Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

'Hear, hear,' I hear the shadow agriculture minister say, and he is right to support me on that! As of March 2015 there are 1,162 gigalitres of the 1,500 gigalitre cap already obtained, leaving 338 gigalitres of headroom for the strategic purchase of gap-bridging surface water. I hope that strategic purchase is such that it is in fact not 338 gigalitres but much less, with the water infrastructure on-farm and off-farm that we are investing in right now. I hope it is much less and I certainly hope that it is not coming out of the Riverina, which has already given so much. The Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder, David Papps, is already the nation's largest irrigator.

This legislation has been warmly received. The National Farmers' Federation water task force chairman, Les Gordon, said in March 2015:

We look forward to working with the Government to secure the passage of legislation through the Senate to enshrine the Cap as law as soon as possible.

It has taken a bit longer than Mr Gordon would have liked, but it is here. John Dal Broi, the mayor of Griffith, said:

I've been an irrigator all my life and I distress at what is happening in this area. They've forgotten about why the water was there in the first place.

Echoing calls from around the region for a major change in water policy, Councillor Dal Broi said:

Nothing annoys me more than listening to governments of either persuasion saying we are the foodbowl of Asia … They're saying you can grow all this food, but we'll tie one hand behind your back. They agree with you but are they doing anything about it? No.

Tonight I can inform Councillor Dal Broi—and I will call him as soon as I have finished this speech—that we are in fact getting on with the job of capping water buyback, and I know he will be pleased.

I am now going to read from a 1946 edition of the book Water into Gold by Ernestine Hill, first published in 1937. I have referred to this excellent work previously in this House because it is such a valuable reference and provides an insightful snapshot into some history pertinent to the Riverina and aspects of this debate. Here is what the author writes of the Riverina from the early 1920s:

New South Wales, the mother-State, and still the rightful owner of the Murray, had many thousands of soldiers to repatriate, but it was wealthy now beyond the dreams of avarice, three times the size of Victoria, with three times the fertile lands of South Australia, and infinite resources to command. Since Federation it had suffered no relapse of the old-time jealousy. Indeed, it had, with the most amazing magnanimity, allowed Victoria to adopt the Murray for mallee irrigation farm schemes innumerable that were not, it must be admitted, a conspicuous success, and even with railways constructed across the stream, to serve its townships on the northern bank that were geographically, if not politically, more closely in touch with Melbourne than with Sydney.

New South Wales, as a matter of fact, was busy with schemes of its own. The great major tributary, the Murrumbidgee, was wholly within the boundaries. On this energies were concentrated for the time being, in yet another miracle of irrigation, that would restore a lost world, and transform the scorched sand-wastes of "Hay, Hell and Booligal" to a garden paradise yielding a million a year.

New South Wales cheerfully spent very nearly £8,000,000 in the construction of the magnificent Burrinjuck Dam, on the upper Murrumbidgee, east of Gundagai, with a capacity of thirty-three and a half billion cubic feet, the Berembed Weir, west of Wagga Wagga, the Yanco Weir, and in a thousand miles of channelling, advances to settlers for homes, towns, and railways to build for them, factories for their produce, roads and electric supplies, to bring into being a thousand farms.

Burrinjuck opened 300,000 acres for settlement within a hundred miles of it, regulated the flow of the river for 730 miles, assured constant water supplies for a million grazing acres, and bejewelled the darkness of the Australian night with the electric lights of Canberra, Queanbeyan, Gundagai, Tumut, Wagga, Junee, Cootamundra, Temora, Murrumburrah, Harden, Yass, Young, Grenfell, Cowra and Wyangala.

Two thousand settlers on the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Areas occupy 318,000 acres, many of them being returned soldiers, and there is unlimited scope for more. A note in the prospectuses of the Water and Irrigation Commission of New South Wales informs us that "Further farms will be made available as demand requires."

Eight thousand people are living on the Yanco Irrigation Area, with Leeton as the chief town, and 9,000 on the Mirrool area, the centre of which is Griffith. Fat lambs, dairying, fodder crops and fruit are the mainstay of the Murrumbidgee area, now exporting its excellent canned peaches and apricots to England. One co-operative canning factory alone in Leeton treats 120 tons a day. Practically the whole of the New South Wales production of canning peaches is grown in the district, with nearly 300,000 bushels of citrus a year, fresh fruits and vegetables for the Sydney market, and three-quarters of the total State production of grapes from 21,000 acres of orchard and vineland.

For the rest, the advancement of settlement may be estimated by the fact that there are now four towns of considerable size—Griffith, Leeton, Yanco and Yenda—three distinct railway lines—

And it goes on and on and on.

The book goes on to talk about the miracle of rice production in the Riverina. It was first planted in Yanco, when the New South Wales Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission began to take an interest in the enterprise. The book states:

Until 1923, Australia imported all her rice from the East, but in that year three varieties planted experimentally on a large scale at Yanco proved successful—Javan, Californian, and the seed obtained from Mr. Takasuka, of Nyah.

His hobby was rice. It continues:

The American adapted itself … to Australian conditions, and from the first twenty tons of seed distributed to settlers by the Government as an experiment, to-day—

we are talking early 1920s—

20,000 acres of "padi" fields have sprung up, adding their wealth to that of the dairy pastures and the orchards, in country that was once considered worthless save for sheep.

I should have said that that was actually when the book was reprinted in the 1940s. It says:

To-day the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Areas are producing sufficient table rice to supply Australia, 313 growers, on an average 80 acres each, reaping an annual … 368,000—

pounds—

from rice alone.

The ever-present problem of markets and the fear of overproduction are the only factors that hold the progress of the settlements in check.

Well, if only today markets and overproduction were the only impediments!

Indeed, our government has successfully negotiated preferential trade agreements which have opened up unprecedented opportunities for the Riverina and other regional areas. The previous Labor government, despite what you might have just heard from the previous speaker, at the behest of the Greens in the lower house in the 43rd Parliament forced a man-made drought on the Riverina and other irrigation areas and did very little by way of trying to forge new trade agreements.

This legislation goes some of the way to making things right. There is still more to be done—much more to be done. I was pleased to be able to read from that book Water into Gold, written 70 years ago, as I say. When you look at what was made available from the precious resource of water then and how it has transformed to today, you get a bit of a snapshot of just why the Riverina is such an important fibre and food bowl.

Jenny Ryan, the Administration Officer, Economic Development and Tourism, of Narrandera Shire Council today told me that two of Narrandera shire's businesses produce 6,510 20-foot-equivalent units in annual containerised freight. This does not include figures from the nut plantations in the Narrandera shire, one of which is an operation which will have more than a million trees under harvest within the next few years. It can also be noted that the Riverina produces 129,000 TEU, of which 72 per cent currently is transported by rail. They are 2013-14 figures.

If we look at the Griffith regional overview, there is more than $2 billion annual production in agriculture and horticulture just out of the Griffith City Council local government area alone. It is Australia's largest producer of wine. One out of every four glasses of wine comes from Griffith.

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