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Farmers and Regional Towns are struggling

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With water availability, labour prices and government all against the farmer, it is too hard for smaller farms to survive and even the large farms are struggling.

If our farms fallover, regional towns will quickly follow and then the rest of the country will be in big trouble. Governments at every level need to help our regions be building cheap, reliable electricity and secure supplies of water.

Decades of government dropping the ball on these issues has left us in a scary position. I talk about this in my new segment, Our Nation Today, with farmer Trevor Cross and Mike Ryan.

Let me know what you think.

Transcript

[Malcolm Roberts] Regional Queensland literally feeds and clothes us, Yet so many short-sighted government policy decisions will hit these regions first and hit the regions hardest. Travelling around Queensland, I’m constantly reminded that the one-size-fits-all policies just don’t meet the needs of rural and regional centres. We’re talking about the fundamentals that urban areas take for granted. Affordable, secure, and reliable water, energy, and food. Reasonable insurance premiums and freight rates, roads, and rail fit for purpose. Access to health and education that gives people the confidence to settle in the regions. There’s nothing more fundamental than food.

A prosperous agricultural sector is essential for supplying Australia’s food needs and the needs of the rest of the world. In the financial year 2021, the gross value of agricultural production is estimated at $66 billion, a staggering figure. And it’s easy to forget that being a farmer is a tough gig because even in good years it’s 24/7 and the balancing acts of risks within a farmer’s control, and those beyond never stops. There’s been a lot of talk about an agriculture-led recovery after the COVID restrictions that smashed our economy and the need for confidence to pick up the pieces and to keep going. Many in our farming community have sustained shattering losses with ready to pick food being ploughed back in and a major reduction in the planting of next year’s crop, simply due to worker shortages.

I see a role for government in creating the right environment for businesses to flourish. Part of that is to help mitigate unnecessary risks, such as having strategically placed dams and a well-connected water infrastructure grid which should have happened years ago. So instead of the Queensland government spending $10 million to cart water for Stanthorpe when the town ran out, it would have been better spent on a longer term solution such as more town weirs to hold more water. We know that our water reserves and existing dams are not keeping up with population growth. Government should aim to minimise its unnecessary intrusions and yet any farmer will tell you that excessive regulations such as the reef regulations and vegetation management laws create an impossible business environment for farmers.

Layer upon layer upon layer of stupid and destructive rules and regulation leaves the farmer with ever-decreasing profits. And yet we expect farmers to just saddle up and continue to make it work. Today Mike Ryan talks with Trevor Cross, a successful Queensland horticultural grower based in Bundaberg. I first met Trevor in 2017 at his farm and was impressed with his passion for farming, his business savvy and the hard work that he and his team do everyday to put many veggies such as tomatoes, capsicums and zucchinis into our supermarkets.

[Mike Ryan] Trevor, thanks for joining us.

[Trevor Cross] Thanks Mike, good to meet you.

[Mike Ryan] Now, tell us about your farming business, the size of your holdings, where you’re located, what you grow and what you export.

[Trevor Cross] We’re in Bundaberg in Queensland, we farm about two and a half thousand acres of small crops. So we grow tomatoes, gourmet roma’s and cherry tomato. And then zucchinis, capsicums, chilies, melon, pumpkin, a few cucumber, snow peas, and sugar snaps, and just a few beans, so we spread that over about a nine-month period in the Bundaberg region. So most of our stuff actually goes Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne a little bit to Adelaide. And this year in New Zealand, it’ll open its exports again, it’s been out for 12 months with this virus. So it’s supposed to open up again this year, so hopefully that’ll be good for the industry.

[Mike Ryan] I can really empathise with what you do. I mean, my dad will probably kill me for this being from the land. I recall he actually decided to go into rockies and do rock melons and large acreage. Anyway, the bottom fell out of the market. And I recall he got a cheque from the bank for, I think it would have been something like sixpence in those days. And I’m thinking, why would you ever want to do this? And then he decided to go into avocados and citrus and stuff. And that’s just as terrifying. It’s a really hard business, isn’t it?

[Trevor Cross] Yeah. The biggest problem with farming it’s actually almost like an addiction. You go out and start growing something, it’s very, very hard to stop it. It’s not so much about money, I don’t think, when you’re a farmer. It’s about just seeing a crop planted, seeing the crop grow and getting it picked. But the biggest problem is there needs to be some rewards on the way through.

[Mike Ryan] What’s the greatest challenge, say, to business such as yours on the land?

[Trevor Cross] In our industry it’s, because it’s a high-labor industry, it’s probably, at the moment, getting enough people to actually harvest crops. Because when we’re in peak-season we have about 350 people here, so… And there is going to be a shortage. I’m not quite sure how far we’ll be down, whether it’s going to be 10- or 20-percent down. So that’s probably one of the hardest parts. Water supply’s another major component to our operation, and just general costing. The costs keep going up and up and up and the end prices doesn’t really reflect what it’s costing to do business, anymore.

[Mike Ryan] So you have two and a half thousand acres, which is a very large, large piece of land. Do you think the days of the smaller farmer, for example, 20 or 30 acres are gone, and that you need to have, just to accommodate your cost and make sure you get a decent return, that you’ve got to have a large business instead of those, not micro, but the smaller businesses used to be.

[Trevor Cross] It’s volume now, whereas before it was just a family, a family could actually survive on a hundred acres and live fairly comfortable, now a hundred acres unless you’re doing really niche market product, you would never, ever survive. So everything’s been turned into bigger farms. We’d be one of the largest, freehold personal farms in town now, there’s probably a couple other families about our size that are just doing it, and the rest is a lot of consolidated money from investment companies, and they’re now are doing nut trees, mainly.

[Mike Ryan] What’s greatest impact on your business when it comes to costs? Which ones are the ones that stand out? Is it labour?

[Trevor Cross] Yeah, Labour used to run about 33- to 35-percent we’d work on for labour, and the way it’s going, last year I think hit early forties, about 42-, 44-percent, and this year, unless there’s a big market change I think it’ll go 50%.

[Mike Ryan] Wow. That’s incredible, isn’t it? How do you survive?

[Trevor Cross] Well, I just hope that there’s actually money paid at the other end. At the point of sale, at the first point of sale at the marketplace, most stuff is fairly cheap. At the last point of sale, it could be three… between two and four times what it’s paid for. So, that’s what the average customer doesn’t think, They think if it’s dearer in the shop, the farmer’s making the money.

[Mike Ryan] I was talking to Senator Malcolm Roberts, and he was saying, just talking about how the consumer in the major metropolitan areas, they all think that the produce that they see almost is manufactured in the supermarket, but, you know, prior to that, you’ve got so many factors. I mean, from the farmer to the chain. Farmer, to the, what do you call it?

The grower. Not grower, the buyer who buys up for the land and then they on-sell it to someone else. And then it’s sold to the supermarket. You think from the farmer to the actual supermarket, ’cause my dad used to always say, he would love to be able to take out a shotgun with some pellets and get rid of those middlemen. Is it still the same headache and pain in the backside?

[Trevor Cross] The biggest problem is with the whole system, if you actually get out of the place what’s supposed to set the right price how do we know what the right price is? And I think the days when people were actually stealing at the first point of sale, I don’t think it’s there anymore because everyone’s fighting for a dollar. So they’re getting screwed down more and more. All the grower actually needs is probably about 20- 30-cents a kilo more and they become very sustainable. And that’s not a lot.

It’s only 2 to 3 dollars a box on average, and everyone’s paying bills, because the Ag industry, and this is not just what we do, It’s every Ag industry, there’s a lot of people get employed before it even gets to the farm. And then after it leaves the farm there’s a lot of people employed from transport, through to your retailers, your wholesalers, and then the processors… there’s many, many people relying on the farming industry.

[Mike Ryan]What are your thoughts of the future of farming, say, in Australia?

[Trevor Cross] Well, I know if we keep going down this track we can’t last much longer. Even our business now we’ve actually got 400 acres of nut trees, and we’ll probably continue to change over just because of the labour price and for our small profits we’re making out of employing all the people, we may as well not have them. We may as well just go to where it’s all mechanical.

So, I don’t know if my boys will actually take over and do what I do, ’cause it’s a seven-day-a-week job. You’ve got to be in amongst the people and see what’s happening. I actually think, even in this area around Bundaberg, there won’t be too much of this industry left within probably four or five years. I think the majors will be all gone.

[Mike Ryan] That’s just terrible, too, because once you have less growers like yourself then you’ve got this monopoly and the monopolies are not what we want. I mean, look at the US and you’ve got these multi-billion-dollar corporations that control the price of produce, although you go to a supermarket and they do the same thing there too, they screw down the grower, although the grower being a lot bigger than what they’ve dealt with, they’ve got their sort of, at least it’s coming up to almost 50-50 between the grower and the actual supermarket chain.

It’s a really, really tough life. What do you think is the most important thing in keeping our farming sector successful and growing? What do we actually need to do besides revise wages, for example, on the land. You can’t keep paying out 50%. You’re going to make no money.

[Trevor Cross] Yeah. Everyone’s entitled to money, Mike. The wage earner is entitled to money, and they all want to lead a good life, but we’ve just got to get a share of that sale price at the end. Basically, I think all growers need just a little bit more money, and it’s not a lot, a couple dollars a box, as I say, it’s not a lot of money. And then everyone’s happy because I don’t think any man who’s been on the land for all his life deserves to actually have the bank come and sell him up, because of the poor market prices. I think everyone can work together.

If capsicums or zucchinis or whatever, ’cause we’re only seasonal, we do about eight months a year in Bundaberg, and then the South is just finishing up now, they would have had the most horrible year in their life. And people have been on the land all their life and next minute they gotta sell their farms because of poor prices. It’s only a couple of dollars a box, they wouldn’t have needed much more and they’d be still viable.

[Mike Ryan] So what do you do, though? If you weren’t on the land, what would you do?

[Trevor Cross] I don’t really know what I would actually do cause I’m not much into fishing, I don’t like doing anything else. And so that’s what I call it, a hobby.

[Mike Ryan] An expensive hobby though, isn’t it?

[Trevor Cross] Yeah but most… a lot of farmers grow because they’re addicted to growing. That’s what they’ve been bred to do. They grow. And they show up nearly every day. So it’s a challenge because you’re challenged against the weather, challenged against people and you become a plumber an accountant, you know, almost doctor, sometimes. So there’s nothing you can’t actually do. A good farmer can do just about anything there is to do.

[Mike Ryan] If somebody was wanting to find out more about what you do, do you actually have a website we could go to and have a look, just to get an idea and appreciation what it’s all about.

[Trevor Cross] No, I would say I keep pretty well under cover but we could actually have a bit of a look at doing something if there’s people interested and actually do something.

[Mike Ryan] Yeah. We must do that. I’m sure you’ll handle the technology as well as my dad.

[Trevor Cross] I have to get someone to help me, yeah.

[Mike Ryan] Trevor, great chatting with you. All the best. Thanks for giving us your time today, and also say thank you to your wife in the background, she’s done a wonderful job.

[Trevor Cross] No worries. Thanks, Michael.

[Malcolm Roberts] The harsh reality is that we, as a nation, will either flourish or decline with our regional centres and with Australian farmers. Our farmers must make a profit to make their livelihoods sustainable. And that, after all, is where we get our food. Our rural and regional communities have unique challenges and need a different set of solutions to ensure fair and equitable access to basic services and to grow viable communities. Thank you for joining me Senator Malcolm Roberts on Our Nation Today.

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How to restore Australia’s productive capacity

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Australia used to have one of the highest household incomes in the world. What has happened since then?

Decades of weak leadership under Liberal and Labor governments, and it doesn’t look like it will get better anytime soon.

Transcript

The government at the moment is proposing industrial relations reform. It is tinkering. That’s all it is. What I want to do is discuss the bigger picture that we need to consider. First, let’s look at the decline of our country. Look at the decline since 1944, with the stealing of property rights from 1996 onwards and with the destruction of the electricity sector, the guts of our manufacturing sector and our agriculture sector. And yet, at a time when other countries have been reducing their electricity prices, Australian electricity prices have doubled or even tripled. We’ve got a taxation system that’s counterproductive, and there’s the neglect of our water infrastructure. Overregulation is decimating our manufacturing sector and, in fact, all sectors, especially small business—our biggest employers. Now let’s look at the recent devastation from the COVID restrictions, or rather government restrictions imposed as a result of COVID. They’re capricious, unsafe and devastating on small business and employees. If you look at Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia, COVID is managing us. Pretty soon JobKeeper ends—in fact, it ends at the end of next month—and then what will happen?

Let’s come back to what we need. We will work with the government to fix a bad bill—that is, its latest proposal. We will work with them in an attempt to do that. The three aims guiding us are: protecting honest workers, protecting small business and restoring Australia’s productive capacity. But not just to recover back to where we were last February before the COVID restrictions from government but to recover back to where we were when we were at the top of the world. We were literally number one for per capita gross domestic product. If I had a wish list, these are the things that would be on it—at least some of them.

I would want an inquiry into local government corruption in Queensland. Right across the state the waste of federal funding runs into the billions, with the fraud, the extortion, the corruption, the threats and the intimidation. We want to end that.

I would wish for a Commonwealth integrity commission, especially now that, during the last week, we’ve learnt what happened in this building. We need a proper corruption-ending system in this parliament and in this building. We need to restore integrity. We also need proper industrial relations reform—not the tinkering, the increased complexity nor the abandonment of small business. We need proper reform that looks after all employers and employees. We need proper reform that enables, first of all, employers and employees to restore their primary relationship without the IR club dipping into their pockets and putting handcuffs on them. We need to restore primary workplace relationships. We need to make it easier for people to work. We need to remove the complexity and remove the lawyers and the vultures.

We need to reform taxation. We need proper taxation reform—not tinkering and not adding more complexity to tax. We need to make it simpler for companies and small businesses to employ people. We need to make it easier for employees, honest workers, to keep more of their pay for their families.

We need reform of the family law system. We need reform of water. We need to do much, much better with our water. We need to return environmental water management to the states. We need to introduce a water register—it’s 14 years overdue. We need to introduce a weirs-for-life program and turn around drains in the south-east. We have a comprehensive plan we’re going to release soon about what we would do with the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and water right across the country.

We need to restore farmers’ property rights that were stolen in 1996 by the John Howard-John Anderson government. We need to make sure we have lower energy prices. We need to restore coal-fired power stations in this country—build a new one at Collinsville and build a new one in the Hunter Valley. We need to address the PFAS problems that are gutting so many areas. We need to look at infrastructure—the national rail circuit, Inland Rail, the Bradfield Scheme—and do it properly. Above all, we need a government with vision that provides real leadership, not tinkering. Get back to basics.

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The governance of our country is appalling

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The governance of our country is appalling. My adjournment speech.

Transcript

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I draw attention to the Australian parliament’s failure to protect the interests of the Australian people. In the Senate yesterday, the Liberals, the Nationals and the Labor Party united in standing beside big banks against the interests of everyday Australians. Together they voted down my bill to prevent bank deposits being bailed in—meaning that when banks get into trouble they can steal depositors’ money.

Their madness is simple: Australia has the world’s safest banks; the only thing that could bring our banks down is a loss of confidence; that’s the very thing my bill was designed to stop. Not once has the Treasurer, the Prime Minister or APRA, the banking regulator, come out and said, ‘We will not bail in your deposits.’ It’s time the Australian people heard those words.

The right to use a banking service without losing our money is just one of many rights that everyday Australians have lost—another is the loss of property rights. Prime Minister John Howard’s government’s response to the UN’s Kyoto Protocol in 1996 was to use the deceitful trick of protecting junk vegetation from destruction. The carbon dioxide that this saved counted to our UN Kyoto targets and it still does.

It enabled his government to bypass its constitutional duty to compensate farmers for stealing their property rights. This is a perfect example of mad climate policies that are about bowing to unelected, unrepresentative foreign UN bureaucrats, rather than showing actual environmental outcomes. The land that John Howard’s capricious actions supposedly protected was not something worthwhile like an old-growth forest or repairing vegetation, no, it was agricultural land that was stolen.

John Howard’s government stole our farmers’ rights to clear junk vegetation that grows on a field not used for a few years. It prevents farmers making productive use of their land. To this day the general public think this ban on land clearing relates to actual forests. This conjures up images of evil farmers chopping down virgin forests and sending koalas of to their deaths.

The reality is this ban stops farmers clearing salt bush and junk vegetation that’s stopping productive agriculture on land that has been farmed many times. The old parties never let the truth stand in the way of virtue signalling. The Liberal-National government with John Howard as Treasurer is largely to blame for banking misconduct. It was John Howard who deregulated banking.

This exposed bank customers to the atrocious behaviour that was found during the Senate inquiry into rural and regional lending that I chaired. Our inquiry led to the banking royal commission finding even more wrongdoing. The Morrison government recently demonstrated another failure in looking after small business. Aussie company CuDeco operated the Rocklands copper mine near Cloncurry in Queensland.

It was driven into insolvency from the actions of the minority Chinese owners. The mine was sold to a local Chinese company who promptly onsold it to a Chinese government entity. China now owns an important Australian copper mine thanks to the ineffective Morrison government. The mine’s workers will never get their missing wages and local contractors are out of pocket $60 million.

The only way we will see CuDeco’s copper again is if we buy that copper inside Chinese manufactured electronics. Chinese corporations continue to cherrypick their way through our resources sector. China is buying mines, real estate, farms and even our water. I do compliment Treasurer Frydenberg though on his recent decision to block the sale of PURA milk to the Chinese, resulting in the Australian company Bega buying PURA.

It’s a welcome break after the Liberal-National and Labor parties selling Australia out for a generation. Since my return to the Senate last year the Liberal, Labor and National parties have been acting together and have voted down One Nation’s motions—many motions—to restore farmers’ water rights.

The 2007 Water Act takes their water rights and forces Aussie farmers, family farmers, off the land. Even now with all the rain this year farmers are on as little as 39 per cent allocation. Who passed the 2007 Water Act? Prime Minister John Howard. Who introduced the Murray-Darling Basin Plan in 2012? Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

The whole point of the Water Act was to remove family farms from the land, then to remove their water rights to new irrigation areas on cheap land belonging to corporate agriculture. Windfall profits all round. Australian farmers and local communities being gutted. The Australian parliament must decide whether it represents the interests of big business or the interests of everyday Australians.

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Nationals lied about changes to Murray Darling Basin plan

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Last week the Nationals claimed to have significantly changed the Murray Darling Basin plan for farmers. I want to be blunt. THEY LIED.They are wilting under the pressure One Nation has put them under through our use of facts and in response instead of doing good are trying to look good.

Take a listen to what the Nationals claimed the report said and what the report ACTUALLY says.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Senator Malcolm Roberts and I’m on the road from Rocky to Mackay in Central Queensland. I wanna make a statement about the and ask some questions about the Murray-Darling Basin Plan notice that came out of the government last week.

And I wanna ask a few basic questions after Friday’s media headlines. And I’m gonna read these questions, because I wanna make sure it’s accurate. Sky News called this the biggest change to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan in 10 years, oh really? The Australian announced buybacks axed in Murray overhaul.

So I asked Minister Pitt for a copy of this supposed landmark report. And this is it, 10 pages, that’s all. The recommendations are two pages and a bit, that’s it. Does it really represent any change in the current policy? No, it does not. It doesn’t say any such thing and yet the Nationals Party and the government has been saying that.

One major issue and this is the first topic. One major issue with the Murray-Darling Basin Plan is the last 450 gigalitres of water acquisitions called SDLs. Which is to be taken off farmers and given to the environment in South Australia. Since the plan started 2100 gigalitres of water has been taken from farmers.

That’s forced many farmers off the land and reduced our agricultural output by more than $10 billion. This is money that our economy needs especially when we try to recover from COVID. This is food that has been taken from the world’s hungry.

Now Senator Bridget McKenzie, who is leader of the National’s Party in the senate made this statement just a week ago. Quote, “You cannot take any more water from our communities. The 450 gigalitres will not be coming from our farmers. Enough is enough, you have taken enough.”

Well, that was clear, wasn’t it? But what does the reports really say? Let me read the recommendations. Quote, this is what the report says. “Work with the states to accelerate planning and delivery of the 450 gigalitre SDL acquisitions. Not stop the acquisition accelerate the acquisition.”

What of the promise to not take water off farmers? Perhaps Senator McKenzie is talking about this line. Quote, from the report, “Shift the focus away from on-farm acquisition to off-farm infrastructure.” What sort of a promise is shift the focus? These are with weasel words Minister Pitt.

450 gigalitres through fixing leaky pipes and burying irrigation channels, not possible. And for the record irrigation channels are lifelines for native Australian birds, animals and reptiles in a drought. Those canals are an entire ecosystem full of fish, turtles and crustaceans that die when you bury them underground.

This idea is literally killing our environment to save it. Secondly, as for splitting the Murray-Darling Basin authority into two, not so much. This is recommendation six, which establishes an Inspector General of Water Compliance. Now is this a new post?

No, they are simply renaming the Inspector General of Murray-Darling Basin Water Resources. When he was appointed, the existing Inspector Mick Keelty was called the tough cop on the block. What happened to that? This is nothing more than a re-branding exercise.

And the media has slapped it up the media has fallen for it. Does the media check anything anymore? Or do they just parrot what this government tells them? Thirdly, as for punitive powers, the Inspector General does not have any. Those powers vest with the State’s New South Wales in particular.

Where the most water rorting is going on. Has not even given the Murray-Darling Basin any punitive powers at all. If big Corporate Agriculture builds a new floodplain harvesting dam in the Northern Basin, the Inspector General has no powers to order that demolished nor even issue a fine.

The New South Wales State Agriculture Minister, Nationals Leader New South Wales, Nationals MP John Barilaro, has to make those orders and the government damn well knows it. Minister Pitt I have three questions. Who wrote this misleading press release?

Secondly, show me where in this report it actually says there will be no more buybacks from farmers? Thirdly, how does re-branding one position without any extra powers suddenly become splitting the Murray-Darling Basin authority into two? It doesn’t, does it?

I’ve heard the Nationals talk a lot of rubbish lately. But this takes the cake. These are lies they speak to distract. Under the Nationals, farmers will lose their water and rural communities will be destroyed. The only winner will be the Nationals Corporate Agriculture Mates.

When will the Nationals for a change? Join us in one Nation in putting Australia first.

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Murray Darling Basin investigation a whitewash

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One Nation Senator Roberts expressed sheer disbelief and disappointment with the Keelty report into the Murray Darling Basin’s water allocations to farmers who need water to grow food.

Senator Roberts said, “As the nation reels from COVID-19 and faces food shortages this report is woefully inadequate and a tragic waste of taxpayers’ money. “

“An investigation should demonstrate rigour and analysis and instead Mr Keelty’s report is full of inadequacies.”

The report fails to include in its datasets this year’s substantial rainfall event and does not acknowledge rainfall within the MDB has increased over the past 100 years. Instead the Keelty analysis deceitfully uses ‘declining inflows’ as a way of arguing why farmers should be denied a fair allocation of water.

When 4000 disenchanted farmers descended on Canberra to protest the unfair allocation of water between the environment and farmers, they were promised that their zero allocations would be the subject of this review.

“It is deeply disappointing, particularly now when our agricultural productive capacity is under-utilised, that this issue was not rigorously examined by Mr Keelty.  Astonishingly the report fails to even mention those zero allocations,” added Senator Roberts.

As predicted by many farmers, the former Water Minister David Littleproud used the promise of an investigation into the MDB to quieten the crowd of protestors and conveniently shift blame to the States and irrigators.

Irrigators are suspicious of MDBA figures that show declining inflows when the Murray River has been running so high that environmental damage has resulted along the upper Murray and Barmah/Millewa forest from excessive water.

Disturbingly the report claims that environmental water is not being wasted, ignoring the unnecessary flooding of forests, excess water flushed out to sea in South Australia and keeping the lower lakes filled above their natural levels with Murray River water.

“The report may as well have been written by the MDBA itself, as it addresses none of the concerns from farmers, some of which have gone without a water allocation for 3 years.”

COVID-19 has highlighted the critical importance of Australia restoring our productive capacity across many strategic industries, including our agricultural sector.

“The Keelty report’s lack of due diligence in this investigation is akin to the last nail in the coffin of one of Australia’s most substantial food bowls. No water, no food,” Senator Roberts added.

Unsurprisingly, the report found that a lack of trust and leadership worsened the problems. One Nation calls for a Royal Commission into misconduct in the implementation of the Murray Darling Basin Plan.

“Trust cannot be restored until rorting has been exposed and fixed.  Australia needs management of the MDB Plan that reflects a genuine triple benefit – for irrigators, communities and the environment,” Senator Roberts stated.

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One Nation Murray Darling Basin Update

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The recent bushfires, some rains and now the CoronaVirus has taken attention away from farmers still struggling with drought or the Murray Darling Basin plan which is still failing to deliver water to farmers.

One Nation has not forgotten about our farmers and is still fighting for a fair and equitable allocation of water.

In this video I give a quick summary of my investigation so far and then an update on what we are continuing to do behind the scenes to restore the productive capacity of regional Australia.

TRANSCRIPT

Some people recently have asked us for an update on what we’re doing in the Murray-Darling Basin. It’s still a very very important issue. Just because some rains have come does not mean it’s over yet. There’s a long way to go. So I’ll just first of all, remind people of what we’ve done. Back in 2017 in February, I listened to people in the Ballone Shire Council, in their chambers in St. George and they told us about the devastation due to the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and the plan in Southern Queensland around the border and Northern New South Wales.

We listened to those people and we saw that they were right. Then we went as a result of that. Pauline and I went down the whole Murray River, right down to the barrages and the river mouth and we learned quite a bit from irrigators and farmers in northern Victoria, Southern New South Wales and South Australia. Then I got knocked out of the Senate and we were about to continue doing a lot more. When I came back in, the first thing we did, was start to understand the Murray-Darling Basin again.

So, we first of all did an overflight. We took off from Albury went right down the Murray River, down around the lower lakes, the Coorong and then up to Mildura, then up the entire Darling and then flew to the north of the basin above Charleville and then came back to Goondiwindi and then over the Clarence River catchment area, and then down the centre of the basin and actually back to Mungundi and then down the centre and then to Albury. We got a good overview of the whole lot. Wasn’t much water anyway, because it was so dry.

Then we went on the ground and we went to Southern Queensland, Northern New South Wales listening to people; irrigators, communities, businesses. We then went down, flew down to Adelaide and went down the lower lakes, the Coorong, then back up through the irrigated areas and non irrigated areas of South Australia, then along the Murray listening to people in southern New South Wales, Northern Victoria. And then we went along the Murrumbidgee.

And we went down the Murrumbidgee and partly under the Murray again, then up the Darling and ended up at Broken Hill. We’ve got a little bit more travelling to do, a little bit more listening with people on the ground in Central and New South Wales. And we’ve also got a few issues that we want resolved. But most importantly, we want to listen now to some experts. These are not technical experts as such, not because they’ve got, they’re not experts because they’ve got initials after their name or they’ve got a title.

These are experts, like former people in the Murray-Darling Basin Commission. Highly regarded. People who’ve done a lot of research, a lot of experience in the area. We want to listen to them, and then we pull it all together. But just now I just want to bring you up to date with a few things. First of all, the need for trust. There’s very little trust. Why? Because there’s so little data, there’s so little openness, there’s so little listening from the Murray-Darling Basin Authority.

And as a result, people are blaming each other between the regions. The flood harvesters in Northern New South Wales and Southern Queensland are blaming South Australia. South Australians are blaming everyone. Southerners in New South Wales and Victoria are blaming the Northerners and South Australia. And we’ve been told that we will get a water registry. Well, the federal government has had eight years to do that and still hasn’t got a water registry.

So what we’re doing is, we’re calling on the federal government to put in place a water registry in 12 months over the next 12 months. You should should be able to do that in a year. The data is largely there. But it needs to be part of a larger watering reporting system comprising the whole basin so we know where the water is coming in, we know where the water is being stored and we know where it’s flowing out. That’s essential. So that people have an understanding, a transparent understanding of the water flows.

The second thing. We want irrigation water to be treated somewhat as environmental water. The losses in irrigation water flow into the environment. Some of the irrigation water itself flows into the environment. So what we’re calling for, is carriage losses in irrigation water to be treated as environmental water because it ends up in the environment. Third thing as part of that by the way, we want farmers to be recognised that they are protecting the environment.

Their experience, their own livelihoods and the future value of their land depends upon them taking care of it. These people are the guardians of the land. Instead of being seen, treated as villains, they need to be treated as guardians of the land. The fourth thing we want is integrity. We want to restore integrity to the Basin. There is corruption.

We know that! Some of the irrigation authorities have a lot at stake and some of the people are telling us around the Basin that some irrigation authorities are corrupt. And with the amount of money involved, it’s easy to see how that could happen. And we know that some people have become very very wealthy as a result. So what we’re calling for is a Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission. Now what we’ve got to do, I just told you, we’ve still got a little bit more to do.

And then what we’ll do is we’ll put a plan out to the whole community. We’ve already released based upon our early understandings at the water convoy. Last year we released our basic plan. It was just a discussion paper, to get people’s feedback. That will become the basis of a policy. It is not our policy yet, but we will, we’ve got a little bit more work to do and then we will restore water to the farmers through a policy that we’ll be releasing to everyone. The plan ultimately is to restore water to the farmers and have a solid sustainable Murray-Darling Basin Plan.

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