Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am the member for Nicholls—someone from a critical, food producing basin community. I've been here for just over a year and I've seen some damaging legislation introduced by the Albanese government. I think it won't be too long before Australians start to realise, even more than they are now, how damaging some of this stuff is and that when you attack businesses you attack the fabric of Australian society. But this bill, the Water Amendment (Restoring Our Rivers) Bill 2023, takes the cake as the most damaging piece of legislation this new government has introduced. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the basin works and how basin communities work. What the original legislation was designed to do and how it worked is extremely disturbing.

What does this new legislation do? It recants a lot of the stuff the then Labor government initially put forward back in 2012. It does one thing that we agree with: to give an extension of time for what we call the SDLAM projects—the sustainable diversion limit adjustment mechanism. The SDLAM projects are about using infrastructure to get water to environmental assets more effectively and efficiently. Unfortunately, the states haven't had time to get the full range of projects up for a variety of reasons, including floods and COVID, and they needed extra time to do it. This legislation does that, and we support that part of it. But there are other elements of this legislation which we fundamentally cannot and will not support, because they are destructive not only to the basin communities and the economies of those basin communities but to the environmental assets in our basin communities. I will explain that shortly.

By removing the cap on buybacks, people just don't understand the damage that it will do. I'm going to try and explain this. When the Commonwealth government waltzes into a community and says, 'We're buying the water,' they're taking it out of what we call a consumptive pool. They're taking it away from production. If people get upset that Canadian super funds or Eddie McGuire, or whoever it is, might own water, at least when water is traded amongst entities who are in the water trading business, it's still there for farmers to buy to grow something with. When the Commonwealth enters the market, the water gets bought and is taken out of business. Then it's stored in Eildon or Hume and sits there.

A certain amount of that has been done, and my community has borne so much pain. When the water goes, so does the food or fibre that it produces, and not only does the food or fibre that it produces go but also all the economic activity that surrounds that produce. I'll give you an example. A megalitre of water is used to grow pears or apples. Apples are my favourite at the moment. Those apples are grown and picked. They're then taken into a pack house. They're sorted. They're packed. All the people who are employed in that process, up to that point, derive their economic future and their jobs from that process. Then the boxes get on a truck. Many of them go to other parts of Australia. All the people who handle that produce, whether they're the marketers, the people who are stacking it at Coles or Woolworths or wherever else, or the people who are involved in selling the produce—some of it goes onto ships and is exported—all the money that comes to Australia and benefits Australians from that process is gone when the megalitre of water goes away from consumptive agriculture and into the environment. That's what buybacks do.

A better way was found through on-farm irrigation efficiency projects. I've been involved in this personally, so I believe I know what I'm talking about when it comes to this. What we tried to do and what the government helped do was to say to the farmer, 'Okay, we'll give you extra money for the water—more than you probably would have got by selling it back—but the deal is that you have to use that money to put in a more efficient irrigation system so you can grow more with less.' I was involved in that with a company I worked for with subsurface drip irrigation, but many farms put in overhead pivots and improved flood irrigation—that was good because you could use less water to grow the same amount of produce. It was a good system. But buybacks are damaging.

This government wants to go back into the buyback business. What they're doing by going back into the buyback business is going back into the smash productivity business, back into the grow less food for Australia business, back into the risk of importing Chinese apples and peaches and God knows what else business. I didn't think I'd see a responsible government in Australia wanting to do that. The issue we have right now is that most of the basin plan has been done and is being done with the original 2,100 gigalitres that's already been either bought back or got back through the more responsible way of on-farm irrigation efficiency. That water has come out of communities like mine, so I don't really appreciate people over there saying that the plan has been sabotaged. You want to see a sabotaged plan, come to the Goulburn Valley and see what pain that water leaving has caused. But now we are where we are. The people of the Goulburn Valley appreciate that we needed Commonwealth water for environmental outcomes. So we have been prepared to wear some of this pain. We have been prepared to do it.

But the additional 450 gigalitres had a socioeconomic neutrality test. So the deal, we believed, if you can believe what the previous Labor government did—and the coalition government locked it in with some of the Labor states, by the way—was that that 450 gigalitres could not be taken away if it had a negative socioeconomic impact test. I've said this a few times in this place: what does 'socioeconomic' mean? It's society and its economy. So that means if it has a negative effect on the society in a basin community—that is Shepparton, Echuca or Yarrawonga—and the economy in those places then that water can't be taken. If you can find a way to do it without impacting on those basin communities' society and economy then let's do it. I think there are opportunities to that. We don't want to see South Australia miss out, but you've got to be able to do it without impacting on the society and the economy. That's the socioeconomic impact. That was the deal. That was the deal we all thought we had.

Now we come into this place and the Minister for the Environment and Water says: 'The socioeconomic impact test is gone holus-bolus. Let's go in and buy that 450 gigalitres back and, if it damages your society, Member for Nicholls, if it damages your society, Member for Riverina, or if it damages your society, Member for Farrer—guess what?—we don't care anymore.' What do you think it feels like in a place like the Goulburn Valley to hear a government say that? It's pretty rough. There is such a better way to do this. I wish people had the compassion and the intelligence to think about how we could get this done in a much better way.

I just want to explain for these irrigation systems that have been running for over 100 years and have a legacy of great impact in terms of food production, iconic businesses like SPC and Tatura Milk, a bit about how they work. It basically works because people own licences to pump out of rivers or extract water from channels, but if the dam gets low in the dry times that we inevitably have then you'll get less of your allocation. Yield is at 100 per cent at the moment. The river is very healthy, by the way. I don't know where this alarmism that the river is not healthy is coming from. But I know that there will be dry times and Eildon or Hume will reduce in their capacity. What happens then is there's an system that irrigators automatically get a lower percentage of the water that they own. So they might get 60 per cent of the water that they own. That's critical because what happens then is that orchardists who have trees that needs to be irrigated no matter what can buy water from the dairy farmer, who can say, 'I can make more money selling my water to the orchardist and I'll buy hay instead of growing pasture.' That's the delicate balance in the system, and that's what makes it work. If we remove so much water from the irrigation system that there's not enough to be traded between the perennial planting, which is the apple tree grower, the orange tree grower or the almond grower, and the farmer who has the ability to grow annual crops, such as pasture or rice, the fundamental balance of the irrigation system won't work anymore. The $2 billion in infrastructure that has been put into the Goulburn-Murray Irrigation District will become a waste of money because the whole system collapses.

Those are the incredibly damaging economic, societal and business effects of this callous, unthinking legislation. But there are also some environmental impacts. The lack of understanding is just unfathomable. If you try to push all that water down the river system to improve an environmental asset further down, you damage environmental assets such as the Goulburn River or the Murray River that's in my electorate and other people's electorates. The river will run too high at the wrong time of the year and it will damage the bank. The catchment management authority have shown me this. Before I came into this place, I had politicians on tinnies—National Party people, Labor people and Liberal people—looking at what these high flows were doing to the bank. How much worse is that going to get if you try and shove 450 gigalitres down the river system? The Goulburn River, which is the most beautiful river—it's the river I grew up on; it's a place of real importance to me—will turn into a channel. It's not a channel; it's a river. There's so much more thought that needs to go into this.

This legislation does not understand what it will do both to the environment and to society. This is a real tragedy. People in my electorate are calling this the Alamo. They're saying that this is it. They're saying this is an existential crisis. This is really serious stuff. I've got a fruit cannery called SPC in my electorate. They got going in 1918. I've had old war diggers telling me what they went through when they were serving in World War II, Korea or Vietnam. The greatest moments of their life were when they got their ration pack and pulled out a tin of SPC peaches, because it was from home, it was from Australia and it was healthy food. They've been doing this for so long. If you go into a supermarket now there's the SPC product. I always try to buy the SPC product. It's so important. But next to it there is the Chinese snack pack. God knows what environmental impact, economic impact or socio-economic impact that has had. Do we want our peaches and our kids' food to come from this country or do we want to bring it in from China? I just ask you that. It's not a scare campaign. That's what will happen if damaging legislation like this goes through, and I oppose it fundamentally.

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