MURRAY RIVER

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop) (15:19): Today I take a few minutes to inform the house about the fallacy of what is happening on the River Murray, particularly on the Murray and Goulburn systems in Victoria regarding what Victorians call their food bowl project, and bring to the attention of the house the lack of concern from the current government. In recent weeks, I have asked questions of the minister who would not answer the question and who simply claimed it was a different project. Last week, I asked a question of the Premier about whether he was concerned about what was happening in Victoria regarding supposed water savings, and again he stood up in the house and claimed that it was a different project.

The Victorian food bowl project is a staged project. There are two stages—stage 1 and stage 2, obviously. Stage 1 is being funded by the Victorian government and is a billion dollar project. Stage 2 will be funded largely by the commonwealth government under the MOU that was signed off on 26 March—again, a billion dollar project. But the reality is that both projects form one and the same project. It is a project that will supposedly save water by increasing efficiency in the Murray-Goulburn irrigation area. Most of the efficiencies will be gained by reducing seepage and leakage from channels.

A most interesting thing that came out of the signing of the MOU back on 26 March was that our Premier claimed that for the first time a cap will be put on both groundwater and river extractions. What the Premier does not understand about that statement is that, at last, the connection has been seen between the groundwater system and the river system and they are, in fact, one and the same. So, water seeping out of the river fills the groundwater (or the aquifer in the soil profile adjacent to the river), and water falling as rainfall on the lands near the river seeps into the aquifer and that water flows underground to the river.

So the river is not just what you see in the channel as you approach the river itself: it is a large body of water, including that in the soil profile adjacent to the river and under the river in the rock structure that the river flows through, and that is the aquifer. And, at last, and the Premier himself said, we are capping extractions from both the aquifers and the river, acknowledging that they are interconnected and one body of water.

We have to understand that the importance of this acknowledgment is that we know that if you waste water or allow water to leak out of an earthen channel which is delivering water to irrigators near the river, or even in some cases far away from the river, all that leakage goes into that soil profile and the vast majority of it eventually ends up back in the river downstream. If it does not, you reduce the hydraulic pressure adjacent to the river and water will flow out of the river downstream to replace that water in that area of reduced hydraulic pressure. So, you have to have a full understanding of the hydraulic nature of the river and its surrounding environment.

The Hon. M.J. Atkinson: As you do.

Mr WILLIAMS: As I do, Attorney. What the Victorians are claiming is that by lessening the leakage and seepage out of their major irrigation channels they will save water. In one sense they will save water—more of the water, or a greater percentage of the water they take out of the river and put into the irrigation channels, will indeed get to the farmers and be used for growing crops. But the water they save will not stay in the river, because they are going to take it out. They are hoping to save 450 gigalitres of water but, of that saving, they will completely remove 75 gigalitres from the system and pipe it into Melbourne. There is not one word of protest from South Australia about that—not one word. Of the balance, half will be given to irrigators to expand the amount of water they are using, and the balance will be used as environmental flows.

The reality is that virtually all of those seepages and leakage losses are already going back into the river, so the net effect of the Victorian food bowl program most likely will be that we will have less water flowing out of Victoria down the river system. This was acknowledged by the Victorian Auditor-General when he said a few weeks ago in a major report that very little work was done to quantify this when the project was conceived.

Time expired.