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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2011-07-07 Daily Xml
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MURRAY-DARLING BASIN PLAN

Mr WHETSTONE (Chaffey) (16:25): I rise to finish a grieve, which I was halfway through in yesterday's grieve session, on the imminent release of the Murray-Darling Basin draft plan. To carry on with what I was saying, and where I left off, South Australia needs to be represented as one for the best outcome for every South Australian. At the moment, unfortunately, I see a media approach to the release of the plan, and it is dividing every water user and every sector and group of people who rely on water within the Murray-Darling Basin.

Of late, we see the media portraying the interests of the environment against the interests of food and fibre production, and we see a perception that the environment is against the communities that rely on the river and on the economies that the river helps to generate. The communities are driven, essentially, by food production and tourism. Those two industries are extremely important not only to local economies but to South Australia's economy as one.

The vision we in South Australia have to portray to the rest of the basin states is that we have a united approach and that we will work together for an outcome that will benefit everyone here in South Australia. The vision I have for balanced reform is that the water that needs to be put back into the environment and into the river systems has to come from somewhere. At the moment, we are looking at a very large system with a lot of inefficiencies, a lot of leakage and a lot of evaporation, and I think that is what needs to be addressed.

The federal government, particularly the previous federal water minister, was fixated on taking the water away from communities and taking the water away from food producers and just leaving the environment to go along as it once did many hundreds of years ago. That is not what the outcome needs to be.

We need to look at fixing up the leaks. The Murray-Darling Basin is, essentially, a leaky bucket and along the system we have leaks, we have inefficient delivery systems and we have inefficient farm practices along the way. The federal government has a very large bucket of money; some of that money is to spend on infrastructure upgrades, and some of that money is to spend on strategic water buyback.

What I would like to see with this new reform is a win-win for everybody and, to achieve that, we need to fix up what we have. We need to look at the strategic buyback. That approach enables farmers who are of an age that they want to get out, and people who are cash-strapped and who need to underpin their businesses with some money, to sell some of their water licences and continue with the business they have been in for many years or for many generations, in most cases.

Again, we need to look at an audit of where those savings can be made. We need to look at where we can measure at the point of extraction. We need a unified, strategic metering process. I re-emphasise that you cannot manage what you do not meter; if you do not know how much water you are using, how can you manage what you have?

Again, we look at the infrastructure money that needs to be spent. Nearly $6 billion of infrastructure money can be spent on improving the infrastructure and the delivery via the open earthen channels. In many cases, it is not viable to put the big channels into pipes, but there are a lot of those secondary channels that could be putting water into pipes. They would not have the evaporation loss and the seepage loss, and it would be a more efficient way to get water to the gate and onto the farm. We look at on-farm efficiencies. We look at the schemes that the federal government has in place to help support the transformation from open delivery on farm to sealed delivery on farm.

South Australia is a working example of what can be achieved. What we have achieved over 40 years is remarkable, and I urge the Murray-Darling Basin Authority to adopt some of those practices that not only South Australia but many other regions have adopted. However, there are areas that need to look at the big picture, and that is using water more wisely and efficiently. South Australia must work as one. Every South Australian will benefit in the long term with some short-term reform.

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