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

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

I rise today to speak in favour of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission of Inquiry Bill, put forward by the Greens, to establish a commission of inquiry into the Murray-Darling Basin. Now we know that this place here in the Senate can be incredibly powerful for setting the tone of how we inquire into and really take on some of the big issues plaguing government policy from time to time. We did it with the banking royal commission. My colleague Senator Whish-Wilson put forward a very similar piece of legislation to establish a commission of inquiry into the banks, and at the time we got the response from Labor and the Liberal-National government that this was a stunt. Of course it wasn't; it was putting on the agenda the fact that everyday Australians were sick and tired of the big banks ruling within their own rules, not meeting public expectation and screwing over little people and little businesses all over the place.

Here today we have a very similar piece of legislation, to establish, essentially, a royal commission into another scandal—that is, the management of the Murray-Darling Basin. We need this because there have been years and years of evidence—and scandal after scandal—that the management of the Murray-Darling Basin is a joke. It has been an expensive use of public money to not deliver the results that the Australian people expected, and, indeed, that this parliament set—the results that the $13 billion Murray-Darling Basin Plan was meant to achieve. We know that after decades and decades of infighting and blame-shifting between the different states, upstream and downstream, and the federal government, the Murray-Darling Basin Plan was meant to deal with the real issue that confronts us all, which is that the system has been overallocated. Too much water is being taken out and not enough is being left there to keep the river alive—to give it a chance for sustainability.

Of course, those river communities right throughout the basin need a living river if they are going to be communities that are able to survive. We've got farmers—family farms right throughout the Murray-Darling Basin—who are struggling today because they can't access the water they need at an affordable price, the water that allows them to keep doing what they're doing.

Meanwhile, even under this Murray-Darling Basin Plan, with $13 billion put on the table, we've seen big business expand irrigation in the Murray-Darling Basin. Some six or seven years ago, this place and the other place decided that we needed to reform the system. We needed to get more water back into the river to give it a fighting chance, to ensure that river communities would be sustainable, because everybody knows there are no jobs on a dead river. What we've got is that most of that money's now been spent, there were a million dead fish in Menindee at the beginning of this year, farming communities are struggling and there is an environment in crisis.

However, there are a select handful of people—businesses—who have done pretty damn well, actually, out of the mismanagement of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, and they're laughing all the way to the bank. They've had huge public funded handouts. They've had water bought from them at an inflated price. They've had public money handed to them to implement irrigation and efficiency works that they were going to fund themselves anyway; they've had it subsidised now by the taxpayer. Meanwhile, communities are still struggling.

The previous South Australian government, the Weatherill government, was of course very concerned about what this meant for those of us who live at the bottom end of the system. I must say, former Premier Jay Weatherill did the right thing when he took on Mr Barnaby Joyce, who had been the water minister under the Abbott and Turnbull governments. Jay Weatherill took on Barnaby Joyce after Barnaby Joyce had been busted bragging in a pub that he was going to manage the Murray-Darling Basin in such a way that it would look after his big corporate irrigator mates at the expense of the environment and everybody else—that he had rigged the system, and he wanted a good slap on the back and a, 'Good job, mate,' from them because he had rigged the system in their favour. It was that astonishing, brazen attitude which spurred the South Australian government at the time into action. They established their own South Australian commission, and it got to work at trying to dig into the management of the system. What it found was that mismanagement is rife; maladministration is rife. In fact, even the legality of the plan itself is in question.

There's the South Australian royal commission, but, of course, we've had both the Department of the Environment and Energy, whose job is responsible for a lot of this, and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority stopped and gagged from participating in the South Australian royal commission because the federal government, the Liberal-National Party, did not want the truth to be uncovered. They didn't want senior bureaucrats to have to sit across the table from the commissioner and be asked the right questions, so they gagged them from being able to participate in the South Australian inquiry. That in and of itself I would argue is a reason why it's time to blow this whole thing open, to shine a spotlight on what is going on and to make sure that the people responsible for stuffing up the Murray-Darling Basin so badly are held to account.

Of course, it's not just the South Australian royal commission that has uncovered a lot of this evidence and has been so damning in its assessment of the management of the plan; the Productivity Commission delivered a scathing report over summer. The government sat on it for quite some time and tried to release it at 4 or 5 pm in the afternoon on a Friday in the middle of summer—that's what they do, of course, when they don't want the public to know what's really going on. The Productivity Commission was scathing in its assessment of how things had been managed. The Productivity Commission's five-year assessment of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan presented a bleak picture. Only two of the 11 metrics were on track. They raised concerns about the current management and governance arrangements. They said that the Murray-Darling Basin Authority cannot be trusted to oversee itself and that it 'lacked candour and transparency with stakeholders'—well, we know about that, here in this place, from the amount of times that I and other senators have asked for information to be put on the table and it has been denied or, when something is finally delivered through an order for the production of documents, it's so heavily redacted it's useless. Secrecy and cover-up are rife in the management of the Murray-Darling Basin under the guise of the National Party, who are in charge of the water portfolio, and, of course, the mismanagement from the Murray-Darling Basin Authority itself.

The Productivity Commission's report went on, raising serious concerns that the remaining funds spent on efficiency projects were 'likely to fail or be implemented properly.' And in the last two weeks we've seen evidence of that through exposes and reporting from Four Corners. Indeed, it wasn't just the journalists, the farmers and the locals talking about how badly managed and what a rort these efficiency projects have been; the Productivity Commission say it is, in black and white, as well. The Productivity Commission highlighted the conflicting role of the MDBA, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, being both the implementers of the plan and those who are meant to be in charge of the compliance. They simply can't be trusted to manage themselves.

The Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission, as I've mentioned, named the elephant in the room: is the Murray-Darling Basin Plan even legal if it has been so politicised and corrupted that it's not actually achieving the objectives of the Water Act? The royal commission in South Australia asked whether the plan itself may be illegal, contravening the Water Act and drastically underestimating the environmentally sustainable level of take. It questioned the whole politicisation of the plan and the ignorance of the science. Numbers have been chosen, figures have been declared and money has been handed over, yet it is not in line with what the science requires if we are to save the river. The Commissioner of the Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission, Bret Walker, found instances of corruption and maladministration. He found that the plan and its implementation lacked transparency and meaningful consultation, particularly with First Nations communities right throughout the Murray-Darling Basin. He highlighted the dangers presented by the lack of metering and the uncertain nature of flood plain harvesting.

The rort that is going on in the northern basin with flood plain harvesting should anger every Australian. It is not the right of people, simply because they've got enough capital to build big dams, to stop overland flow being able to go into the system, into those small creeks and rivers that all link up to feed into the broader and bigger basin rivers. It is not their water—it is the Australian people's water. Yet they have been allowed to get away with harvesting these flood plains for their own greed. Why is it that the cotton industry in Australia recorded a bumper profit and crop last year, yet downstream, in places like Wilcannia and Menindee, in areas like the Riverina, where I was only a week or so ago, those communities are struggling? We're about to debate a multibillion-dollar package for drought relief this week in this place, yet we've got big corporations taking water for free and then charging the taxpayer to build the dams by which they're capturing all of that water. It is a rort. The environment's suffering, the river's dying and small farmers are at their wits' end. It is time that we cleaned up the rorting and corruption and got this plan back on track.

We'll hear, when other people debate this issue, that we shouldn't have a royal commission because we shouldn't put at risk the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. I put it to you, Mr Acting Deputy President, that the plan is not working. Billions of dollars are rolling out the door, filling the pockets of big business and big corporations, but small farmers are suffering, the river is dying and we've got a million dead fish. It is only madness that would suggest that we continue on as if nothing is wrong. Whether you are in the northern basin, whether you're in the southern basin, whether you're a scientist, whether you're somebody who understands the environmental imperative of this, or whether you are a dairy farmer in the Riverina, you know—we all know—that the management of the Murray-Darling Basin is absolutely failing. It's failing our nation's largest food bowl. It's failing the next generation of Australian farmers.

For far too long those who have not wanted us to put the river system back on a sustainable footing have said that this is about the environment versus farmers. Well, it's not. It's not the environment versus farmers; every farmer I know understands that they need a living river to keep their business alive. Every farmer who's grown up in their area for generations understands that the river is sicker than it's ever been. They don't want just a cash handout from a drought fund. They want the management of the Murray-Darling Basin back on track. Small farmers are being priced out by big corporates who have international and foreign interests, coming in, buying up water, pushing up the price so no-one else can afford it. We don't even know how many foreign owners of water licences we have in Australia, because that information isn't readily publicly available. What we do know is that the signs that we can see for ourselves are stark: millions of dead fish; no drinking water in Wilcannia—a town that used to be an inland river port. They can't even turn on the tap and drink the water. Nothing comes out anymore. You've got farmers right throughout the southern basin having to close up shop after generations because the big corporate next door has bought up all the water or has just dammed the flood plain so there's nothing coming when the rain next breaks.

Of course, as a senator from South Australia, I know all too well that if we don't manage this river system fairly, if we don't manage it properly, my state is done. We need a living Murray River for us to survive, and the best way of doing that is to make sure there is enough water left in the river system to let it flow. There are no jobs on a dead river, and, at a time when climate change is really starting to take hold, we have to be realistic about the management of our precious water resources. The current Murray-Darling Basin Plan doesn't even include the impacts of climate change. And why is that? It's because the politics at the time meant that we couldn't talk about what the real science was saying. This plan has been corrupted because of vested interests, and it continues to be used as a rort because of those same vested interests.

When Mr Joyce, as Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources, bragged that he was going to manage the Murray-Darling Basin so it benefited his big corporate, big business mates, he wasn't just joking. It wasn't a joke. He meant it, and he's done it. Now we're left with a river system in further crisis, and yet most of the money has walked out the door and not into the hands of the small farmers and farming communities who needed that support to help transition. It's ended up in the coffers of big corporate irrigators, hedge funds and foreign pension funds in the US and in Canada—they're the people who are banking the money of Australian taxpayers because of the way this Murray-Darling Basin Plan is being managed.

We need a thorough royal commission into the management of this river before it is too late. This isn't about the environment versus farmers; this is about corporate vested interests against everybody else—the environment, the scientists, the economists and our farming communities. We can't afford to wait another three or four years to get things back on track. By that point all of the money is going to be gone, the river system will not be able to be restored and those farming communities and those of us who live downstream will yet again be wondering what on earth happened. I implore the opposition to get off the fence when it comes to this issue. You know that the National Party have stuffed this up for far too long.