Government ‘hell bent’ on 450GL buybacks

As the Murray Darling Basin Plan goes ahead, there are concerns the government is not focused on the “collateral damage” of the buybacks.

John Bruce at his property in Barooga. Picture: Yuri Kouzmin

As the Murray Darling Basin Plan goes ahead with water tenders, one farmer has questioned if the federal government has considered the “collateral damage” of buybacks.

John Bruce, who runs a mixed farming operation on 1060 hectares between Barooga and Mulwala in southern NSW, said there had already been some water sold out of his irrigation district, but the issue was “an interesting one”.

“If you’ve got a retiring farmer that has no one to come back onto the farm, and his farm is essentially his superannuation, he’s going to want to get as much as he can out of it,” John told the Australian Ag Podcast.

“If the government rate is over and above the market rate, it’s a pretty simple equation who you’re going to sell that water to.

“But once that water has gone out of the system, it’s gone forever … costs then have to be spread across a smaller pool, so in turn the cost of delivering water goes up.

“I don’t know whether the government is listening to (those) concerns, they seem to be hell bent on getting that 450GL back, and not too concerned about the collateral damage. So it is a bit of a worry.”

Growing wheat, canola and barley over winter, John said the season had been tracking “pretty well”.

“We were able to get winter crop harvest off without any weather damage,” he said.

“It looked like to was going to keep raining, and then suddently the humidity was horrendous, it was like you were living in the tropics, but it did settle down.

“And the last six weeks, I suppose we haven’t had a hell of a lot of rain. We are getting a bit on the dry side now.”

Growing rice for the first time in six years this summer, John has begun draining water off the rice crop as he prepares for harvest.

“We’re a bit fortunate, we had our (rice) in on the first of October, and we actually had 70mm of rain a few days later so that was enough to get the rice up.

“With a coolish start is was very slow early, but the last six to eight weeks have been fantastic for it.

“With the full water allocation and temporary water prices were cheap, we just thought we’d get back into the summer crop and take full advantage of it.”