Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was visited yesterday by Ric Bull and Sara Hourigan, from Water for Rivers, which is delivering water savings with community, commercial and environmental benefits. Unfortunately, Water for Rivers is now winding up. It is a public company established in 2003 by the Australian, New South Wales and Victorian governments with the objective of recovering water, principally through water savings projects in those aforementioned states.

Underpinning each of these projects was the goal of leaving a regional legacy of water use efficiency and increased agricultural productivity, and they have achieved much. Water savings targets set for Water for Rivers have been exceeded by a full 11 per cent, or a total of 313 gigalitres of water saved, all within the anticipated time frame and within budget. Eighty per cent of water recovered by Water for Rivers has been through regional projects and investments. As a result, there is now an acknowledged legacy of infrastructure capable of improving the sustainability of regional farms and communities in the context of a future with less water.

Water for Rivers projects have yielded an average recovery cost of water of about $1,400 per megalitre, a figure on par with and in some cases under that of direct water purchase costs. Smarter use of water using real-time technology, epitomised by the Murrumbidgee Computer Aided River Management project, can ultimately and will ultimately deliver better solutions and outcomes for the Murray-Darling Basin, with environmental watering targets met sustainably rather than through water purchase alone. We know that unfortunately, for every $5 the Labor government has spent on water buybacks, it has only spent a dollar on water savings infrastructure, and shame on it for that.

In February 2011, the Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities, Tony Burke, said that the government would move to change current taxation arrangements—they were current at the time and they still are, unfortunately—for irrigators who took up water efficiency investment grants to allow more strategic infrastructure investment. I have taken this up with the Minister for Regional Australia, Regional Development and Local Government, and I know that that particular piece of legislation, that amendment that is so desperately needed, is at the moment being debated and still being worked through, but it is more than two years on and it really needs to happen. The irrigators desperately, desperately need it. Certainly in my area at the moment we are seeing the effects of environmental water flows: inundation levels which residents say will cause man-made flooding, cut off access to their land and cause infrastructure damage.

This is not needed. We could have and should have had good water policy. I am glad that the coalition in government will cap buybacks at 1,500 gigalitres. With the recovery already done, that will only mean 249 more gigalitres. We need better water policy and we need it now. (Time expired)