She says Andrew McConville, the man in charge of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, stood up at a Rural Press Club lunch in Sydney this month and admitted he forgot to put farming in his plan for the rivers that grow our food.
“Andrew McConville calls it ‘the missing chapter’. I was in the room when he said leaving agriculture out of the Basin Plan Review ‘was a miss on our part’ and that he was ‘very happy to own that’,” Mrs Dalton said.
“So I asked him about it to his face. I have been in this water fight since 2007 and stood at every rally and protest along the way, and when his report reads like this is the first time anyone has told them what buybacks are doing to our communities, that simply is not true, because our people have spelled it out over and over and nothing has changed.
“Nearly 2,500 submissions poured into his review saying exactly that. Buried on page 77 is the admission that the current buyback program was ‘not within the scope of this review’ anyway.
“They asked the question, wrote down the answers and made sure none of it could change a thing.
“This Basin grows 40 per cent of Australia's farm production. WaterNSW has just hit some valleys with water bill rises of up to 46 per cent over the next four years while Minister Murray Watt's department assesses a fresh round of buyback offers, chasing 400 gigalitres by Christmas.
“By the time they finish stripping the water off our farms there will be nothing left to salvage,” Mrs Dalton said.
She said forgetting the people who feed this nation is not the kind of slip you wave away with a shrug over lunch in Sydney.
“An admission three years too late does not put water back on a paddock or a family back on the land, so I will keep pushing for a Federal Royal Commission into water, where someone is finally forced under oath to answer for this scam,” Mrs Dalton said.
She has also hit out at water buybacks, with a social media post stating “seven corporations have just been handed more than a billion dollars of our taxpayer money
for selling Murray water back to the Albanese government, and every dollar of it was stripped out of the industry that feeds this country”.
Mrs Dalton said the government spent $1.563 billion buying 278 billion litres of water entitlements, and the biggest cheques went to Aware Super, Perpetual, Sandhurst Trustees, GO.FARM, Duxton Water and a United States insurance giant called Allstate. One super fund alone took $431 million.
“Not one of them drives a header, milks a cow or grows a grain of rice.
“They are investors and an overseas company cashing in on a scheme that shuts down the farms around them.”
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