Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have referred before to the north-south pipeline, sometimes referred to as the Sugarloaf Reservoir project, and I want to talk about it again tonight. This is, of course, an extraordinary project which has the object of delivering water to Melbourne for their toilets, gardens and car washing. The water is to come away from the Murray-Darling Basin and be pumped over the Great Divide. The water is to come out of the Goulburn River system—which, sadly, is already designated as the most stressed of the major tributaries to the Murray River.

It is acknowledged officially that there are not the water savings to be found in the so-called Food Bowl Modernisation Project—which is plastic-lining irrigation channels in the Goulburn-Murray region and installing different metering systems. But, despite there not being water saved to put down this pipeline, there is still a statement being made from the Brumby-led Victorian government that there will be, ahead of schedule, water pushed down this pipeline, up over the Great Divide to Melbourne. In fact, they are bringing forward this pipeline event to early next year.

You would wonder where they are going to get the water from, given the Eildon Dam is down to some 15 per cent and below capacity. Mr Brumby is quite satisfied that there is sufficient of the environmental reserve left in the dam that he can take. He admits that there is 10 gigalitres of that 30 gigalitre reserve already given to the Coliban Water Authority to pipe via the so-called ‘superpipe’ to Bendigo, but there are still some 20 gigalitres of environmental reserve left. Apparently Mr Brumby is going to use that water.

The extraordinary thing is that Minister Garrett, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts in this place, has made this pipeline a controlled action under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. He has quite categorically made one of the conditions the fact that the environmental reserve is not to be used to push water down the pipeline to Melbourne. So we are wondering what is going on. Why are Minister Garrett’s EPBC conditions being ignored? What is the power of the EPBC if it can be so actively flouted? Then we have the so-called ‘superpipe’ taking water out of that same system via Waranga Basin to Bendigo. Sadly, this pipeline was pushed through, again like the north-south pipeline, without any environmental, economic cost-benefit analysis whatsoever. The pipe was pushed through so fast that technically it is a very unsatisfactory conduit for water. It leaks. Coliban has acknowledged that. They said, ‘Yes, it does leak, but it’s not dirt building up in it; it’s just organic matter.’ The farmers whose properties this pipeline goes through have been quite interested in having their billabongs and low points filled with the leaking water over the drought periods of summer, but now they are much more concerned that they cannot crop their country because of the leaking pipeline and the disturbed ground which runs along the surface of this pipeline, where it has been buried, is now not farmable. They cannot farm their properties because there is a real problem of lack of compaction and such poorly laid pipes that their farms have become divided by this easement running through them. They have gone to Coliban and asked for compensation. Of course, Coliban has refused to talk to them. We have a real problem. Coliban has a real problem and they are saying, ‘We’ll do another pipe but this time we’ll stick it at the top of the Waranga Basin. That way we can get even more water out of the system than the 100 megalitres we take daily at the moment.’

The Eildon Dam system—the Goulburn-Murray system in the Murray-Darling basin—cannot supply Bendigo, Ballarat, Castlemaine, Kyneton and a number of Loddon River towns, as well as Melbourne and Geelong, but that is the expectation of the Brumby led government. This is environmental vandalism and it is destroying the agricultural, water security and food bowl future for constituents in northern Victoria. You do not have food security when you have no water security. There are 23 food manufacturing enterprises in the area who will lose their workforce and the transport sector that serves them. This is an extraordinarily serious problem which has been totally ignored by this government and the EPBC Act which should have been operative and brought the Brumby government to heal, but it appears to be completely powerless. (Time expired)