Sharman Stone MP

 

PRESENTER:    According to Dr Sharman Stone, Federal Member for Murray, there are no clear costs of how much this water is going to cost the State Government. Dr Sharman Stone, Federal Member for Murray joins us on the program now. Dr Stone thanks for joining us.

 

STONE:            My pleasure Greg.

 

PRESENTER:    Lovely to talk to you this morning. Now you’re telling us that the pipe has been built. I remember the original cost of this North-South pipe was 75 million dollars. I think it was 75 kilometres of pipe and it was $1 million per kilometre. But I guess that’s blown out. And now were saying that the Government has not really calculated how much the water is going to cost to put in it.

 

STONE:            Well our problem is that this pipeline was announced as a done deal from day one with out economic, community or environmental impact assessment work done.

 

We likewise have the same story with the desalinisation plant in terms of costs. You might have seen very recently the Government said ‘we will release our formula about how the water will be cost planned to Melbourne’. The algebra was so complicated and extraordinary, that even academic mathematicians couldn’t fathom it.

 

Then of course on top of that we have the Foodbowl Modernisation Project in Northern Victoria being run by the Northern Victorian Irrigation Renewal Project ( NVIRP). That’s where we are putting plastic lining in the channels and converting waterwheels to meters. That too is going into its third of 5 years. No business plan, no strategic terms of reference or long term statement made about the social, environmental or economic impacts of what this extraordinary piece of change to the 100 year old irrigation system is going to do to Northern Victoria.

 

The pipeline, I cannot begin to say just how extraordinary the impact of it, is going to be. It just takes my breath away and makes me want to spit chips.

 

PRESENTER:    Dr Stone, it took my breath away in its infancy in its planning which as you said was ill founded and had not a lot of public consultation. But there was a huge amount of public protest for that pipe that was totally ignored by the government.

 

Even 12 months before the pipe was announced. I mean it was a done deal as you said. The infrastructure was purchased and everything was all set to go. So any amount of protesting was never going to stop that pipe.

 

Now the water is going to be coming out of the Goulburn River, which effects Lake Eildon, effects many areas. Do we have the water to put in that pipe?

 

STONE:            Well Greg, no we don’t.

 

The idea was that this Foodbowl Modernisation Project, the plastic lining in the channels and so on, it would provide so called savings, and in turn a proportion would be used to push down the pipeline to Melbourne and Geelong. That was the statement of rationalisation.

 

 But, the volume supposed to be saved, could never have been achieved. There were more savings projected then we ever could deliver in our drought years. So that was a furphy too.

 

Right now, where I sit as we speak, I’m about a kilometre from Reedy Swamp, which is just off the Goulburn River on the northern end of Shepparton; there is a very serious blue green algae outbreak.

 

Now that swamp, as I say, is linked to the Goulburn River. If that water rises and gets into the Goulburn, that toxin goes down to Echuca and effects Echuca’s water supply, it’s poisonous.

 

We have supposedly in the Eildon Dam, a 30 gigalitre reserve, called the Environmental Reserve, which has always been there for a toxic bloom flushing. The only thing that kills blue green algae is fresh water pulsing through the system. Guess where that environmental flow is now destined to go?

PRESENTER:    Down the pipe. And of course once Lake Eildon drops to low levels, the Blue Green Algae starts to form there as well.

 

STONE:            Exactly, it goes for shallow, warm still water. 

 

If you wrote a comic book about this Greg, and put all these disasters  together you would say, ‘Come on now, that’s a bit over the top’.

 

PRESENTER:    Now Dr Stone, Premier Brumby is grinning about all this because he can say ‘Well now I’m drought proofing Melbourne. So no one can ever accuse me of not doing anything. This do nothing government has actually done something, we have drought proofed Melbourne’.

 

 I sometimes think that was the underlying plan for this North-South pipe. So ‘No one can accuse me of not drought proofing Melbourne’.

 

The bottom line is, over and above everything you have said. What do we do about it?

 

STONE:            Well Greg, we never give up until we are literally down in the dust. 

I have to say that I am waiting for a lot more people in Melbourne to suddenly say ‘Hang on, we like our Australian food supply. We want to be able to go into the supermarket and see Murray Goulburn, Devondale brand, a product which we know is grown locally in Australia, not imported from New Zealand, or China or somewhere else’.

 

 I have to say. We need to get Melbourne to understand, if you take water security away from the food producers of the southern Murray Darling Basin, then you have the consequences of less locally grown food. You kill off communities. When communities shrink and die because they haven’t got water security, then you actually have environmental degradation like dust storms and weeds and feral animals and so on, so all of that impacts on Melbourne as well.

 

If I was Mr Brumby, I would have understood that it was much cleverer to say, I am going to drought proof Melbourne, by recycling, by storm water harvesting, by introducing a desalinisation plant with proper costing.

 

As you know Greg, we had a front page on one of our biggest metropolitan newspapers recently saying we don’t need the water from the pipeline, we have enough in store for Melbourne on the other side of the Great Dividing range. This doesn’t have to happen.

 

PRESENTER:    Yes you can see it in a couple of year’s time. One un-used pipe for sale.

 

 Look it’s certainly a hot issue, and thankyou Dr Stone for talking to us today. You are right, and what you say is right. The right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing in Northern Victoria is just not good enough.

Can I ask you one question before we go? You talk about the Murray Darling Basin and the Darling River meets the Murray River. Dr Stone what is wrong with the prospect, if they want to build a pipe, and I am not against building pipes because it creates jobs and infrastructure, why couldn’t we build a pipe right now? On this day when we are getting tropical rain falling in Cairns, Northern New South Wales? Where there is a plethora of water that just runs into the sea? They get this every year because the environment up there.

 

Why can’t we run a pipe from Northern New South Wales to the head, that is the top of the Darling River, and let it do its natural job by putting water back in it?

 

STONE:            Greg the only thing between us and a pipeline like that is a few billion dollars and the political will to do it.

 

There is even a vary serious suggestion about a pipeline from Papua New Guinea, where they have the highest rain fall in the world, coming down a track which is already in play for a gas pipeline, down through Queensland and further down south.

 

Pipelines are low technology; they are not hard to do. It’s just the dollars to justify the cost of the water, and the political will, which is one of our problems, if you have pipelines cross state borders in Australia, things start to get a little bit of push back, shall I say.

 

Certainly when you have South Australia wanting to sue Victoria right now because they are not getting enough out of the Murray. Can you imagine Queensland willingly and lovingly saying ‘Oh yes you pipe our water down to New South Wales and further down south’.

 

We have to get more sophisticated about all of this, because piping water out of a stressed drought area down to Melbourne is plain stupidity. But there are other places where pipelines make a lot of sense as you say.

 

PRESENTER:    Thankyou very much indeed for your time Sharman stone. It’s good that you’re in there fighting for us, Thanks very much for that and all the best.

Have a good day talk to you again soon.

 

STONE:            See you Greg.