Bill Heffernan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It has been quite a robust debate here today—congratulations, ladies; it is nice to see a bit of passion in the chamber. I rise to speak on the management of the Murray-Darling Basin report from the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee. I congratulate the committee. We are an unusual committee, for anyone who pays a visit but does not belong there permanently. It is an unusual culture, with a hardworking secretariat. We tend to give unanimous reports, and I am pleased to say that this document, which has 23 recommendations, is a unanimous report of all parties in this parliament, as was the coal-seam gas interim report of this committee.

It is a huge report, which brings together what for many years, under many governments of many persuasions, has been a bit of a mess of water management in Australia. Politics versus science and political interstate rivalries have tended to try to outsmart Mother Nature, but Mother Nature is the referee, as Acting Deputy President Stephens knows—how are things at Goulburn?

Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Perfect.

Bill Heffernan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We have a serious problem in Australia—the world has a serious problem in the future global food task, and everyone manages to focus on the global energy task. This report deals with the Murray-Darling Basin and the fact that over the years there have been some dreadful errors in judgement due to lack of knowledge and lack of science. We still do not know the interconnectivity between some of the aquifers and the rivers, but what we do know is pretty alarming. We know that the Murray-Darling Basin has 73 or 74 per cent of Australia's irrigated farming production. Some of that irrigated farming production is very efficient; some of it is very inefficient. We tend to ignore the research required to manage the global food task, and we tend to take our food granted when we go to Coles, Woollies, ALDI and others—we think, 'There's the tucker; we're all right.' But it is not all right.

The future global food task is one of the serious issues behind the committee's report, which is trying to make the best of what we have in what is inevitably a declining resource. Over the years we have made mistakes—by governments of all persuasions and all political parties—such as the decision to make supplementary water licences tradeable. To overcome that serious mistake now would take hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation. We have the various categories of water: high-security, general availability, supplementary licence, sleepers, phantoms and terminal water. It was pretty distressing for the committee when the chief modeller of the Murray-Darling Basin, assisted by ABARES, was not able to give the committee a clear understanding of what the classes of the water were in the 2,700 gigalitres of proposed buyback water—the modeller did not even know what terminal water was—nor of the effect of differences between buying high-security or supplementary water, or what the outcome would be for the river system.

I do not think we are going to outsmart Mother Nature. This report endeavours, with some calmness—bear in mind that it is a consensual report—to bring science into the consideration of the long-term management of the Murray-Darling Basin. The obvious task of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, for Craig Knowles and others, was to bring a political solution, and in a way I think that was just a political solution to get everybody past the next election and not past the next 50 years.

We have also included in the report a serious need to look at things like the proposed flows of environmental water down the system from the buybacks. It is something like 15,000 megalitres and 7.3 metres, for instance, in the Murrumbidgee River at Wagga, which will have the inevitable effect of flooding a lot of country that should not be being flooded except in a genuine flood.

We have also recommended that the Australian National Audit Office look at the proposed Nimmie-Caira buyback of water, which I have described as a huge fraud to the public purse. I do not have time tonight to go through the detail of that.

The Australian National Audit Office noted the acquisition of Twynam's water, $300-odd million worth of water, where the Commonwealth was sort of bludgeoned into buying water they did not really want to buy to enable them to buy water that they wanted to buy. Despite the protestations in estimates and other places, I regularly have arm wrestles with the appropriate bureaucrats that there was not a process. How in God's name you can acquire $300 million of water from one entity without a tender for that water is beyond me. The Australian National Audit Office, in very polite language, noted that; so I think they should note the Nimmie-Caira buyback. I appreciate that this suits the various local members, because it is buying back water off a flood plain, which in a flood will go back down the flood plain. To put that in perspective, if the people that are behind it win, they have won lotto; if they do, good luck to them. But I do say that it is like the issuing of—I had better not get into that—Cubbie's licenses and then knowing before they issued them that they were going to sell them.

In the case of Nimmie-Caira they agreed at 2¼ times the market value of the water, which was based on an area flooded over the years, without an environmental plan and without any licences. To create licenses they agreed to buy the licences back from the people concerned before they created the licences, at 2¼ times the market value. We managed to get out of New South Wales parliament—which is an attachment to this report—how they were going to actually manage this. It works out about 11 times the market value of the land to get the water off the land, some of which is supplementary water artificially diverted from the Redbank and Maude Weirs—a lot of which is topped up with floodwater at times. The maximum area involved is a bit over 200,000 acres or 80,000-odd hectares, with a gross of something like 370 gigs and a net of about 170 gigs. A lot of the water is going to be acquired from farms that do not actually get the water except in an exceptional flood year. They are going to sell it back within months of issuing the licences under this proposal for 2¼ times the market value; yet, because it is commercial-in-confidence, the officials involved in this would not tell us what the market value is. But we do know it is a $185 million deal, and about $50 million of that is to give scientists and bureaucrats, I believe, to figure out how they are going to shepherd water through this flood plain. There is no environmental study. It will turn into a poverty bush desert, because it is lignum country now. They say they somehow will buy this water off this flood plain and send it somewhere else; but, in Mother Nature's own powerful way, in a flood—because of the constriction between Balranald and Maude—it is going to go down the flood plain. They have allowed about $50 million in the purchase price to figure out how they are going to do that. They originally were going to turn these 200,000 acres into another national park, which would fill up with feral pigs, various weeds, nagura burr, Bathurst burrs and a huge fuel load for a fire—just like Yanga Station next door, which is a disgrace as a national park, and Moulamein up the road where the woolshed is falling down and it is an occupational health and safety hazard. Visitors cannot go into the woolshed because no one has any money to repair it, and no one has any money to look after the various weeds on the property—a beautiful sheep property in the Riverina.

This is why we think this whole proposition ought to go to the Australian National Audit Office. If the Australian National Audit Office has any brains they will come to people like our committee to work out why we think it is a dubious proposition. It is great politically, because it does not affect the irrigators, but in terms of making sense of Mother Nature, it makes no sense.

Finally, I congratulate the committee and the people concerned at the secretariat. I have to say we have done a pretty fair job to try to take the politics out of what has been a 100-year muddle. Bear in mind the Murray-Darling Basin is 6.2 per cent of Australia's run-off—23,400 gigs, and the science says that over 50 years we could lose half of that run-off. Whether it is right or wrong is yet to be known. I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.