Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to stand to speak to the Water Amendment (Review Implementation and Other Measures) Bill 2015. There are some elements of it which are long overdue, in particular the whole business of making sure the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder is able to sell its water onto the irrigators market without it having to go into the irrigators market to buy back more water. I strongly believe that the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder has deliberately only traded several times, despite the urgent need for that water to be placed back in the irrigators market, because he knew how much distress would be caused by CEWH being seen to further erode the viability of irrigation systems and farm properties by clawing more water out of that productive part of the system.

The Murray-Darling Basin is an extraordinary part of Australia. It is the biggest fertile crescent in the country. It supports millions of people. It is the most valuable and profitable part of the food and fibre production enterprise in the country. It is not exactly news to anybody that what we called the millennium drought was one of the longest and most sustained droughts of the history of Australia. It began, roughly, in about 1995 and finally dissipated in about 2010. In the middle of that worst drought on record, we in the coalition government under the leadership of John Howard introduced the Water Act 2007. The now Prime Minister was one of the chief architects of the Water Act 2007. He wanted to make sure, in fact the act was designed to make sure, there were key, deliverable, balanced social, economic and environmental outcomes for the Murray-Darling Basin. Those were extraordinary times. There was great distress as a consequence of the drought, but the Water Act 2007 was enacted.

The amendments we are discussing tonight have had a lot of exposure to the basin community. Most of these amendments received strong support from the basin community, but they do not go far enough, as most of us in this place have been commenting tonight. I am sad that it is only now after a number of years, when it was obvious we were amending the part of the act which required the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder, if it traded, to have to buy back more water. That is a very important amendment, one that I wholeheartedly support. It is a fact that, despite a triple bottom-line outcome being required in the Water Act 2007, the amendment of item 13 of section 22(1) will provide that in addition to the five-yearly reviews of the water quality and salinity targets and the environmentally watering plan there will be a five-yearly review of the social and economic impacts of the Basin Plan. Such impact assessments are essential, and it is remarkable that we need to add those to the act now.

There has been some socioeconomic impact work done in the basin, but it has been poorly done. It has been done by vested interests, who came up with statements like 'willing sellers' when, for example, the environment minister of the day, Penny Wong, was active in the irrigators market offering tenders of up to $50 million. The banks saw this as a great opportunity to have some of their debt paid down if irrigators with unbundled water and land entitlements entered the market and sold their water off to the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder. No-one did any social impact assessment or economic impact assessment of the likely outcomes of, in my case in northern Victoria, some half of my dairy farmers being forced by their banks to sell all or most of their water entitlement. Where was the social or economic impact work to see what would come as a result of those farms no longer being able to rely on any water security? At the time, the water market was only some $40 per megalitre in the southern basin. It seemed possible to live on an irrigated property and depend on the temporary water market. Blind Freddy, if he had taken a social and economic impact assessment of the likely consequences of putting $50 million into a tender, uncapped and untargeted in the middle of the worst drought on record, would have had immediately an understanding that the prices of the temporary market would rise dramatically as the number of buyers in that market doubled and tripled while the water in the pool shrank.

Now in the Murray Darling basin some $5 million to $7 million in productivity is being lost per day. While we rightly talk about the good news of $1 million to $2 million being invested a day for the next several years in irrigation water infrastructure by this federal government, we have to weigh that up against the $5 million to $7 million in productivity being lost per day in perpetuity owing to the diminished access to secure water for farm enterprises and for food and fibre manufacturing. This has led to extraordinary concern about the very viability of irrigation systems, both in southern New South Wales and in Victoria, and even in South Australia.

Those buybacks were not from willing sellers—they were from forced sellers facing the worst drought on record and doubled debt. Because they occurred non-strategically, most irrigation systems in the basin are now faced with real concerns about stranded assets, less viability, higher costs for those remaining in the irrigation systems and no real end in sight, given that not much water is being traded back into the system. The market has been captured by speculators and others like the Victorian and South Australian governments, who have found buying and selling water into the irrigators market each year to be a very nice little earner, because it is cheaper than turning on their own desalinisation plants in Victoria and in South Australia. In the case of Victoria, Melbourne Water's 75 gigalitres cannot be accessed from the Goulburn Murray irrigation system any more. The pipeline is closed, but it certainly makes a nice little earner for the Victorian government when that 75 gigalitres is speculated with in the irrigators market each year.

Murray Irrigation, the West Corurgan Private Irrigation, Southern Riverina Irrigators, the Murrumbidgee Valley Food and Fibre Association, Griffith Business Chamber, 'Speak up' Campaign, Goulburn Valley Irrigators and Communities, Release Water4food, food manufacturers association of Goulburn Valley—all of them have come to me and we have discussed together what can be done. The Murray-Darling Basin Plan was cobbled together without enough science—with the government of the day dominated by environmentalists who had one thing and one thing only in their minds, and that was that irrigators had to relinquish as much water as possible to keep the mouth of the Murray open—and these irrigator associations, community groups and irrigation authorities are saying: how can we restore real balance to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan?

There was a publication very recently released called, 'Corporate Knights: the magazine for clean capitalism'—a rather unusual little document. I think one of the articles in it summarises very much the dilemma we have with the so-called experts or specialists who comment inappropriately about the natural state of the Murray-Darling Basin. For example, the article says:

Still, as the Millennium Drought wore on, the Murray-Darling river system was once again at the brink of collapse. 'It didn’t flow to the sea and had to be dredged for five or six years,' said Grafton.

This is Quentin Grafton, Director of the Centre for Water Economics, Environment and Policy at the Australian National University. The article continues:

It was obvious that the first cap on extraction hadn’t managed to retain enough water during extreme drought.

The point is that the natural circumstance of the Murray River system is that it does not flow to the sea. In fact, when the first white explorers of the Murray-Darling Basin—Sturt et al—got to the sea at the bottom of the system in South Australia, they realised the boats they had been hauling for so many thousands of kilometres were useless because they were met with sand dunes.

If the mouth of the Murray was meant to be a continuously flowing channel, there would be red gum forests there, not waves of sand dunes. But it would seem that the so-called specialists in Australia have come to a conclusion that having the mouth of the Murray flow continuously and free without the aid of bulldozers is a surrogate for the environmental health of the basin as a whole. Somehow that free-flowing channel of the Murray River water out to sea is seen as a natural circumstance that wicked irrigators have chained through profligate use of water to grow food and fibre. I repeat: there is not a single stick of red gum forest at the mouth of the Murray. There are sand dunes and it is an ephemeral stream.

In natural conditions when it was a drought in Australia—and we are the land of floods and droughts and a climate that is one of extremes—the realities are people used to cross the bed of the Murray River and have picnics in the bed of the Murray river about every 10 to 15 years. In fact, the original Indigenous nations in the Murray Valley did not have their tribal countries end at the Murray River. That was not the border. They invariably crossed the Murray River, their tribal country, because they could so often walk across the Murray to reach the other side.

So I am concerned that we still today have this obsession with the idea—from some—that the Murray River is still in a bad way because irrigators operate and produce food and fibre for the nation and for exports. In fact, we now do have a serious circumstance where in my Goulburn Valley irrigation district I am looking at population and community collapse. I am looking at half of the irrigator water gone to the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder, which carried over more than 450 gigalitres last year and over 300 gigalitres the year before because it could not use it for the environment; it simply had too much. Then I read this statement from Jamie Pittock, Associate Professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Society of the ANU:

… there’s still not enough water for the environment, said Pittock, pointing to Murray River’s ongoing struggle to flow to the sea and the challenging task set for environmental managers to craft an ecosystem that requires less water. 'It’s a triage program,' he said.

That is ridiculous. The Murray-Darling Basin is a managed system. It is a system that has suffered droughts and floods. It is a system that has brought prosperity to eastern Australia. Many farmers and irrigators are now on the brink of having to leave their properties because they can no longer access sufficient water for permanent plantings. If you are a rice grower, you wonder from year to year if you can put in a crop. This year it was a bad year and so unfortunately the rice mill at Deniliquin has closed with the loss of 50 jobs.

I have to say that this bill is addressing some of the problems with the Murray-Darling Basin and its plan. It does not do enough yet. It is a work in progress. But I commend our government for beginning the task. I commend this government for understanding the need for a triple bottom line approach. Irrigators are not the enemy of the environment; they are in fact the stewards of the environment.

I commend this bill to the House. But I say that it will be one of many we will be bringing into this place. I certainly ask for a little more serious and proper research and real science to be applied instead of hysteria and nonsense about a system, which has never been a fast-flowing Mississippi. Thank you.

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