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ON THE eve of the public release of findings from South Australia’s Royal Commission into the Murray Darling Basin Plan, South Australian Senator Rex Patrick released aerial photographs of Queensland farms with huge amounts of water held in dams.
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Some might venture the timing was mischievious, others consider his motivations an affront.
He said the scale of water storages brim-full was something that could not be appreciated from ground level.
Senator Patrick such scale of storages was not sustainable and the allocations themselves were not sustainable.
Driving between Broken Hill and Adelaide on Friday, Senator Patrick told The Land he did not think growing cotton for export was in Australia’s best interests.
He said he accepted what he had photographed was quite legal – they were stored water allocations, but he questioned the politics of such a thing ever having been allowed in the first place.
Mr Patrick said he had also toured Queensland’s Cubbie Station, a property that cops a lot of blame for the nation’s water ills, and said there was currently no water stored there.
“The problem is not with the operation at Cubbie, it’s with the fact that they’re allowed to do what they do,” he said.
“It is an extremely professional operation and wholly accountable to the Queensland government when it comes to compliance.
“In my strong view, noting cotton is a water intensive crop that is exported, exporting cotton is akin to exporting water.
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“Given we are the driest continent on the planet, that cannot be in the national interest,” he said.
It was a comment Cotton Australia did not take well.
“It is very disappointing that Senator Patrick is still questioning if Australian cotton is in the ‘national interest’, despite a thorough briefing from Cotton Australia last week,” said chief executive Adam Kay.
“I am pleased the South Australian senator travelled beyond Menindee to witness what is happening upstream, but I would again encourage him to spend time with smaller family farms to better understand the challenges facing our industry,” he said.
“Cotton is grown in more than 150 regional communities across NSW, Queensland and Victoria, providing work for more than 10,000 employees in a non-drought year.
“As the South Australian Royal Commissioner into the Murray-Darling Basin Bret Walker said in his report Australia’s cotton industry had ‘almost been demonised’, and rhetoric of cotton being a ‘thirsty crop’ and an industry made up of ‘greedy farmers’ should be rejected.
The commissioner said cotton “should not be denigrated” in comparison to other crops.
He pointed out that cotton and rice are annual crops and therefore loan themselves to “much more frequent and flexible choices by the farmers as to whether to plant, how much to plant and when to plant.
“Adaptation to drought is achieved by such choices,” he wrote in his final report.
“Permanent plantings — vines, other tree fruits, nuts — are in a very much more vulnerable position, because their normal life-cycles are measured in years, sometimes decades.
“For them, drought is either survived or not.
“The pressure this places on the prices that growers of permanent planting crops are prepared to offer is obvious,” wrote Mr Walker.
Senator Patrick said pulling out one crop and looking at it can be a “little bit dangerous”, but said what needed to be considered was an overall view.
“Cotton is an annual crop, but it also takes 27 per cent of the allocations across the Basin.
“So any change in the cotton space can affect real change.”
He said permanent crops also had to be considered, for example how much of what is grown is exported and whether that was in the national interest.
“I’m not suggesting a Soviet-style mandate of what people can and cannot grow, nor am I suggesting we do not take part in international commerce, we’ve just got to look at things in total context.
“Simply looking at the (monetary) value of the crop is not the right way to look at it.
“For instance we have a lot of uranium, but we don’t choose to export it everywhere.”
Satellite images of water storages obtained from the Sentinel-2L1C satellite show an array of water storages in in Queensland, while the Lower Darling in NSW is a series of muddy pools.
Mr Walker said in his final report there were systemic problems with the Murray Darling Basin Plan, questioned its legality, suggested “best science” was being ignored and that politics played far too great of a role in its implementation.
“The habitual behaviour of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, and to a lesser but alarming extent the CSIRO, is marked by an unfathomable predilection for secrecy,” wrote Mr Walker.
“That is the bane of good science — and an obstacle to the democratic and informed design and improvement of public policy that must be based on science.
“A sea change is required to remove this aspect of the general constraints on beneficial change,” he wrote.
“Nothing in this report should be understood, let alone feared, as a voice against the continued enterprise of our already top notch irrigation farmers.”
Senator Patrick suggested criticisms levelled against Regional Water Minister Niall Blair as having a predilection for irrigators were well deserved.
“He appears to have a strong bias for a particular stakeholder in the Basin,” said the senator.
“He favours no changes to the plan, which is to suggest ‘all’s good’.
“And it is not.”
Mr Blair said it was time “this crusade against NSW irrigation farmers, be it those who produce citrus, almonds, dairy, grapes, wheat, rice and, yes, even cotton, must stop.
“Water is the lifeblood of our basin communities and this continuous campaign to brand the farming community as environmental criminals is dangerous to every citizen in the basin, our state’s economy and our standing in overseas export markets.
He said Mr Walker’s suggestion more buybacks should occur “is strongly opposed by NSW as it would decimate our regional communities.
“As the Productivity Commission report said last week, there has already been a 20 per cent reduction in productive water, mostly from NSW communities and any further recovery should only be taken through water savings projects and infrastructure upgrades.”
Senator Patrick said there was a need for much greater transparency, when it came to allocations and transactions and no one should be able to interfere with the Plan, without critical review.
“Critical review is a really good thing.
Senator Patrick referred to his former military career “as a submariner I understand some secrets are needed.
“How a river system is managed should not be a secret.”