Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Heritage, the Arts and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to wholeheartedly support the Farm Household Support Amendment (Additional Drought Assistance Measures) Bill 2008. This bill carries on the work initiated by the Howard government to provide support to Australia’s farm communities as they continue to battle the worst drought on record. I am particularly relieved to hear that the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry is continuing the program of support through exceptional circumstances payments for drought stressed communities. My electorate of Murray has not seen decent rains for some five years now, and an extraordinary degree of family distress and real economic contraction exists right across the electorate.

I was not convinced that this government would continue exceptional circumstances payments. This government has shown a callous disregard for the plight of rural communities. It slashed the funding for critically important programs like Landcare and for the catchment management bodies by 20 per cent and 40 per cent respectively. It cancelled funds for the Howard government’s very important environmental services program, which was designed to give farmers a way to be paid for the environmental work they did as a by-product for sustaining their farmland and producing food and fibre. That program disappeared with the announcement of this year’s Rudd budget. So I was relieved to see the budget contain ongoing support for our drought ravaged farmers through exceptional circumstances. As I say, it was touch and go.

This bill amends the Farm Household Support Act to help more small rural businesses, which are suffering a downturn because of the drought, access relief payments. This supports not only rural business but also the communities that rely on them. The bill will increase the income exemption for the exceptional circumstances relief payments income test from $10,000 to $20,000. This effectively doubles the amount of off-farm or non-business salary and wages that farmers and small business operators can earn without reducing their payment. This recognises that during this prolonged drought many farmers have had to seek some off-farm income to keep their business viable—that is, if there is local employment. The education and welfare of young rural Australians is also vital for the economic prosperity of their own regional economies and for the country as a whole. By amending the Social Security Act 1991, this bill will provide concessions under the Austudy and youth allowance means tests for newly eligible recipients of the exceptional circumstances relief payments. It will also ensure that all newly eligible recipients receive a healthcare card.

The bill will amend the eligibility criteria to extend exceptional circumstances assistance to more small business operators, as I began by saying. These small operators must be located in towns that have a population of 10,000 or less—and there are 52 of these towns in the Murray electorate alone. They of course will get assistance, provided they can demonstrate that they have had a downturn in income as a result of the drought. They do not have to be a farm dependent business; they can be a butcher, a baker or a hairdresser. If the town has a population of over 10,000 people then exceptional circumstances may also still be paid if businesses can demonstrate a downturn in business—but they do have to have a dependence on farm related enterprise. I commend the bill. It is a very worthwhile and humane measure which tries to support our drought ravaged farmers.

Today 2,000 people from northern Victoria, the vast majority of them dependent on exceptional circumstances assistance, left their drought ravaged farms and businesses to march on Melbourne. Why, you might ask, given the huge costs of their vehicle fuel and the time and effort involved, would they make this five- to eight-hour return journey to the steps of Parliament House in Melbourne and then turn back again up north as evening fell? They came and they protested and they begged the Brumby government to give them a chance to continue to produce food for the state and for export markets. We know there is a global food shortage bearing down upon many countries right now. Like all farm communities, these marching men and women’s food production capacity depends on their water security. In the past when drought struck, as it often does in Northern Australia and up through the Murray-Darling Basin, these farmers were secured by the Goulburn Murray Irrigation System. It is a century-old masterpiece of engineering that combines the natural waterways with thousands of kilometres of earthen channels. The system moves water from the Eildon Dam across thousands of hectares of farmland to where, finally, the irrigation system empties into the environmental flows of the Murray River. Over $2 billion worth of food annually could be, and usually was, grown out of this system—that is, when the water flowed.

Unfortunately, the Brumby state government is hell-bent on creating a permanently droughted state for the food bowl of northern Victoria. The Victorian government aims to pipe the water away, out of the Murray-Darling Basin, across the divide to Melbourne and Geelong and also to Bendigo and Ballarat. The pipes to Ballarat and Bendigo are already in place. There was a great celebration the other day about the water pouring out into Ballarat, a region of 42-inch rainfall. Of course, the water had come from an area of 15-inch rainfall. How extraordinary! The water had come out of the last dregs of Eildon Dam, which is reduced to less than 13 per cent storage. It was water that otherwise would have been piped to the farms of northern Victoria to produce dairy product, fruit, prime meat and crops for consumption. Now another even bigger pipe is to be pushed through to supply Melbourne and Geelong. Why do Melbourne and Geelong need this water out of the failing Eildon Dam from the food producers of northern Victoria? It is because the cities of Melbourne and Geelong do not recycle and do not harvest their stormwater, unlike other great cities of the world. They have been failed by generations of state governments.

To drought proof Melbourne, Geelong, Bendigo and Ballarat, a permanent artificial drought is to be created in what was the food bowl for Australia: northern Victoria. How can Premier Brumby get away with this? This advertisement that I am holding says it all. It was placed in the major Melbourne papers today to coincide with the farmers’ march. It says, ‘We the Victorian government are going to put about $1 billion into fixing up the irrigation infrastructure we own as the government in northern Victoria. We will find that a lot of water will be saved through this process, and that water can go to Melbourne, or a big proportion of it.’ The trouble is, this claim is based on false information and, as well, the wrong values and principles.

It is claimed that there will be a modernisation of the irrigation system and over 400 billion litres—that is, 400 gigalitres of water a year—will be saved and found. The government in Victoria has claimed that 900 gigalitres are lost out of this irrigation system each year. This has been the claim all along from the Premier, but their own Department of Sustainability and Environment published a lower figure of only 650 gigalitres lost. This year, the measured losses of the Goulburn-Murray system were only 450 gigalitres. Let’s pretend we could have saved half of that with a miraculous re-engineering of the system—and no system could ever be expected to save half of the losses—and these savings were redistributed to Melbourne. That would have taken 30 per cent of all water available to irrigators to Melbourne—30 per cent of all water, which otherwise would have led to food production, being flushed down the toilets of Melbourne. This is an absolute obscenity.

We are a country that must make sure that our cities are not climate dependent when it comes to their water supplies. We must not fudge the figures and pretend that you can make new water from simply re-metering—changing from dethridge wheels to a different device. All that does is change the measurement of water from one person’s ledger to another. You cannot pretend to save an enormous amount of water for the environment by total channel control. What that does is collect up water that had once escaped to the environment and turn it into some other purpose. The only way you can really make sure you have additional water for the environment is to have on farm water use efficiency combined with something like piping and the sealing of things like earthen channels.

Unfortunately the Rudd government has decided to disappear—at least the $2 billion that the Howard government put on the table through the Murray-Darling Basin $10 billion, 10-point plan for on farm water use efficiency. That fund has disappeared. Instead, we have been given, first of all, $50 million to buy back water from people like my northern Victorian irrigators, who have the banks leaning on them saying, ‘It is sell your water, or else.’ That is not a willing seller.

We are now told that there is an extra $2 billion to $3 billion to buy more water off these drought ravaged farmers, who are so stressed they cannot say ‘no’ to their banks. Under our $10 billion, 10-point plan—the coalition’s plan—we said, ‘Yes, we will target buy-back from the overallocated systems, which are largely in New South Wales.’ That way we would have sorted out a very serious problem, in particular for their rivers and streams, created by the New South Wales government overallocating water several generations ago.

Today we have a situation where a permanent drought will be created—in terms of water security—in northern Victoria by the Victorian Labor government, which has a callous disregard for food production for this nation. It has alternatives in Melbourne with recycling, with harvesting stormwater, with a desalinisation plant or indeed it can look to new dams in Gippsland, which regularly suffers the ravages of flood. They have to be looked at as alternatives. Geelong has close by one of the most prolific groundwater systems in Australia. All of that is ignored because of the cheap, technologically simple task of pushing a pipeline from the failing Eildon Dam across the range to Melbourne—because it can be done by the next election.

I am so concerned about the future of food production right across Australia, but particularly in northern Victoria. There is a simple solution to the dilemma we have right now. That is, improve on farm water use efficiency, with government support. We had the measures in place. I ask the Rudd government to bring back those measures. Please do that, because the future for all of us is dependent on water security and on being able to feed ourselves. It is about a fair go for all.

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