Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

backbench committee—into the rural and regional communities and into my hometown of Renmark. They went in there and they talked to the irrigators in Renmark and many other places along the basin to hear firsthand what the likely implications of this bill would be on their communities. I have to say, it is quite extraordinary to think that we have got a bill here that has got no input whatsoever from those communities.

The thing that's more terrifying is when I was questioning the minister, when this bill was in this place, about the impact on these communities they had absolutely no idea because the government hasn't modelled this. They've gone and put in a bill in here that has taken out a very important protection provision for our communities, which was agreed to in a bipartisan way, and that is that there was to be no socioeconomic detriment by the recovery of the 450 gigalitres of up water that was agreed as part of the additional component of the plan for South Australia. That was a very important provision, because it meant you just couldn't go in there and take water away from people who were being forced to sell by their banks. You couldn't just go in and rip up pieces of a community and leave them with a footprint that wasn't big enough to support their infrastructure. You couldn't completely decimate one community. You actually had to look at the whole socioeconomic impact of a community before water was taken out of it. So you would have thought when those opposite admitted that the change on this would have a detrimental impact on river communities they might have quantified what that impact might have been. They admitted they hadn't.

Not only were they fudging the fact that they didn't know what the answer was; they actually flat-out admitted (a) that it was going to have a detrimental impact on river communities and (b) that they had done no modelling whatsoever to understand the magnitude of it.

I would say that that shows a second level of contempt for our river communities. But it also shows contempt for all Australians. The cold, hard reality of removing massive amounts of water from consumptive use out of the system is that you will see a reduction in the agriculture that is produced, and inevitably the good old 101 of supply and demand means that Australia's beautiful clean, green fresh produce—our fruit, our vegetables and many other things that are grown the length and the breadth of the basin—are inevitably going to be more expensive on our supermarket shelves, which makes it more expensive in our restaurants and more for anybody wanting to get access in Australia. Right in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, you would think that this government would be trying to do everything it possibly could to not push up prices. It also makes it less competitive overseas, because we rely very much on export, so of course we're are at the whim of world prices. If our prices of production in Australia are so much higher, it puts us at a competitive disadvantage in the overseas market.

Also, this removed the cap on buybacks. We already know that buybacks have a serious detrimental impact on our communities. We've seen it in the water that's already been achieved in the buybacks so far. Some 1,250 gigalitres of water has been bought back out of our river communities. But in the absence of understanding what the long-term impact of that is, it seems very stupid for us to go back into the market to buy back before we've exhausted all less-lazy options. And make no mistake: going in and buying back water, buying back entitlement, is the laziest way that you can get water. There are so many other ways that this government could have a look at, and we were certainly looking at them when we were in government, to get access to water.

But we need to make sure the Murray Darling Basin commission itself, and the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder, are actually committed to finding alternative ways to get water. One such suggestion would be looking at urban and industrial water. We could get Adelaide off the Murray River and start possibly start the de-sal plant as well as urban and industrial water so that we're doing capture and storage so that the water can be re-used within Adelaide, which my home town of Renmark did a thousand years ago. We started using recycled water to make sure we were putting it on our town gardens and the like. So, there is nothing new about recycling urban and industrial water. We have not seen any enthusiasm whatsoever from any of our capital cities, or cities that rely on the river, to go down that pathway.

We also know that the CEWH very rarely uses their water. You don't need to use the entire amount of the water that has been indicated—the 3,200, as the full plan delivery—every year. But because the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder holds it, it basically never gets put back into consumptive use, because it's just too hard. There are suggestions put forward about ways in which the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder could have a covenant over potential lease of that water that allows the water to remain in the hands of the irrigators, allows the irrigators to keep their entitlement and to keep growing food in the years when that water isn't required for environmental purposes. Let's make no mistake: the river system is one of wetting and drying. You do not need all the water every year. But given the way this bill operates and the lack of clarity we have about what a held environmental water entitlement might be into the future, it looks very likely that the CEWH is just going to hold the water, and that water will be completely and utterly lost to agricultural and horticultural production into the future.

A number of questions were put to the minister last week during the debate and the committee stages of this bill, and none of them were answered. We could not get the officials to give us any indication about what would be considered in when it came to held environmental water. This is one of the cornerstones of this piece of legislation, and they don't know potentially what could be in, in terms of particular arrangements around water instruments.

It just seems to me, once again, that it's all about headlines. They're rushing the bill through to say: 'Tick! We've moved on the Murray-Darling Basin.' But there's been no thought whatsoever for the absolutely devastating consequences that this is going to have on our communities or even looking at anything innovative. The really shameful thing is that this government has had a proposal for months. For months and months, they've had a proposal that would allow the water to remain in consumptive use apart from the years when it is identified that that extra water might be needed.

The other thing, too, is that the government needs to come clean with us about how much of the Commonwealth environmental water holdings are being used every year. They will always say they want more water, but let's actually have a look at what the environmental outcomes are that they are trying to achieve and let's have a look at how much water they need and when they need that water before they go back into the market and rip more water out of our river communities.

It is really sad that this is just another example of another bill that is all headline and has completely forgotten the impact of the details that sit under it. There has been no transparency, because we don't know the details about what will be considered as held environmental water. In the absence of that, this bill could pretty much do anything in relation to getting that water. We know that this government will always revert to the lazy options because it doesn't care what happens in the country; it just wants to have a tick in the cities.

Secondly, the bill has had no scrutiny. We saw debate on this bill get cut so that we couldn't debate them to the fullest extent. We got no answers when we were asking really important questions about this bill. So we were denied proper scrutiny. The government guillotined the bill and denied us proper scrutiny because the minister wouldn't answer the questions, somewhat like this morning. We couldn't get an answer out of the minister about a bill before this chamber this morning.

Finally, I'll respond to some comments made in the contribution of the duty minister a minute ago before I rose to speak on this bill that Minister Plibersek has made seven trips—or however many it was—to the basin. I say that you can make seven fly-ins, touch the ground, say, 'G'day,' and then fly out or you can actually get into the community and have lunch or dinner with these people or go out to their properties and talk to them about the impacts this is likely to have on their properties. Then you can go into the town and talk to the community there. You can talk to the shop and business owners and let them tell you what happened last time we had major buybacks coming out of the community.

Don't forget that, the further you get into this, the more impactful that water extraction and taking the water out of productive use is going to be. The first amount of water that we sought through buybacks was very damaging to our community. Also, it was done in a way that allowed quite innovative mechanisms to achieve that water in terms of efficiencies measures that were put in place throughout the system. Those efficiency measures are becoming harder and harder to put in place, so we have to be more innovative about how we pursue this. I would just say that the lack of preparedness to be innovative about how we secure this water is extremely disappointing because it shows this government just does not care about river communities. We have a minister who has not bothered to go out there and find out for herself what the impact on these communities is. If she did go out to those communities, she would be compelled by the stories that they would tell her about the unbelievable impact of taking potentially up to 750 more gigalitres out of the Murray-Darling system and out of consumptive use. Even though the minister had no idea when I asked her questions last week about what that means, 750 gigalitres of long-term average yield equates to probably well over 1,000 actual gigalitres of water entitlement. We're talking about well in excess of 10 to 15 per cent more of existing water that could potentially be taken out of the system on the back of the changes that are contained in this legislation.

I commend Senator Roberts for coming in here and trying to have this referred off for greater scrutiny because, if we do go for greater scrutiny, the government will have to face up to the fact that this bill is going to have a major impact on our river communities. It will push up the price of food and it will destroy the community that I live in.