Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, Senator Heffernan, the Murrumbidgee is your patch, and I know you take very good care of it. My job is the upper catchment in Victoria. It is great that our recommendation there calls for an adaptive management approach where we look at not only climate change and coal seam gas mining et cetera but also the positive and negative effects of overwatering, which is sometimes underspoken about.

Recommendation 8, where we look at the research and projects on water recovery, recommends that the research should also include socioeconomic impacts to irrigation communities of increased levels of buyback. We all know personally that anyone who lives in the basin or cares about regional Australia has seen firsthand the impact of those non-strategic buybacks early in the process. We would hate to see that sort of irresponsible behaviour continue, and we hope that it does not.

Finally, recommendation 16, where we look at socioeconomic modelling on local impacts of the Basin Plan, recommends that a strong focus on the communities likely to be most affected and strategies to address the impacts should be developed. The modelling should also include tabular or graphical data depicting the location and volumes of buyback on an irrigation district basis. Sometimes, when we take the bird's eye view of things and when we take a one-size-fits-all policy view we miss out the fact that that community and their one little milk processor or their other industries attached to the local agricultural productive capacity shut down. That means more than just farmers leaving communities; it means entire communities shutting down and the long-term, devastating effects that that can have. I commend this report; it is a quality piece of work and it is comprehensive. Well done to the committee secretariat, the chair and all those in the basin communities who gave us evidence.