Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, my comments relate to the February 2021 review of the National Water Initiative, which forms the basis of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. This is the second five-year review. The first review did nothing to improve the Basin Plan, and this version will continue that tradition. The many deficiencies and injustices of the plan are simply ignored in this Productivity Commission report. Surely the essence of good government is to accept when you have made a mistake and then put things right. This report does the opposite. The bureaucrats have dug in deeper than a sand slug in the Murray River's Barmah Choke—and for listeners who are wondering about the relevance of sand slugs, stay tuned!

Last month I met with Peter Millington, Order of Australia recipient and the last commissioner of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission before the Basin Plan started in 2012. This meeting confirmed that the 2012 Basin Plan was flawed from the start. Senator Hanson and I have come to the same conclusion, based on our extensive consultation during five tours of the Murray-Darling Basin over the past five years. We've spoken to farmers, to local businesses, to local Aboriginal peoples and to water irrigation authorities. And when One Nation consults, we actually listen, check and research and then act on the data and on what we're told. After watching the Morrison government in action for 18 months, it's clear to us that the only reason this government listens is to fine-tune their marketing pitch. The Murray-Darling Basin Plan cannot be saved by lies and spin, even from formerly robust organisations like the Productivity Commission. This Productivity Commission report refers to the recent drought as unprecedented. Has the authority not read the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre's report dated June 2016, commonly called the 'ice dome core reconstruction'? That report found that Australia has had eight droughts across the last 1,000 years that were more serious than the recent drought. The 1920-1940 drought was far more serious and much, much longer. Global warming did not cause the last eight droughts and it did not cause the recent one.

The formal assumption behind the need for the Murray-Darling Basin Plan is flawed. The plan is not needed to counter falling water inflows caused by climate change. Inflows are moving back to their long-term average following the end of the recent, far shorter drought. A plan, though, is needed to manage cyclical water flows and to fairly balance the competing interests in the basin. By ignoring the need for cyclical flow management, the Basin Plan has gone off in the wrong direction and caused great harm to our rural communities and to the agricultural industry.

The most important element of cyclical water management is suitable water storage. New dams are something we will never see under the Morrison Liberal-National government, who have signed on to the whole global warming scam, hook, line and sinker. There will be no new dams, or power stations for that matter, under a Liberal-National or Labor-Greens government—not real ones anyway. The hastily announced raising of the Wyangala Dam wall has stalled in the face of a cost blowout to $1.5 billion before construction has even started. The new Dungowan Dam has moved forward. A year after the announcement, the government now knows where it's going to go. Big deal; they actually site the dam! At a cost of $500 million for an additional 16 gigalitres, the money being spent on Dungowan could be better used building weirs to provide water security in rural communities. Many of these communities almost ran out of water in the last drought. Stanthorpe in Queensland did run out. That's inexcusable in a developed country like ours.

One Nation's weirs for life project will expand weirs in country towns to provide five years water security for town water in regional areas. One Nation will fund the business case for an 800-gigalitre dam on Mount Buffalo, known as the 'big buffalo expansion'. Outside of the Murray-Darling Basin, One Nation will fund the business case for the Bradfield dam system, including Hells Gate Dam. We will renew the dam wall to original storage levels at Paradise Dam and ensure construction of Urannah and Emu Swamp dams. Only One Nation has the courage to stand up for rural and regional Australia and build the dams we need to provide certainty for our agricultural sector.

Artificial water scarcity has allowed water trading to turn into water speculation. This report ignores the scourge of water speculation. According to Peter Millington, prior to the Basin Plan there were rules that prevented more than 10 per cent of local water being transferred from one valley to another within the basin. The new Howard-Turnbull Basin Plan in 2007 eliminated that restriction and allowed unfettered, free-for-all water trading. This led to water licences being transferred from above natural constraints like the Barmah Choke and the lower Goulburn to areas further downriver. Water has to be forced through these natural constraints to meet irrigation and environmental demands downstream. The erosion this has caused is stripping out the banks and silting up the river. For hundreds of kilometres, the Murray and Goulburn banks have been eroded back several metres on each side. The Barmah Choke has suffered a reduction in capacity from 10 gigalitres a day to seven gigalitres a day as a result of this damage—one-third lost.

The Productivity Commission report waxes lyrical on how well the system is working. What? Did the Productivity Commission even leave its office in Barton, just nearby, to see what is really happening along the river? Can I ask residents of the basin: when was the last time you saw someone from the Productivity Commission in your area getting the facts for themselves? Never, I suspect. To the Productivity Commission, the only measure of success is how much money can be created out of thin air through water speculation. There's no concern for the family farms that water speculation is sending broke, the destroyed lives, the country towns that are emptying out. None of this matters to the Productivity Commission. The natural environment matters. Rural and regional communities matter and people matter. The environmental and social damage caused by water speculation must be factored into the cost-benefit analysis of the Basin Plan. If it were, then the need to stop inter-valley trades and water speculation would be so obvious.

Schedule 3(3) of the Water Act 2007 calls for a transparent water register to record water trades. The Murray-Darling Basin Authority tried to implement a water register in 2012 and, after spending $30 million, gave up. They just gave up. One Nation will shortly be introducing a legislative amendment to remind the government that they have had 14 years to introduce the water register required by the Water Act and to indicate a date by which that implementation must be completed.

I did promise to discuss sand slugs. A sand slug is a plume of sand caused by human activity, like mining, that is washed into a river, where it slowly travels down until building up over time at a constraint like the Barmah Choke. The Murray-Darling Basin Authority is claiming, with a perfectly straight face, that the sand blocking the Barmah Choke came from gold mining 150 years ago in areas like Beechworth and Mitta Mitta. The authority is seriously asking us to believe that sand from gold mining has taken 150 years to work its way down to the choke, and the authority is asking us to believe that the sand being ripped out of the river banks right now is clearing the choke and heading out to sea but sand from gold mining 150 years ago is building up in the river bends. Look at where Mitta Mitta and Beechworth are on a map, upstream of the Yarrawonga dam wall. The authority must answer this simple question: why didn't the weir at Yarrawonga stop the sand slug? That dam has been there since 1939. Would we not have noticed sand building up behind the wall for 80 years? I call on the minister for agriculture to withdraw the sand slug report and apologise for insulting the intelligence of the basin community and disrespecting it.

The federal government does not have the power to legislate agriculture, water or land use, despite the fact that it has stolen land rights. As a result, the Water Act 2007 relies on a combination of referred powers and external affairs powers to cobble together legislation that never contained the triple guarantee that we pretend is there. The triple guarantee is protection for agriculture, rural communities and the environment. The moment guarantees are written in for agriculture and for rural communities, the Water Act becomes unconstitutional. It is a lie. Instead of rubber stamping the injustice and misery the plan has caused for the last 10 years, we should be working out how to replace the Basin Plan with something that can produce a true triple bottom line. The office of the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder is making things worse, not better. When the Basin Plan was brought in, states had substantial amounts of water allocated to the environment. The Commonwealth has no land of its own. The Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder is watering state land with federal water and, in many cases, duplicating watering by the states, all stolen from farmers. Consideration should be given to closing the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder and giving that water back to the states for the environment or for farming before more damage is done.

Finally, I note that the data used in this progress report ends at 2019. It's now 2021. What happened to the 2019-20 water year? Was it because there was too much water to sustain the drought narrative? According to the Bureau of Meteorology, as at 30 January 2021, 100 per cent of the Murray-Darling Basin is not in water deficit, which is the latest nonsense way of saying that it's not in a drought. The Murray-Darling Basin Authority website clearly states that the Basin Plan was created in response to the drought. Well, the drought is over, so farmers can have their water back. (Time expired)