the breakdown of people who are without food. He said the average Australian daily energy intake is 3,150 calories per capita per day and the main sources—wheat, sugar, milk and meat—make up to 50 per cent of the total. He said the proportion of our food energy which is produced in the Sydney basin is only 3.5 per cent of our average good energy consumption.

Basically we have an urban/rural divide. The city depends on rural communities for its very survival. There is no city without the country—and that is the appeal. It is the truth of the matter. Leadership is not being shown. There is no socioeconomic review done on the effects on communities. School teachers are now leaving all of my communities. The number of students entering our rural and regional schools is dropping massively simply because we are now the most marginalised people. I cannot just sit in this House and watch as more and more of our lifestyle and more and more of the nation’s opportunity to produce food, not only for this nation but for our Asia-Pacific nations and for the world in general, is eroded away by buybacks which simply have no basis to them. I cannot just sit here without answers to the questions posed by the Chair of RAMROC in his correspondence to the Prime Minister wherein he asked specific questions and leading questions—the most obvious and reasonable questions. I simply cannot support this appropriation legislation and abide by the determinations being made by the Minister for Climate Change and Water at this point. I urge her to reconsider and to understand the issues of rural communities and the world’s need for food.

Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Support) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank all members of the House for their contribution to the debate on this legislation. The Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010 is required to provide urgent funding to continue rebate payments made through the home insulation program. This bill is in response to the current uptake rate for the home insulation program and confirms the success of one of the government’s stimulus package measures in supporting jobs in the manufacturing industry, in installer job creation and in associated logistics. More than 500,000 Australian households have already installed ceiling insulation, putting them on a path to reductions of up to 40 per cent in their heating and cooling costs. This bill also provides funding associated with the acceleration of the water buybacks within the Murray-Darling Basin system that are addressed in the Appropriation (Water Entitlements) Bill 2009-2010.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.