Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

$303 million worth of water licences, I think, to Senator Wong. You only get one Senator Wong in your lifetime, and Kahlbetzer has certainly made every post a winner on that deal—$303 million worth of water licences were bought by the Commonwealth government and he took off to Africa and bought massive amounts of farms and water licences there, and we were left with effectively just air. I cannot remember—I stand to be corrected—but I think that $303 million bought 109 gigalitres of water. If I were over next to Senator Nash in the chamber, I could ask the departmental adviser. But 109 gigalitres works out at about $3,000 a megalitre—about 50 per cent higher than the usual average going rate for water. It was a great deal for one of those parties, and it was not the Commonwealth government; it was the Australian taxpayer, unfortunately. Those are the options available to irrigators. They have that flexibility after they sell their licences, and good luck to them.

But there are other people who do not have that option; they do not have that flexibility. When water is bought out of a small town and economic activity falls, the people who own the motel, the tyre shop, the newsagency, the bakery or the service station do not have any water licences—they do not get any bailout from the Commonwealth government—but their turnover and their revenue definitely fall. Their businesses are definitely affected. That has been an unfortunate consequence of the Basin Plan, but we want to limit that unfortunate consequence.

Just last year I was up in St George—I was there a few months ago as well. Last year I particularly went to speak to people in St George, a country town in south-western Queensland that relies heavily on irrigated agriculture. A big water licence was bought near a smaller town close to St George called Dirranbandi. That has had a terrible effect on the town. Agricultural consultants have had to leave because there is no more business for them. The wider business community has been affected, and it is causing quite a bit of harm.

The problem for St George is that there is still a lot of work to do. Under the Basin Plan, St George is slated to have its water use reduced by around 100 gigalitres. I should say that this is for the wider Condamine-Balonne region, but, under the current proposal, most of it will come from the St George area. Then there is potentially a common pool amount which would possibly amount to around 50 gigalitres from the area, depending on the review that will be done over the next year. So they are facing a 150 gigalitre reduction. It is about a 50 per cent reduction in water use in that district. It is a third of the overall Condamine-Balonne district. For various reasons that I will go into shortly, at the moment there is not the plan to take water from those areas. They will lose half their productive asset, half their economic asset. The whole town is only there because of this. St George exists because 30 or 40 years ago we built a place called Beardmore Dam. Other farmers came into the area and built ring tanks to store water from overland flow and started growing wheat, grains, cotton and all these other products that have sustained St George. It is a beautiful town, away from the coast, in our nation, and we should protect towns like St George. I certainly want to make sure they continue to flourish in the future.

At the moment we have achieved 50 gigs or so, so we have 100 to take back, possibly 150. At the moment around 50 gigs have been recovered in the Condamine-Balonne. What has been really disappointing is that, of those 50 gigs, only about four gigs—last time I checked it was about four, but it may have changed—was recovered through infrastructure, through that option of getting more efficient. The other 46 have been recovered through buyback. If that proportion continues, St George will no longer exist in its current form, unfortunately. It will be a much diminished town. I do not want to see that. I want to protect against that happening. That is why this cap is very important. It is very important to pass this cap, but it is not the only thing we must do to save towns like St George.

I would like to conclude by briefly talking about some other issues that we need to tackle in this field to protect towns like St George—issues that I hope will be taken up in the inquiry by the Senate Select Committee on the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, which is visiting St George for a hearing on 29 September. I encourage all residents in the area to go along to that hearing, to make submissions and to have their views heard. Particularly, we have to get smarter at delivering the environmental benefits we want to deliver. For the Greens this is about reducing intensive agriculture. For those of us that are the rational political parties in this country—and I include the Labor Party in that—it is not about reducing intensive agriculture; it is about protecting the environment. That is what our goal should be.

When you go to St George and to the wider area, you learn about the environment. The Murray-Darling is not just one big old dry carpet like it is down here on the floor, where you put water down on one end of the carpet and it flows to the other end. It is not a series of interconnected garden hoses. It is a very different and diverse system. It covers a huge area across our country. In that part of the area, when you put water in and try to deliver a water-flow event, often the water will not push down the river system unless there is a big flood; it will bifurcate at the end of the river systems into wetlands, and those wetlands are often the ones we want to target and provide water to. But we can do that in a smart way or in a silly way. We can buy back water haphazardly and chuck water down the river. There are assets we can use in this region to make sure we get the same environmental outcome without destroying towns like St George and destroying the livelihoods of the 2,000 people that live there and the lives of about another 2,000 that live in the area. There are weirs on the Culgoa and Balonne rivers in the area that we can use more efficiently to direct environmental flows towards environmental assets in a more efficient way.

The Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder are now the biggest irrigator in our country. They own the most amount of water right now—about 1,160 gigalitres of water. They are the biggest irrigator in our country and they need to get smarter about how they water their fields, just like we have expected farmers over the years to get more efficient at watering their own fields. They can do that by using assets in this region to make sure that, when we put water down the Balonne, half of it does not go down the wrong river and end up watering stuff which is actually not that much of the priority or not as important as other environmental assets. There is a weir there we can use and upgrade to direct the water to the appropriate places. I do give credit to the government, which has had a number of reports prepared on these issues recently, but now we need to act in the next couple of years to make sure that we do get smarter with this way of recovering water. I would add that we need to think about getting water from places other than just St George. There are other environmental assets upstream in the Condamine-Balonne region, around Chinchilla and Dalby, which also should be considered, particularly to minimise the impact on St George but also to help the micro and macro invertebrates is that part of the system.

The final thing I want to say is that this should not just be about water; this is about the environment. Just adding water is a simplistic way of trying to deal with this issue. This is not a cake mix that you buy down at your local shops and just add water to make it work. It needs a lot more sense to get a productive environment in our Murray-Darling system. We need to be smarter about this and look at what we are targeting, which is the environment, not people's jobs, which is what the Greens want to do.