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

We should be celebrating in northern Victoria. The drought, the worse in living memory, is over. The floods have receded. We do not have any plagues of anything currently. We have just had the second $1 billion for irrigation system renewal announced. We are assured by every expert that the global food task needs to double. We should be rejoicing. In fact, most people across northern Victoria, particularly across the irrigation system called Goulburn-Murray, are in deadly fear for their futures. Because farm debts went through the roof during the drought, every dollar counts. Every farm is on a knife's edge. Every farmer has to ensure that there is absolutely no unwarranted expenditure. Every dollar must give them good value.

The trouble is, the Goulburn-Murray Water Authority is in chaos. It is the last of Australia's state owned bureaucracies running a water supply system. They are totally incompetent. They have over 700 employees where the equivalent in New South Wales, a farmer owned cooperative, has only some 150 to 200. They have debts each year that the Auditor-General in Victoria has said are unsustainable. Those debts were over $53 million last year. The Goulburn-Murray Water Authority is trying to claw back these debts by putting up irrigator costs, charges and fees at unsustainable rates. Over 90 per cent of the fees and charges now inflicted on farmers are fixed charges. Over 1,000 irrigators this year have not been able to pay their fees from last year. The system maintenance is in chaos.

And then we have the so-called Food Bowl Modernisation Project. This came about as a result of a need to justify the pipeline to Melbourne, which was shut down by the coalition government as soon as it got into office. This Food Bowl Modernisation Project should be brilliant. It should be amazing. It should set us up with a world best irrigation system. In fact, it is non-strategic. It is about dividing and conquering irrigators, who are being pitted one against another. It is not backed at all by good engineering. It is about collapsing the irrigation system by at least 60 per cent in order to relieve Goulburn-Murray Water of its own management task so that somehow it might survive.

This is the most dreadful situation. I am calling on the Victorian government and the minister, Peter Walsh, to look at the alternative of an irrigator owned cooperative such as we have in New South Wales and Western Australia—in fact, in every other part of Australia where we have an irrigation system. This is our only hope. It will be a good result; a good solution. Without it, we are going to lose an irrigation area which is and has been the food bowl of Australia. There is no other alternative for us. Goulburn-Murray Water's CEO has resigned. We know that the board has been sacked and replaced. That is not sufficient. (Time expired)