Ross Cadell (NSW, National Party, Shadow Minister for Water) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, President. Basin policy isn't academic. It's about whether towns can survive, thrive and grow and whether they can supply the needs of Australia. This is why water policy is so important. Water is life—let's not pretend anything else—and the Murray-Darling Basin Plan dictates so much of that in regional Australia. When we have a town like Bourke that has lost 40 per cent of its water supply and 60 per cent of its population over the last 10 years, you see the effect it has on communities.

The President was talking about the water I have on my table. This is water from Narrandera, from the tap. People from the city, who don't understand, will call it Narran-derr-a, but it is Narrandera. This is what people can expect in the bush. That is pure tap water that we have there.

This is why we have to go through with this. What we need is action. We can talk about royal commissions and different policies, but you can't create that unless you are the government. This is why we're here today to call a committee of inquiry that can do something now and look into the actions of one of the largest water holders in the country and how it operates, because there has been concern over the past year. There have been instances where they ceased to pump water in New South Wales because they admitted themselves that they weren't compliant with the New South Wales water-metering standards. This is the largest water holder in New South Wales saying they can pump no more because they don't comply with the rules. This is the government's water holder saying that.

If we're in these situations, we need to look at what happens. This is a water holder that has not used its allocation since it's been around. They never use their full allocation, but they continue to buy more water. When you question how much water they have bought, it is not for publication. You have to dig deep and do a forensic dive to see how much they are spending. Look at the WESA report. They're talking about $1.6 billion or $1.7 billion—up to $2 billion per year buying water rights when they aren't using the water they already have. Something is crook in Tobruk if you are spending billions to buy more water when you're not using the water you have.

Later on in this conversation, we'll hear the people of South Australia say, 'We want more water; we want more.' They already have enough water to give more water, but we are buying more water off towns, growers and communities that need it. When I was out at Louth, out past Bourke, we saw a weir. Under the framework, they had to lower the weir to build a new one because you can have no more containment or no more capture under this legislation. So they wanted to spend $70 million to lower the water security of Louth. This is a place that had put its own people on fire alerts because, over the last two months of the last season, it didn't have enough water to put out a house fire if it happened. They did not have enough water under their licence to prevent a house fire, so they went around proactively trying to do this.

What we're doing here is having a look at this, because river health is so important. No-one is saying that is not the case. But, if you go down to Shepparton and look at the river down there, where the Goulburn River and the Broken River join together, there is no ability to get the water licences they hold in that catchment out of that river, because of the choke and other reasons. When you can't get the water out of where you own it, there is no point owning it. So downstream from there, in South Australia and Victoria, all these areas can't get that environmental water flow benefit. What we're seeing more and more is that, when there are environmental releases, they cause localised flooding in agricultural areas. The water isn't going to the environment or the wetlands. It's not going to the Coorong, as so many people claim. It is going on agricultural land because there is too much for the banks of the river to hold.

That is why we're here today calling for an inquiry now, not waiting for a government to change its mind and have a royal commission on the future and not doing anything that relies on the goodwill of the Labor government. We are calling for something the parliament can do. The important part of this is that this commission would report back to the parliament, not get a report to the government, which would sit on it for months or years—forever and a day—and never reply. This would be an open policy where we can see what the concerns are going forward. Since the start of the current government, $5.9 billion has come out of water infrastructure and gone into buybacks—almost $6 billion. Water infrastructure—the National Water Grid—is crying out for funding. The Wilcannia Weir needs to be upgraded, and Wilcannia is another town that's running out of water. The state government said how much they would spend to upgrade the Wilcannia Weir, but the federal government was not able to match it, so the Wilcannia Weir is off the record—once again, another town where water security will not happen because we can find $6 billion to take water out of communities but we can't find $70 million to put water into communities. That is the farce that we deal with as we go forward.

We're not just saying this government is wrong on water. Let's be honest here: state governments have so much to do in this plan, and they didn't do it. They aren't doing the work. They aren't doing the SDL work or the complementary measure works that are required under this plan. When I spoke to a state water minister who signed the deal at the time, this is the quote I got: 'I signed up for the benefits. I never thought I would have to do the work.' That is the attitude here. Without someone in charge of water, it is always somebody else's problem. So we are not seeing the work done on river health. We are not seeing the work done on catchments. We are not in the work done on carp in the catchment. Let's face it: what would these rivers look like if we didn't have these introduced monsters tearing up the bottoms, getting rid of life and killing native species all throughout? I know the communities are there. I know VicWater is very keen for a trial of carp eradication in Victoria, and I say Lake Brewster would be a great site for a trial in New South Wales. That's in the northern end of the Farrer electorate.

We're talking about doing what we have to do to put life back into regional Australia, not to harm the environment. People get up and say, 'Oh, that's stealing the water,' and this, that and the other. The old joke is that everyone upstream steals and everyone downstream wastes it, but is not the case. This is a case of no-one taking responsibility for the effective management of water throughout the chain. This inquiry would only get down to how much is being spent. It is getting away from the not-for-publications. How is the water being used? What are the successes? That is the thing. If you read the Northern basin toolkit report, you'll see some of the massive failures in national water grid funding and you won't see many successes, because the states aren't stepping up. I don't want to put a whole lot of stuff where it's not needed. The federal government has been okay with supplying the money, but the states aren't doing the work. The fact is that the federal money shouldn't be buying water back; it should be making the states do this work.

Go out to the Menindee Lakes. Under the original plan, one of the man-made ones and one of the original ones were meant to be closed down. This was meant to deepen the rest of them so we wouldn't have the evaporation problem. What is happening with the lining of channels? What is happening with the evaporation work that goes on? All of these things can be looked at. What has happened year on year with the accrual of DCCEEW water and the environmental water not being used is it is increasing the capacity of environment water in dams, so the usable water is getting smaller. If you don't use 20 per cent of your environmental water this year and it accrues in the dam, that is a high percentage of that dam that it is used for environmental water. Year on year, it gets bigger, so much less water is available in our storage units for agricultural and community use. I get that 71 per cent of our water is accrued environmental flows, but, when it is taking over the catchments—so we might have a tonne of water; we just can't use it in communities. We can't get it down the rivers. We can't get it down the chokes. When we do, as I said, we are flooding towns. We had the triple bottom line test there. It had to be environmentally, economically and socially acceptable before we went on any buyback. That has gone by the wayside.

I'll go back to Bourke again. When you go through the 60 per cent population drop, a sad stat when we talk about regionality and our Indigenous people, no-one has graduated from Bourke High School within an ATAR in eight years. In eight years, no-one has graduated from Bourke High School with an ATAR, because the population is falling and because the investment in the town is diminishing. That is the indictment. You're not going to close the gap. You're not going to help Indigenous people until the communities they live in and around are prosperous. It's geographical isolation as much as it is a racial problem, and we have to fix these things. We can't walk away from that.

Our farmers already know. They are trying to be more productive with the water they have, but, when you're out there and things are tough and the government is spending up to $2 billion a year in the market, it is very attractive to sell your water. I get that. I cannot blame you for trying to survive. But the government should not be buying the water. This is what we get down to. It should be spending this money on infrastructure to make sure the water we have is used better. Environmental uplift water is there; why don't we have economic uplift water? If a town can be better and be more, why can't a town go to DCCEEW and say, 'I've got a chance to make my community better by doing this,' after which DCCEEW leases them water? Why are we buying water instead of short-term leases when we need it? There are many more things you can look at in what we do. The latest thing this term is another 130-gigalitre buyback. Once again, I've said on the record: we don't use the water we've got, but under this we've removed the guidelines to a 130 gigalitre buyback in this term of government.

We in the Nationals and the coalition Liberals oppose all water buybacks in the basin. They have enough water. There should be no more buybacks until everyone does what they said they would do at the beginning, and you'll see you do not need them. Get rid of the carp, put the infrastructure in, build better storage, and we will be fine—I say as I'm choking. I'll have a drink of my Narrandera water! When communities don't even have safe drinking water, how can they thrive? This is why we need to fund the water treatment works as part of the national water grid. This is why we need to consider people again. It is not just the environment. It is people, and it is accounting for all water. You can't divert the channel waters that used to flow from the Coorong into the ocean and not account for them. You cannot have overland flow harvesting, where you can't take the water even though you're flooding, which causes destruction of the banks and rivers down low. If you take more water, which actually mitigates some of that flooding, you are in breach of the act. This is ridiculous.

This bill calls on an open inquiry into the aspect of Commonwealth water only. It is not a free-for-all on who took what and who does what in the environment. It is narrow to the actions of government. But it is something we can do now by passing a bill that reports back to the parliament. It is a real thing. If the government, the Greens and everyone believe that the CEWH is doing the right thing, they should welcome the scrutiny and get the tick. I do not believe that the CEWH is doing the right thing at the moment. I don't believe it's necessarily bad management. I don't think it's bad operation. I think the rules under which they operate are unfair to communities and farmers. That is why we want to do this.

A royal commission may take some time; it may take two years. It comes back to government, and they look at all sorts of things. Depending on who the royal commissioner is, it may be very unsuccessful for the people that want it. But this will get to the bottom of the operations of the largest water holder in the basin. It will get to the operations of government. It will be done quicker and be more cost effective to the people, and we'll get an answer that everyone can see. Unlike we see in my Narrandera water, we want transparency in this basin. We want transparency in decisions. And we want transparency in water flows and allocation, because so much of Australia relies on it.

Like we're seeing national sovereignty and oil supply lines run out right now, we will see the same with food if we don't protect these communities. When we are putting foreign food on our foreign tables brought in with our foreign cars because we can't use Australian water or Australian resources to grow them, this is where we go. We want clear answers on environmental water, what is being done, what is being achieved and what it has cost our communities. When they come here and tell the real stories they have—as I said, storage has been overtaken by environmental water, and the environmental water is flooding irrigation areas and farmlands, and communities are suffering—it is not good enough. We are spending so much of our money covering for states that will not do the work, refuse to do the work and keep coming back and saying, 'more money for this, more money for that'. We don't have it anymore, because we're spending it on bloody water buybacks. Why does the government need more of something they have too much of?

We can make the environment blossom with the water we have using better management. We can make the farmers more efficient with the water they've got by doing works that protect it. I urge the parliament to support this bill. It is so important for the regions. It is so important for our communities. And, if we don't, we are turning our backs on our farmers.