Bill Heffernan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will begin by commending Senator Polley on an excellent speech and saying that it crosses over to men and prostate cancer as well—so congratulations.

I rise today with great melancholy to deal with what I think could be a possible fraud of the public purse. I rise on behalf of the taxpayers of Australia. They say it is never a secret that gets people into trouble; it is keeping the secret that gets you into trouble. I would like to delve into the keeping of a secret relating to the water buyback in the Nimmie-Caira, the lower Murrumbidgee. I am chairing an inquiry in which Mr Harris, from the New South Wales department, came to the inquiry and said, 'We're not prepared to reveal any of the commercial details around this deal.' I would like to take this chamber and Australia's taxpayers on a little journey and ask some questions to try to open up the secret and get the details.

As part of signing up to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, there is a requirement to buy back water from each state. New South Wales have discovered a unique proposition that could allow them to book 380 gigs—173 gigs net—by buying water off the flood plain in the Lowbidgee from farmers who for many years have diverted water, some of it flood and some of it supplementary, through the weir system of Redbank and Maude. I have to confess that I have had cattle on agistment and I know the country well. Dear old Barry Hodgson started it off years ago. This water has been unlicensed, unmetered, unregulated and free—except for an area cost which has been about $1 an acre. A lot of the country that is levied for that dollar an acre in a lot of years does not get the water. So these guys are about to win lotto—and good luck to them if they get away with it!

The original offer was placed in October 2011. This is about the New South Wales government trying to find a way to fill the water buyback book without affecting irrigators—and good luck to them, but I think this is a fraud. The states are almost putting the federal government in a situation of political blackmail by saying, 'If you don't agree to these sorts of deals, we're not going to sign the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.' As I say, this is all secret squirrel stuff. Mr Harris, in evidence to the committee, said that the proposed price that has been to the Commonwealth is commercial in confidence but has already been decided. That was on 10 September this year. They refused to say what the price is, even though they have said that they are prepared to pay 2¼ times the market value for the water, having issued the licence for the water. My question to Mr Harris is: how could they be negotiating without a conflict of interest the price of water for licences that were yet to be created? By 10 September they had decided the value of the water that was to be created in future licences.

Last Thursday they actually put an instrument through, signed by Mr Andrew Stoner—and I will table the commencement proclamation of the amendments to the Water Management Act 2000 No. 92—to enable the creation of 747 gigs of new water licences outside the normal regime. That is for what would be supplementary water—and the government could not explain to me the changeover between supplementary and flood. When you get an excess flow or an off-allocation flow and then get another rain and it becomes a flood over the bank, it is the same water.