https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2019- ... YO-H8bbUaQThe Federal Government's long-awaited foreign ownership of water entitlement register reveals investors from China and the United States have the biggest stake in foreign-owned water entitlements in Australia.
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/sust ... 4z1uc.htmlIn July 2017 the ABC Four Corners program ''Pumped'' revealed astounding malpractice and alleged corruption, which is currently being investigated by the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). Some of these allegedly corrupt transactions hide behind a veil of incompetence. Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on water "buybacks", where the government has paid twice the going rate for water which effectively does not exist, except during heavy rainfall and peak water conditions.
The first of these was the purchase of $34 million of supplementary water rights, described locally as "empty buckets of water", sold to the federal government during the Millennium drought in 2008 by Tandou Station, 100 kilometres south-east of Broken Hill and just south of the Menindee Lakes. A further water sale to the federal government was made last year by the same station, $78 million for their entire 21,900-megalitre water right and for business readjustment.
As was reported last month, that deal - personally negotiated by Barnaby Joyce - was at more than twice the market price for water.
That’s $112 million of taxpayer funds to one station, Tandou. Webster Limited has owned Tandou since 2015. The company also owns several large cotton properties upstream at Bourke and Moree.
Webster, a Tasmanian company, is also one of Australia’s biggest water traders. Its shareholders include Australian Food and Fibre, which is controlled by the Robinson family, a major donor to the National Party.
The outcome from this $112 million investment of taxpayer funds is that Webster will decommission the irrigated horticultural enterprise at Tandou and return the property to dry-land farming. They will take all the promised jobs and economic activity with them to their northern NSW holdings, where they get to intercept the water before it enters the Darling River.
This is the real kicker - the $112 million water "buyback" will do nothing to benefit the river or water users downstream.
We now know that this was not an isolated case. Last month, Fairfax’s Peter Hannam revealed details of a $17 million purchase in March 2017, at twice the market price for water, from the Tulla Pastoral Company, owned by Geoff Dunsdon, in the Warrego River in southern Queensland. This was also empty buckets of water – or "goanna water" as they call it further north.
According to the November 2017 Matthews Report, commissioned by the NSW government in the wake of the explosive allegations aired by Four Corners, most of the effective water controls and regulation do not apply, or are not complied with, in the Upper Darling Basin.
Joyce confirmed in an interview with The Australian that the deal with Webster meant that some of the five lakes making up the Menindee storage system would be permanently "decommissioned".
The Australian reported that Joyce said letting the lakes dry out would save precious water for irrigators in the cotton communities of St George and Dirranbandi, in southern Queensland, and Bourke, Wee Waa and Moree in northern NSW. This was "a much better alternative than having to withdraw water entitlements from large cotton producers like Chinese-owned Cubbie Station, the biggest user of water in Australia".
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