David Fawcett (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Hanson-Young talks about cotton. She knows or should know that, in times of water stress, allocations go down; so, while South Australian irrigators have 100 per cent allocation, cotton growers have zero allocation. They have the ability to carry over water from previous years, but even if you banned cotton they will just go to the next most profitable crop, because irrigators will use water to generate revenue. There will be the use of water, and, in a country that allows people to use things that they own for the purposes that they intend, as we look at the system in the river we see that environmental needs, critical human needs and then other high-value crops—for example, trees that need water to sustain them—get an allocation, well ahead of things like rice or cotton.

That's where it's important to understand the facts of this argument, as opposed to just pulling out the easy political whipping boy to say, 'Cotton and rice are bad; irrigators are bad.' In fact the system recognises the differing priorities for those crops that sometimes get zero allocation, which is the case at the moment in those northern regions. I come back to the point that the evidence that the plan, even in a time when there is great stress on the river, particularly in its northern regions—South Australia, the state with the most to lose if this plan collapses, has 100 per cent allocation for its irrigators because the plan is in place. By all means, we should continue to implement and improve, but we certainly won't be supporting the waste of millions of dollars that would come from yet another inquiry into the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.