As our nation cannot afford all of this, we are borrowing extraordinary amounts of money from overseas.

There was one thing we were able to do by ourselves and that was that we had the capacity to feed ourselves. However, we are now, as noted by the Australian Food and Grocery Council, a net importer of food. That is, we import more than we export. What the Guide to the Murray Darling Basin Plan would do is set this in stone. This is ultimately a plan for other people to feed us.

Food sovereignty is an issue that comes to the fore only in precarious times but food sovereignty should never be assumed and should always be protected. If we shut down the family farms and the generational knowledge that exists on these farms, we will not easily get our food sovereignty back. This may work in an economic model, but in reality, farmers’ returning to work is a concept that is much harder to come by.

Hopefully, we are smarter than to think we can survive on exporting red rocks (iron ore) and black rocks (coal) alone.

The Guide to the Murray Darling Basin Plan for the city of Canberra is also an extraordinarily bad idea. For an area that extracts about 1% of the water for the Murray Darling Basin, they have been asked to reduce that by 45%. That would be a bad result for the economic development and diversity of Canberra and its regions.

It is also absurd, as pointed out in the guide that only 800 people are going to lose their jobs as a result of this plan. In Griffith alone, there are 27,000 people. This is a town which has an economy based on water and a system like this would have a devastating effect.

Moree, by reason of the drought lost 4000 people from their town and this will be locked in stone if the plan is approved. I believe in a good plan, not any plan. The decimation of whole communities is a bad plan.

This plan does not tell the individual person in the individual town what is going to happen to them and their economy. It does not explain the social ramifications to individual towns or cities in the basin. It does not explain the cost to the person who has worked their whole life to pay their house off. It does not investigate the potential economic tipping points which would cause businesses to close and remove the substantial infrastructure that once supported the town.

The plan does not address the question of what happens when a food producing sector closes down that used to feed millions of people, and now Australia will need to purchase it off people that are hungrier than we are. Do we have a right to make people hungry because we are rich and cannot grow food that we are quite capable of growing? 

Over the years, efficiencies have been made in water usage through the basin. Open channels are being replaced by pipes, more efficient delivery of water to crops and the breeding of more water efficient plant varieties have been achieved. Why are we not looking at the most efficient and creative farming solutions and adopting these instead of sending everyone broke?

The Coalition sought the views of many people and had money on the table to help achieve more infrastructure advancements, but these have been left in the too hard basket. The re plumbing of the Menindee Lakes was just one of the initiatives that would have delivered real water solutions to the basin. Labor conducted study after study but in the end, even God could not wait for it, and the recent rains have filled up the Lakes.

The Minister has the capacity to ventilate the issues that need to be reviewed. It is disturbing at this point that he has had nothing to say except that this is a Guide to the draft. He is not even fronting up at the consultation sessions to hear of the local community concerns. What are his views on this Guide? Does he think the Guide to the Murray Darling Basin Plan is good, bad or indifferent?