WATER DEATH SPIRAL
IPART has locked in a water price hike that hits every irrigator on the Murray and the flow-on lands in every kitchen in the country.
The water that grows your food just got more expensive. In some valleys the price of general security water climbs more than 46 per cent over the next four years on top of inflation, and a family farm holding a one billion litre licence is now staring down an extra nine to eleven thousand dollars a year just to keep the same crop in the ground.
Farmers cannot magic that money out of thin air, so it goes onto the cost of the rice, the fruit, the vegetables and the grain they grow, and then it goes onto the price you pay at Coles and Woolworths. More expensive water means more expensive food which means more expensive groceries, and that bill does not stop at the Murray, it turns up in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane just the same.
Here is the part I need every Australian to understand, because this is not some force of nature we all just have to cop. Families are already getting priced out and farmers are already being forced to sell, and when the next drought hits there will not be enough Australian grown food left on the shelf to go around. That is a choice being made right now, not bad luck.
IPART's own modelling admits these prices push farmers off the land and speed up farm exits. The regulator knows it is making it harder and dearer to feed this country and it signed the increase off anyway.
This has a real solution and it is not complicated. Stop the corruption in the water market, count every drop properly and put the whole rigged system under oath so we can see exactly who is getting rich while the families who grow our food go under.
That is why I am calling for a Federal Royal Commission into water.
