Queensland Senator-elect Malcolm Roberts. is alarmed by news that the Federal Government, just a week after its election, has paid $73.5 million for Cubbie Station water entitlements, from Cubbie’s newest owner, Macquarie Group, and will simply flush it into the sea.
Such mismanagement of water (carried out in the name of “environmental flows”) is hurting Australia’s productive capacity and Australia’s ability to generate wealth for the regions and for all Australians, he says.
“At least the water will be used for “good” – washed out to sea in South Australia,” he suggested sarcastically.
The Agri-Investor website notes blithely that “the voluntary sale comes just after the re-election of Australia’s Labor government, which is pushing to secure more water in the Murray Darling Basin for environmental purposes.”
In other words, the Albanese Labor government wants less agricultural productivity in the Murray-Darling Basin and more wasted water to pander to the party’s green-left and the Greens, who essentially despise agriculture’s place in a landscape they stupidly expect to be “pristine”.
Senator Roberts is wondering what this means for Cubbie Station, which he describes as “the amazing, highly productive and environmentally-responsible, Australian-designed and built” farm and “a marvel of vision, engineering, personal enterprise, environmental responsibility”.
“Fallen to government deceit?” he asks. “Is this Macquarie bank again playing its globalist role?
“There’s a pattern across Australia. Globalists purchase fishing rights, farm water entitlements, CO2 credits and then shut down productive endeavours – beef, fishing, crops – wealth generation, regional viability, productive capacity and food security falling to the globalist agenda.”
Farmonline, the Fairfax outlet, reports that Macquarie Group says “there will be no reduction in productive capacity” at Cubbie, Australia’s biggest cotton farm, despite it recently selling irrigation water rights worth $73.5 million.
That may be true but common sense would ask why water is being sold and bought for tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and then simply flushed out to sea while a large segment of the South East Australian farming community is suffering from drought.
The bureau of meteorology reports that April rainfall was “below average to very much below average (in the lowest 10% of Aprils since 1900) for Tasmania, eastern South Australia, most of Victoria, across the south-eastern ranges and inland slopes, and in the western corners of NSW, and parts of the west coast and the interior of Western Australia.
Cairns News wonders why the irrigated farming industry in states fed by Murray-Darling Basin water weren’t allocated this water instead. There may be properties struggling with current allocations or others able to boost fodder output for the farms struggling with drought i.e. use the water to increase productivity, not simply wasted in foolish pursuit of spurious and vague “environmental benefits”.