SEVENTY PER CENT OVER THE ODDS
Water Minister Murray Watt has just paid up to 70 per cent more than he needed to for our water and he did it with your money.
The market analysts at WSP have published the 2025-26 numbers. The Commonwealth bought almost half of the $1.174 billion of water traded across the southern Basin. In Victoria's Goulburn district it paid an average of $1,303 for low reliability shares while the farmers buying in that same market paid $768. That is the premium you funded, and it bought a record volume of water that now gets sent downstream instead of growing food in the most productive irrigation country in Australia.
They call them voluntary buybacks. That word is doing an enormous amount of work, because it makes it sound like a farmer sat at the kitchen table and made a free choice. Temporary water has gone from $79 a megalitre a decade ago to $259 today, IPART has locked in water bill rises of more than 46 per cent over four years in the hardest hit valleys before inflation, and a lot of good families are carrying debt they took on when water was still affordable. Then the Commonwealth arrives waving a cheque worth 70 per cent over the going rate. By the time the bank has had its say the farmer has already signed.
Every one of those sales makes water dearer for the ones who stay. The water the government buys goes downstream and out through the Mouth, so it is gone from the pool everyone else is bidding for. The number of farmers needing water stays the same while the water available to them shrinks, and anybody who has run a business knows exactly what that does to a price.
So the farmer who never sold a drop cops a bigger water bill, thinner margins and the same debt as before. Eventually they sell too, at the inflated price, and they go. When the farmers go the money goes with them, and the towns our grandparents built for the sole purpose of growing food go with the money.
You would at least hope all that pain was buying us a healthy river. After more than a decade of the Basin Plan only two of its twelve environmental targets have ever been met, and in January the Environment Minister's own scientific committee listed the Lower Murray as critically endangered. They read those results as a reason to go and buy even more water. There is an old line about doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result.
Our food imports are already up 48 per cent in a decade. Four Corners had 221 products origin tested and 22 per cent of them failed, with every single failure traced back to China. That is the shelf we are building.
Your money, spent at a 70 per cent premium, to take water off farmers who are being squeezed into selling, which drives the price up for everyone left, which pushes the next lot out, which empties the towns, which puts your dinner on a ship.
I have said this over and over and I will keep saying it. The only thing that will fix this is a Federal Royal Commission into water. We have had inquiry after inquiry and nothing changes, because a Royal Commission is the one body that can put people under oath and force the documents out into the open. There is far too much money riding on this staying exactly as it is.
https://standupforwater.lovable.app/
Send this to anyone who still thinks the buybacks are harmless.
