NSW water: Lack of government support a major issue

Policy developed to protect the environment is in fact destroying it, argues Laurie Beer.

The Federal Government needs to pay attention to the issue of wasted water in the riverina, a local farmer has said.

THERE was one very clear message that I took from the visit to our region by Water Minister Keith Pitt and his entourage – either the Federal Government is not listening, or it doesn’t care.

Tossing a few crumbs to ‘development’ projects in the region is not going to return the prosperity that has been taken away through lost water. While $34 million in grants might sound impressive – and is a clever political way to divert attention from the real problems – it is chicken feed compared to the economic value that has been removed.

The problem we face is there is no longer reliable water availability in our region, despite it being the closest to the water storages and therefore the most efficient to deliver and use productively.

This is exacerbated by an inability to address unintended and adverse consequences of the Basin Plan, along with the problems we have around water trading. How can we compete against foreign traders who have no interest in growing the food needed for our nation and the world, yet are not even required to pay capital gains tax on their earnings (unlike Australian investors)?

What chance when our government is unwilling or unable to address numerous fundamental flaws which it has allowed to develop in water management and policy, yet what we saw from Mr Pitt suggests there is no desire for change?

This is occurring even though, as a nation, we are jeopardising our staple food security as we have seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This time last year we were importing wheat, now we are importing rice and dairy products after Australia ran out of domestically produced rice.

Don’t forget, Australian rice farmers are recognised as the most efficient in the world. Yet our government won’t even develop policy that supports reliability for this essential food.

Is this the nation we want into the future, where we expose ourselves to world markets through an inability to be self-sustainable?

A key problem that Mr Pitt and his government’s colleagues (including our own Senator Davey and Sussan Ley) will not acknowledge and fix are issues around the huge volumes of water that are being wasted because, with questionable science and a failure to account for the impacts of climate change, we have legislative requirements to send huge volumes to the lower ends of the system.

This cannot be done without damaging river banks and unnecessarily flooding forests, which not only causes immense environmental damage but also wastes precious water that could be used to grow food.

This all makes one thing glaringly obvious from Minister Pitt’s visit – in the political game of winning seats and votes, we are dispensable.

• Laurie Beer is a farmer at Mayrung, NSW

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