Gippsland’s farmers should be able to tap the water under their feet

Drought-stricken Gippsland farmers should be campaigning hard to unlock untapped water. The gas would almost be a bonus.

John Mowat, at Stradbroke, has been in drought for over two years. Picture: Dannika Bonser

It was one of the great Australian opportunities missed. The chairman of Shell Australia Zoe Yujnovich was at the podium at the Melbourne Mining Club. At the head table was a new Victorian minister for agriculture, Jaclyn Symes.

Yujnovich and Shell love to talk about gas and energy but in terms of Australian agriculture, her greatest achievement was the creation of Australia’s “new Gippsland,” a large drought proof area of agriculture.

For generations the regular rainfall of Gippsland, Victoria, made it the envy of Australian agriculture. But now, according it the climate scientists the recent severe drought in East Gippsland is just the beginning of lots more. Gippsland is set to be a regular dust bowl with huge revenue and job losses.

Yujnovich could have explained to the Victorian minister how she and Queensland’s ALP Premier Anna Palaszczuk created Queensland’s “new Gippsland” via water mining. She could have explained how they’re providing farmers with regular cash to buy the best possible equipment, as well as providing provide highly paid jobs for those farmers with children that did not want to enjoy the delights of working on an Australian drought proof “old Gippsland” style farm.

One can only speculate what Jaclyn Symes would have done had Yujnovich pointed out that “old Gippsland” has even an bigger underground water resource than Queensland’s “new Gippsland” and that there is even more cash available for farmers. Unfortunately, the Victorian minister for agriculture has another agenda, and is actually leading the push to enshrine in Victorian law a ban on Gippsland farmers accessing their abundant underground water to relieve their drought-stricken land.

The Symes-proposed ban on extracting Gippsland’s underground water and gas is designed to prevent the fracking techniques that are used in Queensland being deployed in Gippsland.

But Gippsland has water that can be extracted without fracking, and yet the Victorian government, for good measure, also bans its extraction. The Victorian parliament acts like the droughts in East Gippsland are “character building”. More significantly banning water extraction gets green votes in the city — far more important than ruined crops and dead animals.

I know at this point I will have angry readers, a furious Victorian minister plus an embarrassed Shell chairman, who might never venture out of the safety of Perth again. But shortages and abundance of water (eg Townsville floods) are going to be just as great an issue as energy in the future, so we have to start talking about management water in the same way as we talk about more familiar topics.

So let’s restate the creation of the “new Gippsland” and the likely destruction of Victoria’s “old Gippsland” in conventional terms. As we all know, at the back of Gladstone in Queensland are vast reserves of coal gas. This would normally be extracted via fracking, but not always. The gas is piped to Gladstone, turned into LNG, and mostly exported. The farmers receive a regular revenue from that gas which insulates their farms from variations in agricultural prices and funds to buy the best farming equipment.

With that gas comes magnificent water flows. In the case of the Shell and the Origin consortiums, they treat the water so that that it is suitable for agricultural use. And joyous farmers access it because it makes them drought proof and changes the risk pattern in farming. In the early days, there were horrible practices by some developers, so fears about fracking led to the bans on fracked and non-fracked water and gas extraction in Victoria.

Gippsland has vast reserves of gas and water that require fracking and even bigger reserves of gas and water that do not require fracking. The early results showed that the water produced with the gas did not need treatment but if “old Gippsland” is to match Queensland’s “new Gippsland”, then it needs to make sure the water used is top quality.

To be fair to the Andrews government and Jaclyn Symes, although the Victorian Liberals and Nationals now have as policy the use of the great Gippsland water and gas deposits, they did not campaign heavily on it. The Nationals member for east Gippsland should have been leading drought stricken farmers in demanding access to the underground water. The students in Gippsland watching their parents suffer should have tried to unite Victorian and Australians students to gain access to the water for their parents as well as lowering capital city energy bills.

But they didn’t and now the Victorian agriculture minister wants to enshrine in the Victorian constitution that Gippsland farmers cannot have the water that is extracted via fracking. Like all Australians, I have great sympathy for farmers suffering drought. But where abundant water is available, yet its use is banned, then in a democracy, farmers have to fight. Instead the Gippsland farmers complain that the Victorian government is not helping enough with cash.

My message to the Gippsland farmers is to fight with greater vigour for the right to access your water and the gas cash that comes with it. And if you are frightened of fracking, go to Queensland and see exactly what is happening up there in “new Gippsland”.

And to be fair to the Shell chairman, she had the courage to mention the bans on Victorian gas in front of the minister, saying: “I would also add here, too, that artificial restrictions on access to resources for political reasons like we see here in Victoria over onshore gas, ultimately hurt all Victorians by reducing energy security and reducing cost competitiveness”.

In other words, not only are farmers helped, but gas and power prices come down if the water and gas are extracted.

And I should add that Jaclyn Symes doubles as resources minister. She should go to Queensland and study what the ALP government is doing there to create “new Gippsland”.