South Australian senator says cotton sales are equivalent to exporting 20% of river system’s water to China and India

The South Australian Centre Alliance senator Rex Patrick is calling for cotton exports to be banned in an attempt to draw attention to the plight of the Murray-Darling river system and the over-extraction by irrigators.

The senator is preparing to introduce a bill when parliament resumes next week. It would impose a ban on exporting cotton in three years’ time.

His proposal is driven by frustration that the states and the commonwealth have expressed an unwillingness to address the problems of the Murray-Darling basin, and have largely dismissed the South Australian royal commission’s findings that the basin plan is failing and needs an overhaul.

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Patrick said the commonwealth had exclusive powers over exports and could act unilaterally to ban cotton exports.

“We export 90% of the cotton grown in Australia,” he said. “About 20% of the basin water goes to cotton.

“It’s like exporting 20% of the Murray-Darling to China and India. It’s not in the national interest: it goes to food security and the environment.”

Patrick said there were other commodities on which the commonwealth imposed restrictions for public interest reasons. Exports of uranium were restricted from the Olympic Dam mine and the government was looking at restrictions on live sheep exports in the interests of animal welfare.

“We are not saying you can’t grow cotton. We can use it here and we can look at growing a local processing industry if it makes economic sense.”

The chief executive of Cotton Australia, Adam Kay, called Patrick’s proposal “a reckless attack on rural communities and hardworking Australian farmers”.

“Once again we are seeing some politicians, mainly those from South Australia where no cotton is grown, kick our hardworking growers in an attempt to score easy political points. These farmers are enduring one of the toughest droughts in our nation’s history and do not deserve to be targeted so unfairly,” Kay said.

He said the idea that more water would be saved for the environment if cotton was banned was “ludicrous”, and pointed to the findings of the royal commission that rhetoric about “thirsty crops” and “greedy farmers” should be rejected.

“Cotton is an annual crop that is only grown when sufficient water is available,” Kay said. “If cotton was to be banned in Australia, farmers would use their water to grow the next most profitable crop.”

Patrick’s bill, while unlikely to get support from the government or the opposition, is likely to focus attention on the issues facing the basin and would probably be referred to a Senate committee, keeping the issue in the news in the lead-up to the federal election.

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The Greens have called for a federal royal commission, similar to the South Australian inquiry, though that too is unlikely to get support from the major parties, despite last month’s fish deaths at Menindee.

The South Australian commission recommended that the federal government again buy back water rights from farmers and irrigators – something that the former agriculture minister Barnaby Joyce put a stop to.

New South Wales has threatened to pull out of the plan if buybacks are resumed.

The NSW independent Jeremy Buckingham is supporting more buybacks and has called on the state to make immediate changes to its Barwon-Darling water sharing plan, including buying back all the A-class high-security water licences to ensure a flow through the Darling. Buckingham says this would cost $20m and would result in 1,250 megalitres a day for the river system.

“These licences are almost exclusively used by two big cotton irrigators in northern NSW,” he said. “Compulsory acquisition is an effective way to ensure connectivity along the Darling to Menindee during drier times.”

He also wants changes to the rules which allow irrigators to take 300% of their allocation in one year, regardless of the actual flows in the river.

But the prospect of Patrick’s move getting support or even the chances of the Murray-Darling basin plan being revised appears slim despite the highly critical findings by the South Australian royal commission.

Both Labor and the government appear reluctant to reopen discussions on the environmental water recovery target of 2,750 gigalitres that is central to the plan and have instead been focused on a political compromise. Patrick has also flagged that the current plan is likely to be invalid because it took account of considerations not permitted under the Water Act.

The agriculture and water minister, David Littleproud, immediately ruled out lifting the cap on water buybacks or a bigger water saving target.

“No, the Australian parliament agreed that the cap on buybacks should be 1,500 litres,” he told ABC’s Landline.

He said the government had already reached 1,200GL and that only small purchases were required in isolated catchments to meet that cap. “So we will not be revisiting that.”

He said: “We believe the best way is through efficiency measures, through using technology and investing in our brightest in being able to get those water efficiencies that deliver water to the environment and away we expect it to, and that is what we have done and that is the we will continue on.”

Littleproud also rejected increasing water for the environment, saying that as late as September last year the Senate had voted for measures which cut the water recovery target in the northern basin by 70GL and voted to allow alternative measures other than buybacks, such as water-saving projects, to achieve 605GL in the southern basin.

The commissioner was highly critical of both changes and said they further undermined the plan.

There is also no sign that Labor will shift its stance on the plan, which was developed when it was in government.

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The opposition leader, Bill Shorten, has asked a panel of scientists to report on the fish kills in the Menindee lakes in January, but so far there are no signs that he or his water spokesman are backing any review of the targets inherent in the plan.

Labor’s water spokesman, Tony Burke, has criticised the commission’s finding that the plan, developed when he was minister, was invalid because it considered a triple bottom line approach rather than being based on environmental concerns only.

But he did not take part in the commission’s hearings and his recollection was not part of the evidence.

Burke has been critical of Joyce’s administration of the plan, which he said effectively ended a compromise that would have delivered a further 450GL to the plan in the future.

He has said he would support more water buybacks if the projects designed to deliver 605GL of equivalent water to the environment didn’t stack up.

But that’s a long way short of what the commission wants to see. It was highly critical of many of the projects that make up that 605GL because their outcomes were highly uncertain and also because it was a very expensive way to claw water back for the environment.

But Burke was silent on the commission’s central thrust: that the target should be raised and the buybacks resumed as soon as possible.