Senator JOYCE (Queensland—Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) (13:45): In a matter of days the draft Murray-Darling Basin plan will be announced. This is an issue of utmost importance for Australia. The Murray-Darling Basin is what feeds us. It represents 40 per cent of Australia's agricultural output. It is also 60 per cent of our nation's irrigation. The Murray-Darling Basin is home to 2.1 million people. The biggest city in the Murray-Darling Basin is this one, Canberra. There are other cities that rely on it. Adelaide takes water from it but it is not actually in the basin. Melbourne has a pipeline to it but is not actually in the basin. If it were a state, it would be a mid-range state in our nation.
The thing that drove the work as to the Murray-Darling Basin was the general belief of overallocation, and that was a fact and there had to be water returned to the rivers—that was a fact too. However, if the government gets this wrong, the socioeconomic ramifications will be disastrous and the environmental benefits will be dubious. We have huge concerns about where this government is going with it. We have been waiting for this report. There has been delay after delay after delay and prevarication after prevarication. I think the belief is this: try and get the parliament over and done with before releasing what I would say is going to be the final one of the troika of disasters—the carbon tax, the mining tax and then the Murray-Darling Basin draft.
The first time that it was released it got very close to our having riots in Australia. There were burnings of the guide to the draft plan and there were massive meetings by people who obviously had huge concerns about what was going to happen to their town. The primary concern goes beyond the farmer and to the person who owns the motel, the mortgage holder in a regional town—in a Mildura or a Shepparton or a Goondiwindi or a St George—the tyre business, the person who moved to that town for a future and every person pushing a shopping trolley in every supermarket who purchases food. With the carbon tax we drove up the price of power. With a bad Murray-Darling Basin plan we will drive up the price of food. It will be yet another assault on the standard of living of the people of Australia as driven, by all intents and purposes, by the power of the Greens.
The draft Murray-Darling Basin plan will be released on 28 November. There will be a 20-week consultation period. The Murray-Darling Basin Authority has not released any dates for public consultation but has committed to hosting meetings in regional towns and metropolitan areas. It is not yet clear what the format of these meetings will be, whether they will be open and will be public, and whether the minister will be there. I do not think the minister was at any of the others. We do hope that the person who is actually responsible for this is there. The Basin Communities Association will hold a meeting at Griffith on 4 December 2011. We hope that many people will turn up to that. We can provide a Senate inquiry through December if required.
What we can glean thus far is that what the MDBA are going to do now, turning from what virtually caused the riots, means that the difference between those two amounts is about 1.4 per cent. So if what they had before was virtually a riot I cannot see how what 1.4 per cent off that amount is going to cause peace in our time. Also, very serious questions have to be asked about the water that they use and what environmental assets are being watered. The people of South Australia have a strong connection with the Lower Lakes, and that is understandable. But what has to be understood is that the water that is returned to the rivers is very rarely ever going to get to South Australia. It will be watering assets such as the Culgoa floodplain, the Narran Lakes, the Barmah Choke. They are among a whole range of the 2,300 environmental assets. But that does not mean that it is going to end up in South Australia.
We have to look at exactly how this deals with the socioeconomic challenges of so many towns that would have been decimated before. In the process we also have to expand our moral paradigm of how we look at these issues. The last guide to the draft would have been responsible for the virtual destruction of the rice industry. The rice industry feeds 20 million people. If we take a staple of carbohydrate, which is rice, out of the food production of our nation—so therefore we are living on imports—we should not think that is where the issue finishes. In a time of privation somebody somewhere is going to miss out. So if you take the rice at the top out of production everything shifts up and then the person at the bottom misses out. So a person in Southern Sudan whom you have never met or a person on the Thai-Burma border whom you have never met goes without. If you take out of the world's production of food the capacity to feed 20 million people with rice, somebody will starve. It is quite obvious that someone is going to starve to death. Someone will definitely die, generally some child—in fact, it will be thousands of them. That is the unfortunate circumstance of a reduction in the production of food.