http://www.smh.com.au/news/paul-sheehan/anything-but-a-national-party/2005/08/28/1125167548103.html
Farmers are the casualties as one state wages war on another, writes Paul Sheehan.
At the Lightning Ridge Bowling Club last Tuesday, 45 farmers confronted the Sinkhole. It is an uneven struggle. The Sinkhole is huge, wealthy and politically connected. It is a goldmine for the few and a disaster for the many. It also serves as the embodiment of the National Party's drift towards becoming a collection of featherweights, opportunists and "states-rights" fundamentalists who call themselves "Nationals" yet are anything but.
National disgrace perhaps. This is a party that won 5.8 per cent of the national vote at last year's federal election and is now in the process of blackmailing the 94.2 per cent who didn't for vote it.
The Sinkhole, for example, breaks every rule of communal morality. It is better known as Cubbie Station, and it is an act of economic war by one state, Queensland, against another state, NSW. Cubbie is a source of rage for the former NSW premier, Bob Carr. Privately, he urged his fellow Labor Premier, Peter Beattie, to buy the station and take it out of production for the national good. Beattie was sympathetic, but Queensland is Queensland, the bulldozer is still king, and the Queensland Nats will die in a ditch to protect Cubbie Station.
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AdvertisementThis applies doubly to the Canberra press gallery's latest pin-up boy, Senator Barnaby Joyce, whose political base is dominated by Cubbie and whose Senate campaign was funded in large part by Cubbie. Although Joyce won just 4698 first-preference votes - 0.21 per cent of the Senate primary vote in Queensland - and got into Parliament on the coat-tails of John Howard, he has engaged in brinkmanship since the day he arrived in Canberra.
After financial contributions for the 2004 federal election were revealed earlier this year, Joyce was asked by the Brisbane Courier-Mail about the $9000 he received from Cubbie interests for his Senate campaign. He replied: "I have no problem with people associating me with the irrigation industry at all."
He has a problem. Joyce is now the most important politician in the region affected by Cubbie Station, but he was nowhere to be seen at the Lightning Ridge Bowling Club last week, and nor was any other National politician. Five officials from the natural resources departments of Queensland and NSW came to listen to a room filled by people whose livelihoods are being sucked away by the cotton lobby.
About 100,000 years of landscape evolution and 100 years of sustainable farming are going down the sinkhole. Don't take my word for it. There's a lot of scientific evidence about the impact of Cubbie. There's a lot of sensible farmers outraged. One of them is Pop Petersen. She was at the Lightning Ridge bowlo on Tuesday.
"It was extremely frustrating and everybody left pretty cranky," she told me. "This is absolutely going to kill us. You are looking at 1.4 million acres [560,000 hectares] of flood plain that is dying." For the past 27 years, Pop's husband, Peter, has been managing Brenda, a 66,000-hectare mixed grazing property straddling the Queensland-NSW border. It has been a working property for 125 years.
"All this country along the flood plain was taken up because of the regularity of flooding," Pop said. "After a flood, we reap the benefits for two years. The feed that grows on the flood plain after a flood is just magnificent." Was magnificent.
The floods have stopped. Their property has a recording station for the Bureau of Meteorology and in the past 100 years it has recorded 110 floods, one every 11 months. But there hasn't been a big flood on the property for seven years, and the Culgoa River is barely running.
"At the meeting they tried to explain why we were not getting water, but we all know why we're not getting water," Karen Betts told me. She and her husband, Owen, own the property immediately south of Cubbie.
"A lot of people won't survive this. It is in effect transferring wealth from many downstream landholders to a few upstream irrigators. The river red gums are dying and the natural grasses are dying."
Pop said: "Apart from being an economic disaster it is also an environmental one. We have many dead or dying river gums, coolibah, black wattle and thousands of acres of dead lignum. A flood plain must have a flood over it from time to time to exist ...
"Last year, there was a good flood upstream and 66,802 megalitres per day were released from the weir at St George. Under similar conditions in 1994 we had over 60,000 acres flooded on our property. A flood like that would have been an absolute lifesaver after the drought. But we got no flooding. Cubbie Station and others literally stopped the floodwaters by taking the water and storing it in their massive storages ... We lost $568,000 in production."
Multiply this by a hundred and you get the bigger picture on the Culgoa flood plain. I have reams of material about water licences, management plans and overland flows which I will summarise: Cubbie came into being via licences created by the former Borbidge National Party government in Queensland, with no environmental impact studies, and now the Queensland Government is planning to legitimise the status quo retroactively. All the earthworks and redirections of water will be vindicated by a policy that says the bigger the bulldozer the bigger the water rights. The irrigators pay $3 a megalitre from the river and nothing for overland flow they trap during floods.
Cubbie's vast system of weirs and levees has a holding capacity of 480,000 million litres. Peter Petersen puts that in perspective: "It is larger than Sydney Harbour." It is not just Cubbie, it's cotton. The amount of water storage constructed on irrigated properties between St George and the NSW border is now 1.5 million megalitres, three Sydney harbours, and more than 15 times the amount stored 10 years ago.
It's all legal. It's all proper. Cubbie has always said that what it does is run a highly efficient and profitable business. That's true. It's also absurd. It's the rock on which the National Party's credibility may perish.
