Perin Davey (NSW, National Party, Shadow Minister for Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to finish my remarks.

Leave granted.

As I was saying, we need to understand the arrangements of the amendments that have been undertaken and the views and considerations of the Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council. Indeed, I have had an order for the production of documents, notice of motion No. 318, that was originally tabled in September. As a courtesy, I was finally delivered some of those documents last Friday. Some of the requests in that order of the production of documents were to seek an understanding of the arrangements entered into by the Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council and the advice or correspondence that had been undertaken by the MDBA or the department and the government in entering those agreements.

Interestingly, next to that request for the order of the production of documents, I got a big fat zero. That raises the question: did the government not seek advice before announcing on 22 August this year that she had reached an agreement with New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and the ACT for the Water Amendment (Restoring Our Rivers) Bill 2023? Did she not seek any advice and just enter that agreement with those jurisdictions without referring to her department or the subject experts? Or do I take it that the department has just chosen to ignore the order of the production of documents and is not providing the advice they gave to the minister? Either way, it is only fair that this chamber understands what that agreement means. As part of this referral, one of the terms of reference that Senator Roberts has included is matters relating to the approval of the amendment by the Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council.

We also know that Victoria has not approved or agreed to the water amendment bill. Victoria has stood fast in defence of their communities, so we also need to understand what that means. How can we have a Basin Plan without a jurisdiction and without one of the largest water users in the basin coming on board? What restrictions will there be on the rollout of things like the structural adjustment package and the leasing that I raised earlier? And how will the water recovery be made? In her correspondence with Senator Van, the minister also talks at length about her proposal to actually publish—basically, for want of a better word—a water recovery strategy. She will publish a public implementation schedule for the recovery of the 450 by 30 June next year. But how is she going to develop that public implementation schedule? What consultations will she have in devising that?

Last week, I and my colleagues held a press conference on the passage of the bill, outlining our disappointed that, in all of the amendments we considered, we did not include a robust socioeconomic test.

We did not amend to maintain the cap on buyback, and we did not get over the line a requirement to undertake a review and evaluate how to account for complementary measures—things like fishways, cold-water pollution management, riparian vegetation management and other things that deliver environmental outcomes on the ground.

In that press conference, I called on the government to, in developing their implementation schedule, please get together a committee of wise heads. Call in food processors, food manufacturers and the unions that represent those workers. I never thought I'd have to tell the Labor Party to consult with the unions, but that's what I'm doing. Call in the farming sector and, importantly, local government, and listen to them and their ideas of what a water recovery implementation schedule should look like. At the very least, give them the decency of talking to them then, because we know you didn't talk to them when drafting the water amendment bill. We know consultation was a series of four invite-only seminars to talk only about schedule 3 and an online webinar—one online webinar for the millions of people that live in the Murray Darling Basin, the small farm businesses, the food processors, the dairy manufacturers, and all of those people impacted by this bill.

At the very least, form that committee. I urge the Senate to support this motion so we can have a proper inquiry into the implications of the amendments that were rammed through this place without sufficient debate last week.

Malarndirri McCarthy (NT, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Indigenous Australians) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This has involved many months of stakeholder consultation and negotiations with basin states to land the agreement that basin water ministers announced on 22 August 2023. Minister Plibersek has toured the basin five times, and the government has held almost 700 consultation activities—

including workshops, round tables and public webinars. Do you want to hear this? This is what this is about, isn't it? The department undertook a five-week public consultation process seeking options to deliver the Basin Plan from 29 May to 3 July 2023, with 131 submissions received. The Water Amendment (Restoring Our Rivers) Bill 2023 was the fruit of this painstaking work.

The bill is consistent with the agreement of basin water ministers and is based on wide consultation. It provides more time, more options, more money and more accountability. It has been scrutinised by the Environment and Communications Legislation Committee, which received 124 submissions and held two extended public hearings in Canberra on 31 October and 1 November 2023. Overall, the committee heard from over 100 individual witnesses, spanning 45 organisations. The bill as introduced provides for a greater transparency and accountability, and further amendments increase this even further. Annual reports were tabled to parliament on water recovery progress, consideration of socioeconomic impacts on voluntary water purchase programs, environmental releases from the Snowy scheme, and engagement with First Nations in the basin. A third, independent review of the Water for the Environment Special Account is due in September 2025, including: community assistance funding; an independent audit of water allocated to the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder; and a public tracking mechanism on the department's website of progress against milestones set out in a public implementation schedule. We are mandating a range of consideration in the 2026 Basin Plan review, including First Nations water issues, water resource plans and climate change. Further review of these matters is simply just another delay tactic from those who do not support the full delivery of the Basin Plan.

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

Can I just put on the record that I support the delivery of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan in full, so any suggestion by those opposite that that's not the case is vagrantly trying to bill me incorrectly. So I just want to be very, very clear I support the Murray-Darling Basin Plan in full.

But I also support the Murray-Darling Basin Plan delivered under the terms and conditions that were agreed to in this place back when we had bipartisan support for the Murray-Darling Basin Plan implementation—not the political stitch that's being caused by this particular bill that we are talking to here. For the minister to stand up—clearly she's been given talking points by someone else—and suggest that somehow we are standing in the way of the delivery here is just completely ridiculous. This has been stuffed through this place at a rate of knots. It was guillotined without us having any opportunity to be able to do broader consultation. I would just like to say that: it doesn't matter how many times you say something that is factually incorrect, it doesn't make it correct.

The biggest concern that we have, and Senator Davey put this on the record very articulately during the actual bill itself and again in her contribution to this motion by Senator Roberts, is that there has been no real consultation. You cannot possibly look Australians in the face and say you've consulted about something when you have blatantly refused to look at the people and tell the people to their face that they are going to be majorly and negatively impacted by the decisions that are contained in this bill.

It was the absolute height of contempt when we sought in this place to have the water bill referred to committee, so that the committee was able to go and consult, to only hold hearings in Canberra! If ever there was a Canberra focused, Canberra-centric government it's got to be this one here. The reality is that there isn't a lot of impact on the Murray-Darling Basin here in Canberra, with the exception that it relies on the system for its water, but it doesn't rely on the system to grow food and it doesn't rely on the system to grow fibre. So I would say that only holding hearings in Canberra has got to be one of the most contemptuous things I have ever seen, because we know that river communities are really upset. They are worried about the impact of the changes that are contained in this bill. I think the government should have the guts to turn up and face those communities and hear what their concerns are directly from them.

I commend the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee, headed up by Senator Canavan, who took their committee out—actually, it might have been the—

Perin Davey (NSW, National Party, Shadow Minister for Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Backbench committee.

Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to 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.

Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak in favour of this motion. One of the things that we lack in this chamber is the use of measurements; in particular, numbers. When it comes to the Lower Lakes, I think we need to look at some facts and figures to put things into context. I'd like to thank the stakeholders who gave me these numbers last week, because when you hear these figures you'll actually understand how unproductive and insane the Murray-Darling Basin Plan is.

The surface area of the Lower Lakes is 200,000 acres. That is a massive property. I come from a large property about 150,000 acres in Western Queensland. I know how big that is, and to think that that is the size of the surface area of the Lower Lakes. They hold 1,924 gigalitres of water, and approximately half of it evaporates every year, so in the Lower Lakes we are losing about 865 gigalitres every year to evaporation.

But here's the thing: there are only 166 licence holders in that lower basin—the lower part of the Murray River in southern South Australia, not in northern South Australian near Renmark—and they use only 21 gigalitres. We let 865 gigalitres go to the Lower Lakes and evaporate every year so that a small number of farmers can use 21 gigalitres. That is completely insane. If you really want to fix this problem and get to keep more water in the Upper Murray and the Upper Darling, you're much better off building a lock at the top of the lake—a much deeper lock that can hold quite a bit water, with a much smaller surface area—that can be used for irrigation. You keep the fresh water apart from the salt water and you get rid of those lower barrages.

The other thing that I found out last week from these stakeholders, who were from around the Goulburn area, is that now, because of these so-called environmental flows, there is flooding in certain parts of the river in seven or eight of every 10 years. Normally, in Australia you get flooding, as we all know, a couple of times a decade. We are now getting constant flooding, almost every year, and of course that is destroying some of the surface area and the gum trees in the Murray-Darling Basin. I'm all for the idea of environmental flows, but you don't want these environmental flows actually destroying the environment.

There seems to be a bit of deja vu with the climate change thing. Everyone said, 'We need to get away from coal-fired power stations, so let's build renewables,' and renewables are destroying the environment. It looks like we are finding out now that these so-called environmental flows that come down the river just about every year, when they don't normally come down the river every year, are actually destroying part of the Murray and Goulburn. We need to have a much closer look at this.

I do support the motion. It's a very good idea, because we do not want our farmers going broke and closing down. The stakeholders I spoke to last week were indeed dairy farmers and other farmers on the basin who had lost their livelihoods.

Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was almost going to say that the government had taken a 'shoot first and ask questions later' approach to the Murray-Darling, but, while they've definitely done the former—they've taken a shot at Australian farmers—they actually haven't even bothered to ask the question later. They haven't done that part of it. They're just shooting wildly at Australian farming policy and our agricultural development without asking any questions or going out and talking to farming communities about the impact.

We've heard from other speakers how the government worked to ensure that the Senate inquiry into this bill held no hearings in parts of the Murray-Darling where farming occurs. The only hearing that was held was here in Canberra, which is notionally part of the Murray-Darling but is not really renowned for its strong farming community and is certainly not renowned as an economy based on the use of water for agricultural purposes. The government asked no questions. They didn't allow the Senate to get out there about the bill. Then they came into this place and moved a huge number of amendments to the original bill. I'm told by Senator Roberts there were 20-odd amendments here and 30-odd in the other place.

Those amendments haven't been subject to scrutiny or review.

We're only talking about our country's ability to grow food. It's not that important, is it! We're only talking about our ability to have food security for Australians. The Murray-Darling is our nation's food bowl. It produces over 40 per cent of our food. Over 70 per cent of our peaches, our apples and our oranges come from the Murray-Darling Basin. This is very, very important, and yet the government has not even gone to places like Griffith, Shepparton, Renmark, Deniliquin—where Senator Davey is from—or Moree, Dirranbandi or St George in Queensland. It hasn't gone to any of these places to actually work out what's going to be the impact on our ability to grow food, on the costs of manufacturing our food and on the price of food for everyday Australians. They haven't done that.

So I support Senator Roberts's motion, albeit that it is late to be doing this. We should have had this committee before passing the bill. It is still better, if you have a shot, to ask some questions—to ask some questions about whether those shots are actually effective, because certainly Australian agriculture and Australian farmers feel like they are under the gun from this government. They feel like they're in the government's sights. Almost everything the government is doing is about taking rights away from farmers, hurting farmers and making their life harder than it already is. It's a very hard life being a farmer, but this government is making it harder and harder. That's the feedback we're getting from farmers and it's the feedback from polls of farmers who don't support the government's agenda.

It's hard to identify anything positive at all that the government is doing to help and support farmers. They're taxing them more to pay for biosecurity and they're imposing more red tape and regulation on farmers. Here, they're taking away people's ability to grow food. They're stripping the economic rug out from under these communities. The government won't even give them the right to have their say to their nation's parliament and to the representatives of that parliament.

A regrettable decision was made not to have hearings out in the Murray-Darling. I think it was referenced by Senator Ruston, Mr Rowan Ramsey from the other place and me. Mr Ramsey is the chair of the coalition's agriculture backbench committee, and I'm the secretary. We took it on our own and said, 'Let's have our own hearings.' We don't have the resources of the Senate. I think we live streamed all of our discussions, but we didn't have the resources to transcribe them and those sorts of things. But we took it on our own to get out there and listen to people and to give them some say about what is going on. I want to give credit to our shadow water minister, Senator Perin Davey, who joined us for those visits, and to the local members of parliament like Sam Birrell, Tony Pasin, Anne Webster, Mark Coulton and Sussan Ley—I think I've got them all—who came to those hearings. I should say I think we had some senators there as well.

That was good. It wasn't as good as having a Senate inquiry, but having those discussions was worthwhile. We went to the Shepparton Preserving Company, where we heard in discussions with the head of SPC that the government's changes, the government's plans to buy that water from people, will force up their costs of buying water because less water will be available. The average cost of delivering water in the Shepparton district will be higher, so their costs will go up. And, if your costs go up, as the CEO of SPC said, they'll have to pass them on. That means higher prices for consumers for basic food items in their shops. We heard this story all around the place.

And multiple people in the basin are having to pay more for energy now because the government has mismanaged that issue. A lot of food production in the basin is very energy intensive, especially manufacturing, dairy and refrigeration for perishable goods. So they are having to pay higher prices. I've met three different businesses who have in the last year installed diesel generators not just to save them money; it's more to make sure they have a secure supply. They can't have their fridge go off during blackouts, which we're warned may happen this summer. So they've invested in that security at their own cost—adding more costs to their food production process by having diesel generators.

Some of those businesses are actually bidding to sell that diesel generation back to the energy regulator, AEMO, who are currently out there seeking secure energy supplies to try and gaffer-tape our electricity system back together in case we have blackouts this summer, as they've warned.

That warning was made a few months ago in an official report, the so-called Electricity Statement of Opportunities—the ESOO—outcome statement, and that warning made in the ESOO that we face blackouts this summer triggers this auction process to try and get reliable supplies of energy through the system.

Isn't it amazing that, if we go through summer without blackouts, it will be thanks to diesel generators running on imported fuel from overseas? Isn't it wonderful that the internal combustion engine will come back and save the day again? But it will be very high cost. It won't be that wonderful once our power bills turn up. Diesel generation is one of the more expensive types of power, especially where petrol prices are right now, and, of course, if you want to use these terms, it's the dirtiest power. It's even worse in terms of carbon emissions than coal, and yet the government will be relying on diesel generation to keep the lights on this summer. It's an absolute embarrassment. It's imposing more costs on our farmers and our farming communities, and that's why they're so frustrated with this government. This government has lost control and is doing nothing to help support their livelihoods and their jobs.

The least we could do for our farmers is to hold an inquiry. Let's have an inquiry. Let's get out there and go to these regional towns. Let's get out of this camera bubble and not just spend all our time here. Let's get out of the bush. It's not going to hurt you. There are no snakes out there that will bite you. You'll come back safe. There might be some people that are scared about that, but it will be okay. You can get a really good coffee in Griffith. Senator Perin Davey will be able to take you to Bertoldos. It's a beautiful place and a lovely bakery. There are lots of lovely places in regional Australia that I know Labor and the Greens are a little bit worried about going. So get out there and support this motion and listen to the Australian people.

Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to thank Senator Roberts for this timely motion. Last week, we saw the legislation to cruel basin communities rammed through the Senate with substantial amendments, which were unable to be debated and were unable to be honestly and seriously considered and consulted by the people whose lives and livelihoods they will impact. It was almost the complete opposite of what this chamber, under our Constitution, was expected to deliver for the Australian people, which is a place of review and a place of consideration. It's why we have the opportunity to have a lot of say on bills. We have a rigorous committee stage. We have Senate inquiries. That gives the whole of the Australian public the opportunity to participate in democracy in a very, very unique way.

Last week, the Labor government, under Minister Plibersek's orders, sought to restrict transparency once again and restrict accountability for their decision-making and for the impacts. During the committee stages of that particular guillotine provision, we found that the government had done no modelling on the impacts of this bill on the lives and livelihoods of the millions of people who live in the basin. It is absolutely abhorrent that they would seek to implement such a Draconian piece of legislation without considering the social and economic impacts on the people they seek to do stuff to. They don't even have the respect to go out and talk to people they want to do stuff to. They just expect rural Australians to keep copping it in the neck, whether it's on live sheep exports, water policy, transmission lines or biosecurity levy. The fact that you'd actually tax the very people who are subject to a biosecurity breach just shows the level of disdain and distrust that this government has for the nine million people who don't live in capital cities.

I commend this motion. I commend Senator Roberts for making sure the Senate will do the work it has to do. We'll do the work that basin communities wanted it to do so that they can actually articulate the very specific impact that this piece of legislation will have, not just in the short term but over generations to come, not just to farmers but indeed to the many union members in those manufacturing and processing plants throughout the basin, and what it will do to our export tasks. I commend the motion to the Senate.

Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Are there any further speakers on the motion? Then the question before us is that the reference be agreed to. Is a division required? It being past 6.30, we will defer the division until tomorrow.

Debate adjourned.