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

There will be several documents. I will seek leave at the end of my speech. A lot of this water is being bought off a flood plain which has been engineered to flood-plain-farm and now they are proposing to buy the water back off that flood plain—and they have not been able to explain either in my committee or in the New South Wales parliament what they are going to do with the land after they take the water off it. They were going to turn it into a national park—but I think they have changed their mind about that.

The clerks of the New South Wales parliament have never seen such a proposition in the way that it has been put. It is a unique game. It has been done by an instrument which has no disallowance. Mind you, no-one—not this parliament and not the other parliament—knows the financial commercial-in-confidence details of this deal. It can only be reversed by killing off the entire Water Act. So it is pretty unique. Minister Hodgkinson, in evidence at the estimates in New South Wales, said that she had not read the business plan surrounding this deal, even though she has perused a summary—as reminded by Mr Harris.

To the best of my knowledge, the New South Wales offer in October 2011 to these landholders to buy back the water—which is buying back the water when you are not buying back the water because a lot of it is just floodwater that is going to go back down to the flood plain when it floods—was $100 million. We kicked up a bit of a fuss here in various committees—and I understand that I get a bit of a mention in the various paperwork in New South Wales as a troublemaker. In June 2012, that package, which, as I understand it, includes the land—I have never known where you buy water but you have to buy the windmills, the troughs, the fences and everything—grew to $183 million plus 10 per cent for a contingency, which is $205 million.

In estimates just the other day, Mr Stoner was asked what he knew about the Nimmie-Caira buyback. I have the transcript here. He said: 'I'm not aware of the Nimmie-Caira water buybacks.' Yet on 4 October he was actually a signatory to the enactment of the amendments to the Water Management Act that made into an instrument the water buybacks.

So then you hear that the minister has not read the financial plan surrounding it. Why the rush? They have rushed it through in a way that the clerks have never seen anything like before, the minister has not read the document and to the best of my knowledge there have been no valuations done. And how can Mr Harris, the bureaucrat involved, negotiate the sale of water licences and the creation of those water licences—negotiate the sale of the water licences before the water licences are created—and also come to a determination as to what they are worth?

The New South Wales government has said—and they are almost bludgeoning the Commonwealth government into this—that they are prepared to pay 2¼ times the market value of the water for these licences under a new water licence that was created last Thursday. Yet the price for those water licences was determined a month or two before. How can you then not see that there is something dodgy going on here, given that they do not know, and that there is no environmental plan to confirm, what you do with a flood plain once you take the water off it? And how do you prevent the floodwater going back down the flood plain in a flood? This is water bought back for the environment that allegedly is going to be sent to some other environment, but at the same time Mother Nature is going to say when it goes over the bank in the Lowbidgee at the Redbank and Maude weirs, 'It will go down the same flood plain'.

They were going to turn it into a national park. Now they are saying, 'Oh, we might give consideration to somehow engineering it so that the farmers can still use some of it'. These farmers are about to win Lotto, and good luck to them, because a lot of the land that the water was allocated to does not actually get there in the lower flows. So they are getting something for nothing and the government is getting 380 gigs. To get to 173 net gigs they are actually buying 380 gigs—that is somehow the magical average of the water, but we have to pay the top price. They will not tell us the value of the water, which they have determined is a special class of supplementary water, and yet Australia's taxpayers are supposed to cop this.

In evidence to the estimates in New South Wales the government has said—and Mr Harris has said—that the only way they will reveal the valuations is if the Commonwealth agrees for them to be released. So today I am here in the parliament, in the Senate, saying to the Commonwealth—pleading on behalf of Australia's taxpayers—to make this absolutely a transparent process. Why the secrecy? Why not tell us what they think the commercial value of supplementary water—this special class of supplementary water—is?

Bear in mind that they bought water off Tandou, and as the chief executive of Tandou said when I rang him a year or two ago: 'Bill, we've won the lottery! We've sold 230 gigalitres of supplementary water to the Commonwealth. We've won the lottery!' That was 11 gigs net at the conjunction of the Murray and the Darling, and they had to buy 230 gigs of supplementary water. As he said, 'We will buy this water back on the spot market,' because when supplementary water is available there is plenty of water in the system! How brain dead do you have to be not to see that this is cooking the water buyback book?

There is some urgency by New South Wales. The minister has not read the business plan. The person who signed off was the deputy governor—they had to get someone because the Governor was away; last Thursday I think it was. He did not even know what the Nimmie-Caira was, even though he signed off the government instrument on it. What are we to think on behalf of Australia's taxpayers? Mr Harris said he will not reveal the values because they are commercial in confidence. Will the Commonwealth release the details and make this a transparent process? It was gazetted in New South Wales last Thursday, but the price for the water in anticipation of getting the licences—put the cart before the horse!—was made some months ago. And the person who put the whole deal together and hardly kept the minister or the government informed, because there was an urgency about how they were going to cook the books, did the whole deal. How can you have an independent valuation if the one person is working out how to allocate the licences, then what the licences are worth and then the deal to buy back the licences? I just think that these sorts of things ought to have full transparency. I think that the only way out of this now is to kill the Water Act, because the instrument they used is not disallowable.

So this is with regret, and this will not be the finish of it today, because I decided I would not go through the technical side of this—there is plenty of technical work to be done. I might ask the question: if you take water off a flood plain which was originally a lignum flood plain and do not let Mother Nature do its thing on the flood plain, what happens to the flood plain? I can tell you: it becomes a poverty bush desert. To the best of my knowledge, that is what is proposed here. Originally they were going to turn it into a national park adjacent to Yanga, which was supposed to be a wonderful set-up—the same as Toorale. A waste of good country! The pigs are building up, the kangaroos are building up and there are no tourists, the Noogoora burr is building up, the Bathurst burr is building up, and the fuel load is building up. If the lightning strikes it could be like at Lignum Park between Mossgiel and Ivanhoe the other day, where it burnt 15,000 acres in one night just with one lightning strike.

We are allowing all this to go on at the same time as cutting back the people employed in these departments that are allegedly supervising it. They have just bought another national park adjacent to a place I have down there. On Saturday I saw a convoy of six national parks trucks with two people who were all smiles driving in—no tourists. God knows what that all cost and God knows what a waste it is of productive, beautiful saltbush sheep country.

But here we are at both a Commonwealth and a state level doing a deal which could be worth $200 million with the remediation required and they are saying, 'We are not going to tell you what we are paying for anything.' I say that this has the potential for a judicial inquiry. I think this has the potential to be a serious fraud on the public purse. I seek leave to table the commencement proclamation and the actual amended act.

Leave granted.