We did learn in these answers that the government has no idea whether its interventions in Australia’s most important food bowl are going to have any impact on food prices for Australians. Anyone who has been to the supermarket in the past year or so—and that would be most people, I’d say—would know how expensive things are at the shops, how expensive food has become, along with many other products. Since this government came to power, bread prices have gone up by 21 per cent, milk prices by 18 per cent and egg prices by 17 per cent. You would think that in that environment the government would be very wary about making any changes that make it harder or more costly for Australian farmers to produce food and therefore potentially have a bigger impact on prices than already exists.
But this government is rushing headlong into making major changes to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, and they’re completely unnecessary changes at that. We have plenty of different ways to recover water for the environment. Instead, this government is headlong obsessed with buying back water from Australian farmers. And if you buy back water, farmers are going to produce less food. These are not buybacks; they’re buyouts. They buy out the farm, the farmers shut down—farmers do very well out of it, quite often—and they’ll end up reducing their production, as we heard in Senator Davey’s question today, and reduce their supply of food. And what will reduced supply mean? It’ll mean higher prices for that food overall.
In fact, the Murray-Darling Basin is our nation’s food bowl. It produces 40 per cent of our country’s food. It produces over 70 per cent of our nation’s oranges, peaches and grapes. It produces over 20 per cent of our nation’s milk. While I now live a long way from the Murray-Darling Basin, I’ve had a lot to do with it over the years, and I was fortunate enough to join Senator Davey a few weeks ago to travel through the Murray-Darling Basin for a week. We went to Shepparton, to Mildura, to Renmark, to Griffith and to Moree—all around the basin. We did that because the Senate committee that is looking into the government’s plans on water buybacks, which is dominated by government senators, refused to hold hearings in the Murray-Darling. The government is making these massive changes to the Murray-Darling, massive changes that are going to impact our nation’s farmers, yet they refuse to hold public hearings where those impacts would be.
When we went to these towns we heard from these communities, heard from farmers how anxious they are about water buybacks coming back in and potentially completely changing the economic structure of their community. We heard from the CEO of SPC, a great Australian company in Shepparton that produces so much food for our country. He very clearly told us, regarding buybacks—and the reason the government didn’t go to Shepparton is that they didn’t want to hear this, of course—that the cost of the inputs, of food, would be higher, and therefore in order to recover costs and make a modest profit they would have to sell at a higher price. That’s what will happen. That will be the consequence of this government’s policies.
But we heard today that the government is taking a shoot-first, maybe-ask-questions-later approach. They haven’t done any modelling. They haven’t done any investigation into what exactly the impacts of their obsession with water buybacks will have on food prices for Australians. That should make every Australian very worried, because it is already costly enough to buy food in our nation’s shops. Australians are already reporting that they are cutting back on meals because they cannot afford to buy food at their local shops. In that environment, why would we be making our farmers’ lives tougher? Why would we be making it harder for people in our country to grow our food and to supply Australians with affordable, high-quality produce that we are so lucky to, in normal times, have the advantage of having?
We’ve had a very good few years in food production in Australia. We’ve had very good seasons. These higher prices we’re seeing are not a consequence of a lack of food production; they’re a consequence of higher energy prices and higher labour prices, with inflation generally flowing through to food prices. But if, on top of that, we put a man-made drought onto our nation’s farmers by restricting their use of water, these prices will only be a foretaste of what might come for Australians having to access food in their supermarkets. So the government should end this obsession with water buybacks. They should listen to our nation’s farmers. And, most of all, they should protect living costs for all Australians and encourage food production in Australia, not make it harder.
