Damian Drum (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Water Legislation Amendment (Inspector-General of Water Compliance and Other Measures) Bill 2021, which gives me a great opportunity to touch on an important issue that is absolutely critical to my electorate of Nicholls. There would be nobody in the Goulburn Valley that hasn't heard of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, and a considerable number of people in the Goulburn Valley are very much across the detail of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. But this form is now over 14 years old and has been implemented by all sides of government. What has to be said is that we rely not just on our agriculture but on our towns and on our people, and I think it's fair to suggest that at the implementation of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan we had very healthy communities and we probably had some reasonably sick rivers. Now what we've got is very, very unhealthy communities, unhealthy people being forced off their land and too much water running down the rivers, to the extent that we have to worry about the degradation of those river systems and we've got to pass regulation to pull up some of these flows that take place and cause damage.

Today we welcome the opportunity to reform and to establish a statutory position of the Inspector-General of Water Compliance. This role will combine the compliance and enforcement powers that are currently held by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. This is currently under the interim inspector-general's role. We've listened to the community saying that the Murray-Darling Basin Authority cannot mark its own homework. This is a very strong aspect. The Murray-Darling Basin Authority has been proven not to be a source of single truth. That's the damning indictment that's been put on the Murray-Darling Basin Authority by the Interim Inspector-General, Mick Keelty, when he did his report and said: 'Having worked with the authority for over six months, the most important thing that we need is a single source of truth,' effectively saying the authority is not that. That's a damning assessment of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. It's been out of that inquiry that we've seen the need to break compliance away from the other roles that they have. We need stronger compliance and greater accountability, which are going to be important steps to improving the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.

We must not stop here with our improvements. The community has been calling out for reforms, and it's important that as a government we listen and we act. The original plan was set out to recover 2,750 gigalitres of water for the environment. A political deal at the time was also struck with South Australia to see an additional 450 gigalitres of water delivered to the environment if and only if there are no socio-economic impacts on the community. This is very, very important, because the amendment that the member for Griffith has put forward is effectively going against the communities within the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. This is where the Labor Party is in a horrible position trying to say that they support basin communities, but the legislation and their policy are absolutely damning towards the impacts that they will have on Murray-Darling Basin communities.

It's been proven now, over many years, that every time you take water out of the Murray-Darling Basin from agriculture that you actually cause damage to those communities. Every time you take any policy that's going to force the price of water up, you are damaging the communities and you are having a negative impact on the communities. It's been proven, time and time again. The Murry-Darling Basin Plan now states—thanks to all of the states coming on board in late 2018 to accept and acknowledge—that for buybacks and water efficiency plans where half the savings are taken out of agriculture and put into the environment you have a damaging impact on the communities every time that takes place. Yet the Labor Party still have this as their primary policy towards water recovery within the Murry-Darling Basin and Murray-Darling Basin Plan. So the Labor Party are more or less saying with their policy and their amendments that: 'We don't care about the impacts that we have on communities. We don't care what the Murray-Darling Basin Plan says. We want to keep going after water, and we want to keep going after it until we recover another 450 gigalitres.' They have to be called out on this.

We have to start protecting our people, and we have to start being proud of agriculture. We have to start acknowledging that during the COVID pandemic the one thing we haven't had to worry about was agricultural product finding its way to the supermarket shelves. For many other countries around the world, that's their primary problem—is there going to be food on the shelves tomorrow? In Australia, our agricultural sector has been able to keep our supermarkets full of everything that we've needed. We need to protect this. We need to honour this. We need to be very, very proud of the fact that communities such as mine are continuing to deliver the agricultural produce so that we can, in fact, worry about our health problems through COVID. And, as we worry about sovereignty and our ability to operate as a nation, we need to look at water policy to ensure that we give our agricultural sector the opportunity that they need.

Effectively, what we need to do is wipe out this idea that there's another 450 gigalitres that we can somehow or other take out of agriculture without causing social and economic damage or without having social and economic impacts. The 450 has run its race, and we simply cannot take more water out of the system—this has been proven—without causing a whole range of social and economic damage. That's just simply the facts.

In this government, I'm very proud of what the minister has done in relation to ruling out buybacks. Buybacks are simply where the government finds a desperate farmer somewhere who needs to repay his debts and simply says to him, 'We'll buy your water off you, and we'll pay you a premium over and above what it's worth, simply to take water off your farm put it into the environment.' Buybacks totally decimate communities. They totally isolate the stranded assets that an irrigator might have because four of his farming neighbours have effectively sold their water under a buyback scheme. This might be all right for the farmers who sell their water and recover their water and recover the money they need to pay their debts, but it is decimating to the area and the community around those farms that have lost their water.

Our minister has effectively ruled out buybacks, as has the Victorian government. The Victorian government—the Victorian Labor Party—could teach the federal Labor Party a thing or two about water policy. Maybe they're a little bit closer to it. Maybe they understand it a little better. The idea that our minister has ruled out buybacks is incredibly encouraging for our farmers, but we need to legislate this, because we know that as soon as the Labor Party get their opportunity to sit on this side of the chamber in government—this is their policy at the moment—they will start buying back water from desperate farmers, with no regard whatsoever for the communities that they decimate. We all understand the importance of water in our regions. We need somehow to get the Labor Party in the federal sphere to come on board with supporting some of our communities. Reading the words of their own amendments, they don't want to leave basin communities behind, but their policies do exactly that. We are always prepared to work with them if they have the people of our areas as their No. 1 priority.

It's also been touched on in relation to the 605-gigalitre targets that some of them are not stacking up very well. These are projects that have been put forward by the states where we can achieve certain environmental objectives without using water—instead, being able to use engineering works and pumping processes but not having to flood with gigantic amounts of water. These projects have been struggling to come forward, especially from New South Wales. I'm suggesting that we need flexibility within these projects that are legislated and written in as gospel. Maybe if these projects are not able to proceed—I think again the minister is right on the ball here. Let's get on to the states to get on with it. Let's do what we can. Let's not talk about what we can't do. Let's not talk about the projects that can't be done. Let's go and complete the projects that can be done so that then we are looking at a smaller amount. Let's just see then if we can create some flexibility in the projects that are going to give us those 605 gigalitres of additional savings of the plan.

Once we build in that flexibility—we need to understand that, with climate change, we are going to have less water flowing into our river systems in the future. If that's going to be the case then we need to protect agriculture first. We need to protect our people first. That's where South Australia has some very serious questions to answer in relation to the science that was put around the history of the lower lakes. That science was doctored, so we have built on incorrect science about what the history of the lower lakes was for tens and hundreds of thousands of years. We need to look at that and at whether we need to have all this fresh water flowing into Lake Alexandrina. Do we need to have fresh water, trying to freshen the Coorong from the bottom of the mouth? The policies we have in place for South Australia at the moment are just absurd. All of this water comes out of communities further upstream. I can understand South Australia being concerned, because their system is more or less run through piping and sprinklers. Their system is contained. Their system has no losses and no leakages, whereas in Victoria you have the open channel system in concert with the centre pivots.

What we need more than anything is an understanding that the plan has been and continues to be incredibly damaging. The member for Griffith spoke about various reports and reviews that have been done. Well, we've done reviews looking into the Goulburn Valley, and $500 million per year in productivity is lost from the Goulburn Valley alone. But no-one wants to take that seriously. No-one wants to make any changes. The Labor Party continues to have some of the most damaging policies associated with water retrieval, policies that make it even worse for the communities that live and exist within the Murray-Darling Basin.

When the droughts come and the water starts to tighten, the prices go up and the farmers walk off their land. If the Labor Party think this is okay, then they can stick with their current policies, because that's the impact they will have. If the Labor Party wanted to, we could get together tomorrow and change the Water Act; we could change the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. We could work our way through this together. We could take no more water off the agricultural sector. We could say enough is enough. It has been proven that the 450 gigalitres cannot be delivered without serious social and economic pain and detriment to those communities, with damaging impacts. That has been proven. Yet the Labor Party's policy is still that if the 450 gigalitres is not returned then they're going to go back in and buy the water off desperate farmers. That is their policy, and it's disgraceful.

What we need to do is look at what our people have been telling us. We need to honour our agricultural sector. We need to look at the damaging impacts. Do we want to have New Zealand dairy products on our shelves, outcompeting our own? Do we want to have a thriving and prosperous dairy sector? Do we want to have a fruit sector that is up and vibrant and again competing on the world markets? Do we want to give our farmers an opportunity to compete on the world markets, or do we want to hamstring them completely? We've already taken so much water out of the Goulburn Valley, out of the Riverina and out of the Sunraysia. What we've taken out of those communities will never be able to be put back. We've already seen so much erosion and damage done to our river system because of catchment management authorities running so much water down the rivers at the wrong time of the year, causing all of this erosion. We've got to look at the damage we're doing to our environmental system, on top of the damage we're doing to the agricultural sector.

This bill is a fantastic start, bringing in the Inspector-General of Water Compliance, but we have to do a lot more work to achieve the outcomes that we want. (Time expired)

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