FARMERS OR AI?
Every meal on every Australian table starts with a farmer and a drop of water. That is the most basic fact of how this country feeds itself, and right now we are quietly throwing it away.
Right across the Murray, families who have grown our food for three and four generations are being squeezed off their land, because the water they depend on has been stripped away and sold off for environmental outcomes we were promised and never got. The rivers are no healthier, the towns are emptier, and the only thing these buybacks have reliably delivered is heartbreak and higher prices.
Now, while our own farmers are told there is not a drop to spare, governments are waving through new data centres that will drink billions of litres of clean drinking water every year. I am not against that technology, the country genuinely needs it. But you cannot look a farmer in the eye and tell them their water is too precious to grow food, then pour that same water into a shed full of computers.
If we are going to find water for new projects, the honest place to start is the water we already waste, not another raid on the people who feed us. Stop stripping water from our farmers for no good reason.
This government has to decide what it actually wants. It can back the farmers who feed the nation, or it can keep chasing environmental outcomes that never show up and data centres that never stop drinking. It cannot keep hollowing out our food bowl and pretending there is no cost.
That is why I am calling for a Federal Royal Commission into water, on the record and under oath.
