The cost of getting this wrong goes to every supermarket in Australia and becomes yet another chink in our food security armour. When we replace Australian food with imported food we expose ourselves to currency fluctuations and food inflation. Every time we shut down our capacity to produce food we abscond from our responsibilities from the global food task in feeding 7 billion plus people and we deny the implications of what happens to them if we don’t.
The minister says that this is about cotton and wine grapes because they use 30 per cent of the water. Ok, what about the other 70 per cent? What do you think we use tomatoes for, to throw at wildlife? What about oranges do we use them for juggling? Potatoes are a pretty important staple and the rice industry feeds 20 million people who will go without if remove that source of nutrition from the most important of tasks that of feeding the world.
The more than 2,400 environmental assets are referred to but how much water do they need and where is this shown? The answer is it is not there. So we are starting from a premise where we don't know what we are going to do and if you don't know what you have to do, how are you going to do it?
The next issue is the fallacious consensus argument; that is if everyone is unhappy then we must have done the right thing. Sort of like a doctor cutting off an arbitrary arm and leg and giving everyone a dose of penicillin and saying that must have been the right diagnosis for someone.
Is it too much that the person in Deniliquin wants to know what happens to their town? Is it completely out of the box to let someone in Cobram know whether they should buy the motel?