Kay Hull (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to congratulate Coleambally Irrigation Cooperative Ltd, or CICL, on their successful application to do with the most timely and biggest issue on our agenda at the moment and their receipt of $12.53 million for irrigation practices. Coleambally Irrigation is most innovative and is full of aspirations in the area of ensuring water efficiency. It has received $12.53 million to implement an exciting project which will demonstrate the benefits of an integrated set of cost-effective control sensor and communication technologies for improving water-use efficiency in irrigation on a very large scale. The project will remove barriers to improved water-use efficiency in one of Australia’s major irrigation districts. This project will be used to demonstrate the capacity of a community based approach to effectively encourage water users to adopt a wide range of technologies and measures to improve water-use efficiency, optimise productive capacity and improve the cash-flow position of individual farming enterprises. The project outcomes will showcase the benefits of integrating existing technology and provide fundamental learnings for other national communities on ways in which to deliver positive change, particularly in water-use patterns in established open-channel irrigation areas. (Time expired)