The Murray-Darling Basin Environmental Catastrophe Bill

I’ve travelled the Murray-Darling Basin from its northernmost point in Queensland, through New South Wales, Victoria and into South Australia. I’ve listened to the people along the way including the Aboriginal people for whom the water in the river is their life and central to their culture, health and happiness. As one elder said, “We were used to justify buybacks and now we have been forgotten”.

The mismanagement of the river flow across the basin is based on unmeasured guesses, not data. Government bureaucracy attempting to control the water in the river spells death to farming, death to our precious natural environment, death to the regions, and death to Aboriginal culture and society. The real agenda here is that the many towns along the river are considered to be ‘in the wrong place’.

Entire agricultural areas are on the minister’s hit list because they ‘shouldn’t be there’. But you can’t grow food on politics alone, Minister Plibersek. You need water and you need irrigators crazy enough to try and feed Australians while negotiating the insane levels of bureaucracy imposed over the years by politicians who haven’t got a clue how farming works.

The Murray-Darling Basin accounts for $22 billion in food and fibre production. What effect will this cruel policy, delivered to satisfy ignorant leftist city dwellers, have on our beautiful country? With 2.2 million new arrivals requiring food in the last 12 months alone, measures to reduce water for food production are the reverse of the policy we need.

As a servant to the many different people who make up our one Queensland community, the Murray-Darling Basin is an important topic for One Nation because the Murray-Darling Basin starts in Queensland. Just because the water ends up in South Australia does not mean it’s South Australian water. Queensland has a say in this as well, and I will continue to stand up for Queensland farmers, regions and communities. 

During the last Senate session, I spoke about this Labor government’s decision to withdraw funding from the Emu Swamp Dam near Stanthorpe in Queensland’s Southern Downs. This area is in the Murray-Darling Basin and is one of the areas that ran dry in the last drought, requiring water to be trucked in for weeks using a convoy of water tankers. The Emu Swamp Dam was a proposal for a modest dam to retain 22 gigalitres of water for local residents. When I asked Minister Watt about the suffering and economic damage that decision would cause, the minister led the Senate on a merry dance that social media has rightly smashed and ridiculed. 

Minister Watt avoided admitting that, yes, the Albanese government cancelled the Emu Swamp Dam and, yes, the Albanese government came back a year later and cancelled all the infrastructure upgrades in the region just to make sure the dam was never built. Such is the ideology behind the Water Amendment (Restoring Our Rivers) Bill 2023. Minister Watt, a Queensland senator, was happy to tell the residents of the Southern Downs that, in the next drought, they will have to truck their water in again—and in the next and the next and the next. Wow! What arrogance from Canberra bureaucrats and city politicians like Minister Watt! What arrogance from environmentalists who would see Australia destroyed as long as they get their way and as though humans don’t matter!  

These same urban elites go to Coles and buy their Australian almond milk for their half-strength lattes—organic, of course—buy Australian bread, buy Australian meat and buy Australian vegetables. Where do these Green and Teal fools think these products come from? From the Southern Downs and from farmers across Queensland right through to the Murray-Darling Basin—the very farmers this legislation is smashing, gutting. Among all of the technical, I speak in favour of humans and people. 

Before you say it’s not happening, let me share with the Senate a Hansard record of question time in the Victorian parliament from just two weeks ago. One Nation member for Northern Victoria, Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell, asked the Victorian water minister what her government’s position on water buybacks was. Here’s part of Labor Minister Shing’s excellent, heartfelt response: 

At the moment, we are in a process of discussion and debate at a federal level about the future of the Murray–Darling Basin plan. 

Oh, really? I thought it was settled. Apparently that was government misinformation as well. Her remarks continued: 

In 2018 all jurisdictions party to the Murray–Darling Basin plan signed up to what is known as the socio-economic criteria, meaning that water could not be returned if it did harm to communities—that is, that any return would need to satisfy a test of positive or neutral socio-economic outcomes for communities. 

Victoria remains committed to achieving the outcomes and the objectives of our share of returning environmental water to the plan in the terms that we agreed. Victoria opposes buybacks. 

Her words. Victoria: 

… oppose buybacks for a range of reasons and based on modelling … showing that irrigated production job losses of over 40 per cent were observed in Victorian communities due to water recovery for the environment, including in Cobram, 40 per cent of job losses; Kerang, 43 per cent of job losses; Cohuna, 43 per cent of job losses; Kyabram, 42 per cent of job losses; Tatura, 42 per cent of job losses; Rochester, 42 per cent of job losses; Pyramid Hill, 66 per cent of job losses; Boort, 66 per cent of job losses; Shepparton, 61 per cent of job losses; Swan Hill, 53 per cent of job losses; Red Cliffs, 76 per cent of job losses; and Merbein, 50 per cent of job losses. 

The Victorian government has this information because they funded Frontier Economics to conduct a study on the effect of water acquisition on rural communities. Queensland Premier Palaszczuk has not done the same thing. Under Premier Palaszczuk, if you don’t live in a Labor electorate in the urban south-east, you don’t exist. For the Queensland Labor Party, Queensland ends in Toowoomba and Noosa. Good on Victoria for defending their rural communities; shame on Premier Palaszczuk for selling out regional Queenslanders. 

Forty per cent job losses is a common figure I hear when I travel to Queensland basin towns like St George, Dirranbandi and Charleville. This is not a matter of those people walking away and having to make a new start somewhere else—if they can find accommodation and a job, of course. Rural communities have a critical mass, the point below which the whole town ceases to be viable. The doctor leaves, the bank closes, the school closes, small businesses close and, suddenly, the town becomes unlivable. Many towns in Queensland and across the basin are facing that point now. Another 760 gigalitres of buybacks will kill them off. The shocking truth is this: wiping out towns and agriculture across the basin is an intended consequence of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. 

When I was first elected to the Senate and travelled down the Darling and Murray system, I spoke with a representative of the Murray-Darling Basin in the river lands. His words have stuck with me: ‘The Murray-Darling Basin agenda is based on the principle that many towns along the river are in the wrong place. Those towns would not be built today because of their reliance on irrigation and have to go.’ They have to go? That’s the real agenda here. That’s why this bill allows the minister to buy water from anywhere in the basin, not just within a valley. As Minister Shing, the Victorian Labor Minister for Water, rightly pointed out, ‘This act removes the socioeconomic test.’ 

Now, finally, Minister Plibersek’s intentions are out in the open. Entire agricultural areas are on the minister’s hit list, areas that ‘shouldn’t be there’. When environmentalists and city politicians like Minister Plibersek hold this bill high, declaring, ‘Let the rivers run,’ what they really mean is death to family farms and death to the towns they support. At least be honest about it. What effect will this cruel policy, delivered to satisfy ignorant leftist city dwellers, have on our beautiful country? The Murray-Darling Basin accounts for $22 billion in food and fibre production needed to feed and clothe the world. Hell, it’s needed to feed the two million people this Labor government let into Australia in the last 12 months. We have 2.2 million new mouths to feed and the government’s response is to reduce the water available to grow food. There are five million tourist visa holders that have to be fed. No wonder our beautiful country is in trouble. We have a government that can’t put two and two together. 

I’ve travelled the basin, listening to people across the whole basin—from the northern basin, including Charleville, Dirranbandi, St George and Stanthorpe in Queensland; from Albury and Tenterfield in the east of New South Wales; from Broken Hill in the west of New South Wales; from Cobram in regional Victoria; through Menindee, Mildura and Renmark; all the way to Goolwa and the Murray mouth in South Australia. I’ve listened with farmers, irrigators, researchers and environmentalists. I’ve consulted with Aboriginal people, for whom the water in the river is their life, the centre of their culture and the centre of their health and happiness. Drought harms Aboriginal people and much damage was done even as the plan was nearing completion. And damage continues to be done. 

To illustrate this, I saw an ABC video made in October this year that talked to Aboriginal Australians along the river. When buybacks were happening in 2012, they were promised some of the water would be returned to their river in improved flows. Two thousand eight hundred gigalitres of acquisition later and those improved flows for Aboriginal water have never happened. What we’ve seen is a pattern of water flow that’s harming the connected system. One reason is water trading. I’m not talking about productive water trading to keep family farms going; rather, we see foreign owned corporations exploiting water trading to keep their massive monoculture plantings alive. Hundreds of thousands of hectares of permanent planting—almonds, citrus and grapes—are pulling water from places like southern Queensland down below the border to western Victoria and to South Australia. Those water allocations are being sent down in floods to increase the amounts that arrives. Aboriginal communities are left without the regular environmental flows that are so much a part of a river tribe’s life—that’s their word: ‘life’. As one elder said, ‘We were used to justify buybacks and now we have been forgotten.’ It sounds like the Voice. They were used to try and get it through, and now they are forgotten. 

The other major culprit is environmental watering. That watering is being sent down in floods, which, once again, contribute to flooding along the river and do enormous environmental damage. In years past, the flooding that happened in the spring and early summer and during tropical storms in the Queensland basin went down the river as a flood, watering the associated forests. The difference today is that those short periods of natural flooding were between natural long periods with low river flow. That natural cycle allowed the banks to dry and harden to withstand the next flood. What used to happen was the water in the dams was released across the year for mostly local use. If it was not used, it was carried over. Most areas in the basin still have carryover water. Now we have huge amounts of water being sent south to keep massive permanent plantings watered and huge amounts being sent down to water native forests that don’t need it, and the river is stuffed with severe, catastrophic riverbank erosion and forest drowning—and forests dying. That’s the problem this government should be addressing. Instead, Minister Plibersek and her electorate full of city lefties were declaring, ‘Let the river run!’ The minister is killing the natural environment in the name of saving it, ignoring the harm that’s being done—and being done in the name of the Basin Plan. 

There’s nothing in this bill that addresses the fundamental flaw in the plan. The mismanagement of river flow is based across the basin largely on unmeasured guesses of water flow—not on data, not on measurements. It does not matter if you’re mismanaging 2,800 gigalitres or 3,200 gigalitres, the outcome will be the same: death to farming, death to our precious natural environment, death to the regions, death to Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal society. 

Where are the targets for minimum and maximum heights of riverbanks to protect and repair the environment? Not here. Where’s the plan to repair hundreds of kilometres of erosion down the Goulburn, Murray and Edward rivers? The Murray-Darling Basin Plan destroyed those rivers, and nothing in this bill will fix them. This bill will continue the environmental catastrophe. I see limits to diversion for irrigation, yet I don’t see limits for diversion for environment watering—meaning how much water is to be taken out for the drowning and killing of forests as opposed to how much water is to be kept in the river for desalination, fish health and so on. Where are the hard limits? Rivers suffer when water is taken out. It makes no difference if the water is being extracted for irrigation or to drown forests. Where are the water quality limits to control blackwater, which is caused through the overwatering of wetlands, like the Barmah-Millewa Forest, under orders from the Commonwealth? Not here. Where’s the ratio of water over the barrages as against basin inflows, which would ensure the rivers actually flow? Not here. Where are the explicit statements of minimum flows for Aboriginal water in each river? Not here. Real plans are based on measurements and data. Without measurement of river and creek flows across the Murray-Darling Basin, there is no plan, just political patronage, corruption and control. 

Where’s the solution to this salination in the lower lagoon of the Coorong? It’s time to talk about the subject that shall not be spoken: the basin inflow from the south-east of South Australia, which is water supposedly from outside the basin that flows into the basin to refresh the water in the Coorong and Lower Lakes, inflow that before Western settlement delivered hundreds of gigalitres of water a year and flushed the Coorong and Lower Lakes to maintain a healthy environment. Years of draining the south-east to create a productive farming area have sent the flow directly out to sea, bypassing the basin instead of into the basin, where, by the way, it’s damaging the saltwater environment of the sea and the seagrass beds that stabilise the coastline. 

One Nation supports the farming community in the south-east of South Australia and seeks to protect vital agriculture in the area. The initial round of redirecting the drains back into the basin was completed, and basin inflow has been partly restored. The South Australia government now counts this flow is basin SDL recovery, after many years of my campaigning for that very outcome. Thank you. The south-east flow restoration project takes water from some of the drains and redirects the water into Tilley Swamp and then along natural watercourses through Salt Creek into the lower Coorong. Being a swamp, the water soaks in and forms part of the unconstrained aquifer that flows into the Coorong and Lower Lakes at a depth of as little as one metre. 

The aquifer flow is not measured, yet it should be. The improvement in water quality in these waterways suggests more water is arriving that the 25 gigalitres that has been credited—much more. I foreshadow my second reading amendment calling on the Murray-Darling Basin Authority to measure all inflow into the basin from the south-east, both surface and aquifer flow. This surely must be a prudent exercise before embarking on costly water buybacks that will have a catastrophic effect on the basin just to meet arbitrary water acquisition targets—and those are the points that I don’t have time to go into. 

This plan is already highly complicated, and this bill makes it more complicated. It involves micromanaging with slogans. It involves taking taxpayer money to defeat productivity on farms and to raise food prices. Taxpayer money is being stolen to raise food prices. New South Wales farmers are moving to the Flinders River in North Queensland, and we now see the Labor-Greens-Pocock-teal coalition in full flight, destroying our country. The Water Amendment (Restoring Our Rivers) Bill 2023 isn’t a plan to improve the health of our rivers and lakes; it’s an open declaration of war on farming and rural communities, ideology driving a political and social war to the exclusion of decency and common sense. Making farming harder will reduce the supply of fresh fruit and drive up prices at a time when inflation is already out of hand. The Albanese government does not need another policy failure to add to its collection. I urge the government: don’t do this! For the sake of every Australian who eats food, we oppose this bill accelerating the death knell of economic food production and food security. In opposing this bill, One Nation protects the natural environment, protects food security, protects economic activity and protects regional communities.