That’s the message from the National Farmers’ Federation, National Irrigators’ Council and NSW Irrigators’ Council, who have written joint letters to the federal water and agriculture ministers demanding transparency to ensure an informed debate on the Water Amendment (Restoring our Rivers) Bill 2023.
Submissions to the Senate inquiry and polling by reputable analysts show that Australians overwhelmingly oppose water buybacks and believe they will have negative impacts on basin communities, the three organisations say.
“The advice from the government’s own agency, ABARES, is that this legislation will impact water prices and have negative outcomes,” they said.
“Yet, the government is relying on activist academics telling them what they want to hear and ignoring their own agency’s advice.
“If the government is so sure this is not the case, then it must provide its internal information instead of relying on the opinions of anti-irrigation academic activists.
“The Productivity Commission also recently warned that in the absence of a plan for water recovery the government risked being seen as just chasing a target, with no interest in the consequences or enough focus on the outcomes being sought.
“The government continues to deny communities and the parliament any objective analysis, planning and program information. Whilst it rewrites the 2012 Murray-Darling Basin Plan, which had federal bipartisan and basin state support and that communities understood to be the limits of socio-economic impact and the expected environmental outcomes.
“This new legislation throws all that out the window for a political plan that causes more hardship for basin communities with little environmental gain, because it fails to deal with constraints and the key degradation drivers that more water will not fix.
“If the government does not disclose its research and modelling, then it must be assumed it is knowingly pushing ahead with an agenda to cripple agriculture and regional communities, to achieve a targeted number devoid of environmental outcomes.”
NFF water chair Malcolm Holm said at this stage, “there are simply too many unanswered questions for senators to vote in favour of this bill”.
“The bill has been rushed into parliament,” he said.
“It’s convoluted and it completely lacks transparency. We just want to know the impacts on communities and consumers, and we want to know what it will achieve for the environment. As it stands that’s all unclear.”
