Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I seek to take note of the minister's response. As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I note that there is a reason this matter will not go away, and it is not just the dogged pursuit of this scandal by Senator Patrick, for which he is to be complimented and commended. I've spent many weeks touring the Murray-Darling Basin, listening to locals who are telling me that this deal is crook. The government purchased water licences that have been assembled into one line by a local company called Eastern Australia Agriculture that Mr Angus Taylor formed, owned and registered in the Cayman Islands before selling out to unknown buyers. Mr Joyce, as minister, bought this on behalf of the government. This is a case of the Liberals and the National Party working closely together—no split here.

Let me share the context and the facts so that people can make up their minds themselves. This was not real water; it was overland flow, meaning that the water can be taken only if the Condamine-Balonne Valley is in flood. By its very nature, overland flow is unreliable water. A qualifying flood occurs once every five years on average. So, this is lower security than low security. This is why overland flow is the cheapest form of permanent water licence—the cheapest. The Australian National Audit Office gave this water a very generous valuation in the range of $1,100 to $2,300 per megalitre. It's also worth noting that the unredacted valuation document advised the Commonwealth that a price in the lower end of that range would be appropriate, most likely because the actual value of this water in the market at the time was between $750 and $950 a megalitre. This is based on the only previous large sale of overland flow water in the lower Balonne, in 2008, for just $800 a megalitre and despite the water being valued on Eastern Australia Agriculture's own books at just $950 a megalitre.

In a move that makes a joke of good governance, the government paid $2,745 per megalitre. That's almost three times what it is valued at on Eastern Australia Agriculture's books and way over double what the Australian National Audit Office valued it at. Much attention has been given to who Eastern Australia Agriculture are, so I don't need to go there as well. I would just like to point out that water flows into the Murray-Darling Basin in 2020 are exactly equal to their long-term average. The whole premise of this purchase of reduced inflows caused by climate change requiring urgent government action is statistical rubbish—it is nonsense. One Nation agrees that there are substantially reduced flows coming from the Northern Rivers into the Darling and then into Menindee Lakes. This is not coming from climate change, and it is not being caused by farmers taking water for which they have a legitimate licence. These reduced flows are being caused by illegal floodplain harvesting.

The minister is not doing enough to restore the integrity of water licences in the basin and, through that, restore environmental flows that are being hijacked by illegal floodplain harvesting. The question now is: why did the government buy this water at all? The water was purchased by the Commonwealth towards environmental flows under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan—the infant born out of the Water Act 2007 that's now doing so much damage in this country. What does not make sense is that flood flows are environmental flows. This periodic flooding waters native vegetation in an entirely natural cycle. Australian flora, as most people understand, has evolved to thrive on receiving a good drink only every few years, followed by long periods with only the natural rainfall to tide them over to the next flood. The government has effectively bought environmental flows for use in a flood and paid $80 million of taxpayer money to do it—$80 million to pay for environmental flows in a flood.

What extra good would that little bit of new environmental water do in amongst all that environmental floodwater flowing down the river in a major flooding event? Nothing! It wouldn't do a thing. The only way this water could have been useful to the Commonwealth Environmental Water Office is if the water had been stored in a public dam and then released after the drought to produce environmental flows at the discretion of the Commonwealth Environmental Water Office. Once water is stored in this manner and released at the discretion of the owner, it is not overland water; it's general security water. Here's the problem with doing that. The licence attached to overland water allows that water to be used only on the property the licence belongs to. It has no legal standing once it's removed from the property.

The Commonwealth government was prepared to pay $1,800 per megalitre over the market—that's three times the market—for 27,000 megalitres of water, because it had every intention of quietly reclassifying overland water into general security water. Where are the approvals for that? Where's the business case? Where's the due diligence? Where is the environmental impact study to show that watering forests outside of their natural cycle does any good at all? The office of the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder has been watering the Barmah Forest, for example, nonstop for 18 months now. The forest has never been allowed to dry out as it naturally would. The result, thanks to the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder, has been devastating to the natural environment. Trees are dying; native grasses are dying; the flora of the forest is black with rancid, dead water.

At no time has this aspect of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan been reviewed. The minister's department has allowed water purchases that were not needed at a price that borders on criminal incompetence. The minister's department have treated the terms of their water licence as a joke and set out on unsupervised, unaccountable vandalism of the natural environment. Meanwhile, the government's mates are laughing all the way to the bank. What a scandal!