10% MORE AT THE CHECKOUT EVERY YEAR
Your food is about to get 10 per cent more expensive every single year and it has nothing to do with the farmers who grow it. It traces straight back to water.
The dams that water our food bowl are nearly empty, with Hume sitting at 22 per cent and still falling as a dry El Nino summer builds on top of it. At the same time IPART has just lifted the bulk water bill again and the increases now on the table run to 10 per cent every year. Water is the one thing you cannot grow food without, so the irrigators, the ACCC and the government's own experts all say the same thing, higher water costs land straight at your checkout. Every year the water gets another 10 per cent dearer, so every year your food gets dearer with it.
So what are they doing with all that water? Canberra keeps buying it off farmers who can no longer survive the bills, then flushing it past the paddocks, down the river and out to the sea, or pouring it into South Australia's man made lakes to keep them propped up. More than 13 billion dollars of our taxpayer money has gone into this scheme, the fish are still dying, the Lower Murray has been declared critically endangered and not one of the environmental outcomes they promised has turned up. It is a disgrace.
The Riverina grows almost all of Australia's rice and a fifth of its milk. This year the rice crop is forecast to fall by two thirds because water has been priced out of reach. Strip the water and you do not just empty a paddock, you empty the supermarket shelf and what takes its place is food shipped in from overseas.
This is a cry for help from the people who feed this country. A third of us live outside the big cities and we are done being treated as second rate citizens. We are the heartland that grows the food on every Australian table and we will not keep being sacrificed so Canberra can chase inner city activists who have never set foot on a farm and have no clue where their dinner comes from.
If you do not want your food getting 10 per cent dearer every year and grown overseas instead of on our farms, share this post and tag Anthony Albanese and Murray Watt so the two men in charge cannot pretend they did not see it. Put their names in the comments too and show them the third of this country they treat as an afterthought is a voice too big to ignore.
Add your name at https://standupforwater.lovable.app/
