Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I will take that interjection by the minister. Apparently Barnaby Joyce has no friends. Well, he is going to have a lot of friends very soon—$11 billion worth of friends.

The CHAIRMAN: Order! Senator Hanson-Young, can you refer to senators by their correct title and, minister, no further interjecting.

Senator Joyce is going to make a lot of people in the upstream states very, very happy. Eleven billion dollars will be bankrolled out to big irrigators for buying back water that they greedily took when they should not have had access to it in the first place—$11 billion of Australian taxpayers' money.

Let us look at some of the reaction from those irrigators who have participated in the buyback programs in the past. There was a survey and report done by the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities in relation to sellers of water entitlements, called Restoring the Balance in the Murray-Darling Basin Program. Some of the responses of people who have already participated in water buybacks under that program were: 80 per cent of irrigators surveyed said the decision to sell water had been positive for them, including 30 per cent who said the decision had been 'very positive'. This is not doomsday, as the coalition would like to make out. Most of the 158 irrigators who sold their water and exited farming are now working in other employment in that same region—51 per cent are still working in the region—and 35 per cent have retired in that region, so they are still contributing the money they got to that local community.

Half of the irrigators who sold part of their water entitlement continued farming. So, after selling their water, they are able to continue farming, and they have said it has had no consequences for farm production. Around 30 per cent of irrigators surveyed who had sold all their water on entitlement and continued on the farm said that selling had had no impact on their ability to continue production. Around half of all irrigators who sold water to the Commonwealth did so because they believed they received a higher price for that than they would get selling their water on the market. It is a pretty good deal. It is also the best bang for the buck for the Australian taxpayer.

The coalition does not give a damn about spending $11 billion and not even getting the environmental outcomes that this plan is meant to achieve. What happens in five years when we are back in drought? We have already spent $11 billion not returning enough water to the river.

What then? When the impacts of climate change start biting in the southern basin and the water quality north of Adelaide is too salty to feed stock, let alone use domestically—what then? How are we going to get back the water that we need when we have just spent $11 billion not returning enough water but bankrolling Senator Joyce's mates?