Senator Barnaby Joyce said today that Senator Wong was misrepresenting the contents of the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) research report which assessed the impacts of the governments first $1.5 billion of water buybacks, released yesterday.
After releasing the report, Senator Penny Wong said, "This really answers Senator Joyce and a range of other critics of the Government's water purchase program."
“The report does nothing of the kind,” said Senator Barnaby Joyce.”I support a well thought through program of buybacks in the Basin. Buybacks give due recognition to the property rights of farmers. But I do not support how Penny Wong has implemented the buybacks. As the Productivity Commission recently stated ‘there appears to have been insufficient forethought given to the design, scale and implementation of these initiatives.’”
“There is nothing in the ABARE report which changes that view. The buybacks have paid too little attention to the social and economic costs of concentrating the buybacks in areas where smaller communities rely heavily on agriculture. The way Senator Wong has approached the buybacks has led to devastating economic effects to towns such Collarenebri.”
Senator Joyce pointed out that on page 22 of the report, ABARE themselves say that the limitations of their economic model mean that “this is not an ideal way to examine the regional effects.” One of these limitations is that the model assumes that water buy back money goes to everyone in a town and that after a water purchase, no one leaves the area.
Everyone who has been negatively impacted by the water buy backs should call Senator Wong’s office and tell her how wrong she is, again, on this ill-considered scheme.