Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to speak on the economy and the environment. Bad policy and bad implementation lead to really bad outcomes, and this is very clear in my electorate of Nicholls. It's not only the people of South Australia who are very disappointed with the Labor government; it's the people who live in the Goulburn and Murray valleys. The Murray-Darling Basin Plan was supposed to deliver a triple bottom-line outcome: social, environmental and economic. It was supposed to support those principles. We would have an improved environment and we would have an improved economy, because we could still produce food and we could therefore have better social outcomes. The people who are employed in agriculture and the people who are employed in all those great food-producing industries, like in my electorate, could continue to be employed and we could continue to export clean, green food to many places, including South-East Asia and China.

But the bad implementation of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan and the pursuit of ripping more water away from irrigation, which is basically a political objective, not an environmental objective, has led to some really perverse outcomes. I want to explain one of those perverse outcomes to the House, because I think we could all bring examples that we understand, because we live it. That's what this place should be about. But what happens when excessive amounts of water are pushed down the Goulburn and Murray rivers to meet targets in the artificially fresh lower lakes of South Australia? Those rivers have unsustainably high flows in summer, and that damages the vegetation on the banks of the river. In the words of a peak fishing body in Victoria, 'It's a river, not a waterpipe.' If you think it's bad now, it's going to get a lot worse, because, under the previous environment and water minister, the buyback of more irrigation water to push more water down our precious rivers was authorised. It treats them like a waterpipe and sends it all down to South Australia, which not only damages the economy in my area but also damages the environment, because when the water keeps going up and down in summer, the vegetation that the catchment management authority has been trying to protect gets damaged. The banks are eroded; the rivers are silted up.

I grew up on the Goulburn River, and I've seen it my whole life. It's all very well for city members to interject that this is fantasy, but people in my community have lived it. In fact, Congupna farmer David Miles, who's a great steward of the environment, said: 'We've had some massive high summer flows, and they ruined the banks. There were massive erosion problems and trees falling in. They were softening the bank, then letting it dry out a little bit, and then letting the river rise.' This is what happens when you make policy and don't understand the implication of it.

It's not only that. I think that climate change is a significant challenge for the globe to face, and I am supportive of renewable energy in the right place, but what's happening in my electorate is that prime agricultural land is being taken over by wind turbines and solar panels. The trouble with that is that the communities are very against this. They think it's a terrible policy, because they've been stewards of that land. They've been building up the soil carbon levels for years; they've been growing wheat, canola and all sorts of different production. Now, we're going to have this incredible scarring of the landscape by 650 hectares, in one area, of solar projects. I think people don't understand the scale of what some of these solar projects are. Six hundred and fifty hectares is huge. And I don't object to using all sorts of technologies to try and reduce our emissions. I think it's really important. But when you start to take over prime agricultural land with all of these solar projects and then wind turbines, people don't understand just how much concrete has to be poured to house a wind turbine. When that wind turbine's life cycle ends, that concrete can't be used to install another turbine. Let's have a proper debate about the environment and the environmental degradation caused by the Murray-Darling Basin Plan and the reckless rollout of renewables.

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