Anybody who knows anything about water will know the recent announcement by the MDBA of a 265 gigalitre SDLAM shortfall is no surprise, because SDLAM was never achievable in the first place, but the response from Federal Water Minister Murray Watt is nothing short of horrifying and shows just how out of touch he really is.
Maybe he needs to grab himself a copy and have a read of Caught in the Current by Pat Byrne, and understand if Australia continues on the course it’s currently on, we will be net importers of agricultural product by 2037.
In an interview with ABC, Senator Watt stated the agricultural sector is continuing to grow, he obviously hasn’t had a look at the data which shows agricultural production has stagnated since the early 2000s, while our population has increased by 43 per cent.
The Murray-Darling Basin produces 40 per cent of the food grown in this country.
It is the most productive area region thanks to affordable irrigation, but over the last six years, as the real impact of buybacks has started to filter through, production has decreased by 29 per cent and an area twice the size of the ACT has gone out of production.
In the mid 1990s, Australia used to produce over 500 litres of milk per person, in 2025, that figure was down near 300 litres, rice nearly 70kg, now around 20kg, and cattle has dropped from over two per person to just over one.
Claiming a $300 million structural adjustment program is fair compensation to rural Australia when buybacks have, and will, continue to strip billions of dollars from productivity, processing and logistics, just doesn’t make sense.
Especially when all of that productivity is linked to affordable irrigation water.
What does this mean for the average consumer?
Higher prices in the supermarket, increasing inflation and even higher interest rates.
The only thing we can agree with Senator Watt on is we do have a sustainable river system, but the basin plan, buybacks and questionable environmental outcomes based on volumetric numbers are not the mechanism to do that.
Sophie Baldwin
Southern Riverina Irrigators CEO
25°C