We’ve just heard that the Labor Party and the Greens are teaming up again to sell out farming communities across Australia and Australian families who are already struggling to pay for groceries at the shops. This bill, the Water Amendment (Restoring Our Rivers) Bill, will mean that there’ll be less water used to grow food in Australia. That’s what it will do. It will remove a cap on water buybacks that was properly put in place to protect Australia’s agricultural productivity and food availability for all Australians. Now our nation’s food bowl in the Murray-Darling Basin, a place that accounts for over 40 per cent of our food production and over 70 per cent of our peaches, apples, oranges and massive amounts of the fresh food in our shops, will be the playground of the Labor Party and the Greens to rip out water from food production and reduce the amount of food that is grown in our country.
We already have a cost-of-living crisis. People are struggling to pay their bills. The government is going underwater because they’re doing nothing to respond to the fact that people are struggling to pay their mortgages. Every time you go to Coles and Woolworths, you play that game where you estimate how much is in the trolley and how much it’s going to cost you when you go through the checkout. Every time you do, you end up responding: ‘Holy hell, that is a lot more than I thought it would be! Holy hell, I thought that would be half of what I put there, and this is just a couple of meals for my family this week! It’s costing me a fortune.’ People are struggling. They now know that when they walk into the shops, they have to think, ‘Have I got enough on the credit card to get out the other way once I get what my family needs?’ And this government is doing nothing to help. In fact, the deal that they’ve just done with the Greens today is going to make things worse. If we grow less food, it’s going to cost more for everybody in this country. It’s a simple economic reality that this government does not seem to understand. They don’t understand simple economics. You reduce the supply of something, you increase its price.
We’ve heard that directly. Liberal and National senators, including myself, travelled through the Murray-Darling in recent months. The government hasn’t done that. The Senate didn’t do that. We had a committee looking into this bill. This bill was referred to a Senate committee. That committee refused to hold hearings in the actual Murray-Darling. They hold hearings here in Canberra, and notionally, this is in the Murray-Darling, but, of course, this town is not where the food is grown. They use a bit of water here and build dams for their own purposes, but they do not produce our food. The Labor and Greens senators refused to go to the communities and towns that grow our food and supply everything in our shops, as I said, 40 per cent, almost all of our food. Especially in southern Australia, almost all of our food comes from this area.
The reason they didn’t go is that they didn’t want to hear the cold, hard truth that this bill, this proposal between the Labor Party and the Greens, will increase the price of your shopping trollies even more. That is the cold, hard truth of this bill. We heard that ourselves when we went, so we decided to establish our own committee. We established our own extra parliamentary committee. We didn’t have the resources of the parliament. We didn’t have big budgets. We teamed up as a group of senators from both the Liberal and National parties.
We travelled to Shepparton, Mildura, Renmark, Griffith and Moree—all proud, beautiful farming towns that grow our nation’s food. Many of us would know these towns because these towns are actually in your shops. That’s one thing that struck me as I was driving around the region with my colleagues. When you see SPC at your shops, some people probably don’t realise that that’s Shepparton Preserving Company. That’s Shepparton on your shelves in your shopping centre. Mildura is also known as the Sunraysia region. You can get Sunraysia dried fruits from that region. I think Berri is defunct. Berri fruit juices is no longer around, unfortunately. Berri fruit juices used to be from the Berri and Renmark region in South Australia. All of these places are effectively wrapped up with our nation’s history and heritage, which this government is destroying, effectively, through its policies in league with the Greens.
When we went Shepparton, we went to the SPC factory. We heard from lots of local businesses and farmers in the region, and heard from the CEO of SPC. As I said, they make all that preserved, tinned fruit in your shops. They’ve got some beautiful new drinks hitting the shops as well. He very clearly said to us that, if you cut the amount of water supplied in the Shepparton region, that will reduce the amount of peaches and fruit, which he needs to run his factory. It will increase input costs for people. He will have to pass those input costs on. SPC nearly went broke a few years ago. They’re not made of money. It’s tough being in the food supply business, facing competition from overseas and the pressures put on by Coles and Woolworths. It’s a very tough business. They will have to increase their prices.
I want to be clear and outline why this bill will increase those input costs for farmers. At a broad level: if you reduce supply, you increase the costs. I want to go through in detail how that happens, because I don’t think the government quite understand that. The Greens either wilfully ignore it or don’t understand it. They don’t go there and don’t hear from farmers about how the system works. These areas like Shepparton, when they grow food, don’t work like individual businesses. There are no farmers who are an island in this area. They are all connected through the irrigation network. These irrigation networks were built, sometimes, over 100 years ago. They were planned by people with great vision. A lot of these areas were deserts before they put these irrigation channels in—that’s definitely true for Griffith. There was not much there before very visionary Australian men and women, sometimes around 100 years ago, carved out these irrigation channels and built dams so they could grow food and make these beautiful communities and farms in these areas. When they did that, they planned out this system so they could minimise costs. It costs money to send water from a dam or water storage down a channel. You have to upkeep the channels and invest in them every year to make sure they still work. Monitoring and metering cost money. When the government come along with this bill, what they’re going to do is say to Joe Bloggs on his farm in, say, the Murrumbidgee irrigation area, ‘We want to pay you’—taxpayers’ money, not their money; your money—’to stop using water.’ That farm shuts down. That farmer normally does pretty well. The farmer gets a pretty good price because the government’s not negotiating with its money—it’s using your money—so it tends to overpay for the water. The farmer does well. They can go and buy another farm, retire or do whatever they like; it’s happy days.
But what happens to the rest of the farmers that are stuck there? That irrigation network is now like Swiss cheese. The irrigation network has a hole in it. Water passes that farm, but the farmer is not there to contribute to the costs of upkeeping that irrigation network that was planned and run to minimise costs. When the government pock marks an irrigation network by buying out farms in an uncoordinated fashion, which they also did last time they were in government, it completely destroys the economics of these irrigation communities. The average costs for the remaining farmers all go up because now there are fewer farmers to maintain, effectively, the same network. The bulk water infrastructure also has to be paid for by fewer farmers—that’s a given. Suddenly the costs for everybody go up. When the cost of everything goes up, the price of that food has to go up. Then it goes up at the factory, at SPC. Then the price will have to go up again in your shops. That’s what this policy does.
I haven’t been able to be here for all of the other contributions, but I doubt anyone on the other side is responding to this point, like the minister could do in the summing up. What have they done? Have they done any planning here to assess how buying back more water will increase costs? We haven’t seen it. They haven’t published any modelling that I’ve seen about how this will impact on the costs of farmers and therefore the cost of food in the shops for everyday Australians. There’s been no analysis of this at all.
And, before I move on, keep in mind just one other factor: when there are fewer farmers in a district—though, as I say, the people who sell the water do pretty well—it’s not just the other farmers that are left to picked up the can; it’s the whole community. With fewer farmers, you get less contracting business, fewer fencing contractors, fewer dozer drivers and fewer people to laser-level land. That then has a flow-on effect to people’s shops, and the community and cafes and hotels.
If you want a real-world experience of this, go to Dirranbandi or to Collarenebri. When this government was last in power, it bought up enormous amounts of water around these towns—some of the most disadvantaged towns in our region. Both those towns have very high Indigenous populations. And the government just came in and destroyed those towns. They are shadows of their former selves, because of the uncoordinated, ill-thought-through and, I would say, careless approach to water recovery that the former Labor government had. And now we’re up to the sequel, with the Labor and Greens back in power, back in charge, destroying our proud competitive farming economy across Australia.
The other aspect you would have heard about, I’m sure, from the other side, is that they are all doing this because they care about the environment. If pressed, they would say, ‘Unfortunately, there are costs on farms, but we have to do this for a healthy river; we have to do this to increase water flows down the river.’ They have these very vague goals of water recovery. You’ll hear numbers like 450 gigalitres and 3,250 gigalitres—they have probably come up in this debate. Even they don’t know what those numbers mean; no-one really does. They’re just numbers on a page. They don’t actually translate to real environmental outcomes, for two reasons.
First, anyone who knows the Murray-Darling properly knows it is not a series of interconnected garden hoses. Down here, in this building, so many people seem to think that, if you just put water in at one end, then down the other end the water comes out. Some people even think you can put water in up in Queensland, up in Toowoomba, and it will come out in Adelaide and supply them with water. It doesn’t work like that. The Murray-Darling Basin, as many people have told me before, is like a big old carpet—like this carpet that’s in front of us here in the Senate. It’s dry, usually, and it’s quite flat in most parts, like most of Australia. So, if you tip water on that corner of the carpet over there, it’s not going to flow down to that other corner. It doesn’t flow down, because this carpet is all dry and it soaks it up, just like Australia—just like the Murray-Darling! The only way you’d get water from one corner to another corner, across the Senate, would be if the whole thing were flooded—if you had so much water that basically it was above the carpet and it just flowed. That does happen from time to time: sometimes we get massive floods, and we do have that connectivity, but that is a very, very rare circumstance; it doesn’t normally happen.
Normally, there are a whole lot of what are called constraints in the system. There’s the Barmah Choke, through which you can usually only get 10,000 megs per day. But this government, in the way it’s going to approach water management, is just going to flood everything; it’s going to put water through everything, and that will be a disaster.
On our tour we heard about areas that have been environmentally damaged by too much watering. You might think that’s somewhat counterintuitive, but think of your own garden. If you put too much water on some plants, they die. Different plants need different amounts of water. And—surprise, surprise—the native plants in Australia typically can be hurt by too much water because they’ve adapted and evolved to live in what is often a very, very dry continent for large numbers of years. But when this environmental water manager comes along and this government buys back water and just lets the water flow through, areas like the Barmah-Millewa Forest will get too much water and you won’t get big enough trees growing because they’re flooded too often. Then, when the dry does come—eventually it will come, and even the environmental water manager won’t have enough water—those trees will die because they won’t have been allowed to grow big enough individually to survive the dry times. They’re running an unnatural system. They’re not converting it back to the pre-Captain-Cook era. They’re running it based on what bureaucrats see and do here in Canberra. And it’s an absolute disaster. Nothing in this bill deals with that issue of the constraints in the system. If you were serious about protecting the environment, you’d fix those first. That is what could help make the effect of the water that’s been already recovered do better.
The other reason we don’t need to buy back water is that we could actually invest in ways that recover water for the environment and maintain food production on people’s farms—we can, and that is what the coalition was doing. We can invest in ways that farmers themselves can be more efficient with their water use, like laser-levelling fields and lining channels—lots of different techniques. We can do that. They all cost money, but if the government decides that, as a society-wide objective, we should spend a lot of money to save water, farmers are ready to help do that. They possibly can’t afford to do that on their own, from an individual commercial perspective, because they have to run their businesses for a profit, but if there is a broader societal benefit that the government can contribute to, there are lots of ways to save water so we could have more water for the environment. We could protect frogs, wetlands and birds and supply water down to Adelaide while maintaining our fruit production and keeping people’s grocery bills down.
Why won’t the government do that? Why won’t it adopt policies that will help people with the cost of living? This government is so out of touch. It is doing nothing to help people pay their bills. In fact, when people in this country are screaming out, ‘Help me stay above water,’ it has come into the Senate today and is passing a bill, in league with the Greens, to reduce food supply and push people’s grocery bills up. What is going on with this government? It’s like it is living in a different environment—’I just got here!’—and a completely different universe. Everyone is talking to me about their bills, and this government is just doing deals with the Greens. It’s an absolute disgrace, and it’s why people have had enough of this government.
