NSW election: water the farms, not Adelaide, says Barnaby Joyce

Barnaby Joyce has called for a wholesale review of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.

Barnaby Joyce at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Kym Smith

Scott Morrison’s hand-picked drought envoy, Barnaby Joyce, has called for a wholesale review of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, declaring the scheme favoured Adelaide and was costing the ­Nationals support in regional NSW.

The NSW Farmers Association has renewed calls for an urgent audit of the plan following the stunning state election victories of the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party on a platform calling for it to be “paused”.

But NSW farmers, who warned of further severe falls in agricultural production as skyrocketing water prices make many crops uneconomic, urged caution about tinkering with the agreement, saying the only real solution would be a break in the drought.

Mr Joyce yesterday defied Agriculture Minister David Littleproud, who defended the plan after water emerged as the key issue in the swing against the ­Nationals at the NSW election.

The former deputy prime minister said there was too much focus on environmental outcomes under the basin plan’s current model, finalised last year through an agreement by Mr Littleproud, the states and Labor environment spokesman Tony Burke.

“People always say you can’t (review the plan) or you will lose seats in Adelaide. Well now we are already seeing that when you are always looking after Adelaide you start losing seats in other places,” Mr Joyce told The Australian.

The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers held the seat of Orange and picked up the former Nationals strongholds of Barwon and Murray in the state’s west at the election, with the basin plan and water management a major issue after the mass fish-kill in the Menindee Lakes in January.

Mr Littleproud said the plan was imperfect but defended it as the “the best plan we can expect” as he ruled out another review.

“I can tell you if you want to blow it up you are going to get a worse plan than what you have got now,” Mr Littleproud told Sky News.

SFF state leader Robert Borsak has called for the basin plan, agreed among the federal government, Queensland, NSW, Victoria and South Australia, to be “paused” for five years.

The plan involves substantial water buybacks and other measures to increase environmental flows in the river system, and has been blamed for many farmers leaving the land and economic decline in many regional areas based on irrigation farming.

The chairwoman of NSW Farmers’ conservation and resource management committee, Bronwyn Petrie, said the pressure was now on the re-elected Berejiklian government to take action.

“The plan was a compromise from the start,” Ms Petrie said.

“The very severe drought has highlighted some of the unintended consequences through the ­implementation of the plan.

“It has to get water to South Australia irrespective of the conditions in NSW, Victoria and Queensland. We want an immediate review looking at the timelines.

“Let’s look at the punitive ­impacts: is it going too fast, is it meeting the intended outcomes?”

The chief executive of the NSW Irrigators’ Council, Luke Simpkins, said NSW irrigation farmers, most of whom faced water allocations only a fraction of what they were in previous years, had ­become “highly emotional” when seeing large amounts of water flowing down the Murray to meet obligations to South Australia.

“We are going to see less than 10 per cent of land cropped in the north,” Mr Simpkins said.

He said the SFF idea of “pausing the plan” would only maintain the status quo.

Abandoning the plan altogether was “not realistic”, Mr Simpkins said, and a “massive review”, such as a royal commission, would likely lead to “going further to the ­environmental side”.