78 JOBS OFF THE MILL FLOOR

I was on the panel at Rice Connect in Barham today with growers from right across the valley and every one of us was sitting there with the same news hanging over the room. SunRice cut 78 jobs at the Leeton and Deniliquin mills this week. SunRice was the platinum partner of the event.

What I said in that room is what I say everywhere. Governments at both the state and federal level have very little regard for us and they seem perfectly happy for this country to live on imported food while the people who grow it here get squeezed off the land. We send the produce out and we get the crumbs back.

What I want for this valley is simple enough. I want to see people busy, I want to see kids playing sport on a Saturday, I want to see towns with a bit of vibrancy in them. You do not get any of that out of a district that has lost its mill, because the wages that pay for the sponsorships and the shopfronts and the school enrolments come off those factory floors.

Every grain of rice grown in this country comes off Murray-Darling irrigation, so when Canberra keeps buying the water out of this valley the damage runs straight through the towns that mill it. This week it landed on 78 families in Leeton and Deniliquin.

The policy settings have to start recognising what we actually do out here. Halt the buybacks before the next tender goes out, then write our communities back into water legislation as a binding test that has to be passed before another drop is bought.

The other thing I said on that panel I will say here too. The RGA does a great job and they cannot carry this on their own. The people making these decisions have never stood on the floor of a rice mill and they will keep going until enough of us tell them what it is doing to us, so tell your story and put it somewhere the city can see it.

Sign the call for a Federal Royal Commission into water: https://standupforwater.lovable.app/