Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, their constituents. It is: ‘We don’t want to upset them so we’ll do it as a last resort.’ So we are going back to Mr McGauran’s approach where we buy out as a last resort; we only buy that little bit of water we can get from water savings.

We come to the impact of the water holdings of the large corporate buyers who have been very strongly in the market buying up megalitres of water. I am told of one corporate entity that has at least 50,000 megalitres. Another one, I am told, potentially has 60,000 megalitres. Obviously, these allocations and entitlements were bought up for managed investment schemes and, since the ground has changed, they are now holding significant amounts of water. Are they going to be expecting the government to bail them out with the $3 billion or are they going to try to transfer that water use from less-secure water holdings to high-security water holdings, again distorting the water market? Because they have been such major players in the water market, they have actually significantly increased the cost of water, making it even harder for government to buy out, to deal with the overallocation, and for this plan to be effective. There is clearly a need to review how that is going to occur and how they are going to make the allocation decisions.

We come to the issue of how the whole plan is going to work in the first place when you consider that the Commonwealth government is taking control of water-making decisions from the states. But you cannot separate water management from natural resource management. Anybody doing NRM 101 knows that. In NRM 101, one of the first things that I did at uni was to look at catchment management and water management. If you are going to do water allocations and water management, you have to be getting involved in natural resource management. So does that mean the Commonwealth are going to start making decisions on locations of plantations, land use management plans, farm dams and clearing? There is the dreaded word ‘clearing’. Clearing has an absolutely immediate impact on water run-off, groundwater and salinity, not to mention biodiversity loss. Then you get to the tricky issues of illegal drainage. Are they going to turn a blind eye like the states have been doing? For example, in New South Wales you get environmental flows made to Ramsar-listed wetlands and the water does not even make it to the wetlands because people are so busy draining that water off, yet no action is taken. I hope the Commonwealth is going to start dealing seriously with those issues, but that is yet to be outlined. How is natural resource management going to be coordinated with water management decisions? That is not clear, and I do not think the Commonwealth has come to terms with the level of decision making that is going to be involved. It is likely, I understand, that the Commonwealth will be getting laws referred to them, but then they will be delegating to the states to make decisions. I think that is making decision making even more complex.

We come back to the issue of the CSIRO doing their assessment of catchments in order to start setting more realistic caps and deciding on overallocation. They have been given an extremely short time frame in which to make this decision. As we all know, the decision to involve the CSIRO in doing this work was made after the water summit—or the Melbourne Cup water summit, as it is commonly known—and they have been given until the end of this year to do it. It is an extremely complex area. I would suggest that the only work that they could get done in that time would be collation of the data, because that in itself is a very significant process. So how are the decisions going to be made—and by whom—on the actual data that is provided as to what is sustainable and what is not? What is a sustainable yield? How are those decisions going to be made? How will that translate into decisions made about the caps and then the caps together? What is a sustainable flow? What is an environmental flow for the Murray? That information is not clear. Of course, it will significantly impact on the outcomes and the success of the national water plan.

These issues are highly significant ones. Not one of them has been subjected to any review or scrutiny. I put to you that these issues are vital and that they need to be reviewed, particularly in the context of climate change, and that, because there is so little work being done on the impacts of climate change on our agriculture and on the interaction between our water resources and climate change, the Senate should undertake this type of review. It should look at the effectiveness of the current work being done. It should look at the effectiveness of the national water plan to deliver outcomes. Because of its rushed nature, these issues have not been adequately considered. There has not been time to adequately consider them. It was also reported during estimates that appropriate experts have not been consulted. So when will they be consulted? It is better being done up front now, while the plan is still in development—which is obviously what is happening—than in a couple of years when we have to restructure things because they got it wrong. It is time to it do now.