ADJOURNMENT
Mr CHAFFEY (Parkes) (19:40): One in three Australians lives outside a major city. These are Labor's forgotten Australians. These are the same Australians who feed and clothe our country, the same Australians whose innovation and resilience give us an internationally competitive agricultural industry and the same Australians who harvest the resources that power Australia and generate critical wealth for all Australians.
Yet these Australians face obstruction after obstruction. The whole supply chain in these critical industries is facing the strangling constraints of red and green tape in compliance. I have already spoken in this House about the shortage of workers, and I spoke yesterday about the crumbling state of our regional road network under the Albanese government.
In addition to these challenges, our primary producers have been handed yet another burden: the rapid and frightening march of wind, solar and battery projects. Mapping data recently released by Rainforest Reserves Australia shows there are 1,126 projects in the pipeline, requiring a staggering 44,895 kilometres of new haulage roads for more than 300 wind projects, along with an additional 443,000 hectares of prime land for 545 new solar projects.
The number of solar panels proposed totals a staggering 584 million. These projects, applauded by people who don't live in and never visit the places where these projects will be located, are causing a frightening uncertainty for many, many primary producers and regional Australians. They are setting neighbour against neighbour and family against family and are threatening farmland and our forests.
Yes, we need a balanced energy supply but not at any cost. Regional Australia must not wear the brunt of an impossible emissions target. Yet we see no consideration, no thought, going into these issues by the Albanese government.
Instead we see a mad rush to transition to net zero, with a target to reduce emissions to 62 to 70 per cent by 2035. This mad rush will cost Australians $1.328 trillion and regional Australians much, much more through their loss of land, relationships, productivity and certainty. In Labor's haste to look good at an international level, we are destroying the very thing we value: our environment, our future and our people.
The Albanese Labor government is not yet done sticking it to primary producers. Not only are farmers facing labour shortages, watching their roads crumble and looking at a future scarred by hasty renewable projects, but many in the electorate of Parkes and beyond are dealing with uncertainty when it comes to the most basic of requirements: water. Water is life in regional communities.
Crops, animals and people all depend on it. If there's none, there are no crops, livestock or people. Labor's Water Amendment (Restoring Our Rivers) Act, which came into effect in late 2023, made changes to the Water Act of 2007 and the Basin Plan of 2012, getting rid of the cap on Commonwealth water purchases.
Removing the upper limit of how much water could be recovered left no certainty for farmers or for the communities located in these catchments. In April this year, the New South Wales Irrigators Council submission on the impacts of this act on New South Wales regional communities found economic modelling consistently showed that water buybacks harm regional communities reliant on irrigation.
The submission highlighted a growing risk of water recovery by stealth and called for all New South Wales rules based water reforms to be paused. The Murray-Darling Basin is one of the largest river systems in the world. It crosses Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia—an area the size of France and Germany combined, covering a great swath of south-east Australia.
We need to get this right without destroying our agricultural heart and forcing people off the land into the cities. We are losing farms and we are losing population in our basin communities. Just in the past week, I visited the remote town of Wilcannia, where the residents are still relying on a weir that is 30 years past its life cycle.
It simply isn't good enough, and the Albanese government need to do better.