 Look, I have to issue a viewer warning. Some viewers might find aspects of this presentation disturbing. While there's no violence, nudity or references to drug usage, there may be some commentary that might go a little close to the bone for some. But I'm at the blunt end of the Basin Plan and I want to give you an unashamedly user's perspective on the plan. Okay, we need some very quick context to understand where I come from and the points that I'll make about the modernisation program. So Coley Irrigation is the fourth largest irrigation company in Australia. It's without doubt the most modern and efficient open channel irrigation system in the country. If people want to pursue that, I'm happy to do so. And its irrigators have on average more water and tidal than anywhere else in Australia. Coley is, its modernisation didn't happen overnight. It's been a 17-year journey and it's been both challenging and rewarding. In terms of where does Coley-Ambly irrigation sit in the context of the Basin Plan, it subscribes to the views of the two irrigator peak bodies, New South Wales Irrigators Council and the National Irrigators Council that the Basin Plan that we've got was the least worst option that we were going to get and therefore we support the Basin Plan. But it's bloody challenging. Make no bones about it. And if you really want to know what it's like to be between a rock and a hard space, come and be the CEO of an irrigation company in the Basin because you have to spend a lot of your time negotiating with government and then you've got to go back and communicate what are sometimes disappointing outcomes, sometimes progress to a group of farmers who naturally see what's happening to them as a threat. And then you've got the rest of the community who aren't irrigators but who depend on irrigation for their livelihood, who also want you to be their champion. So it's not for the faint-hearted. But there is progress. I suppose though we find ourselves almost in a in a perfect Bermuda triangle because you're not just dealing with the Basin Plan, you're dealing with a whole lot of industry reform and you're dealing with a whole lot of government processes that are happening simultaneously. You've got Productivity Commission inquiries, you've got Harper Reviews, you've got ACCC all over the water industry like a rash. And there isn't a day where I don't log on to my computer to find yet another review is underway, yet another opportunity to comment. And yes, we've got we're being promised thorough consultation. And the last promise I got was two days ago thorough consultation and our submission was required in 10 working days. So it's a Bermuda triangle and you just feel like you're being sucked deeper and deeper into the vortex. But there is progress. Okay, so this slide says that there's approximately 1900. David's put it David perhaps has indicated it's 1951 or sorry David Glides indicated 1951 gigalitres of the 2750 recovered. But I make the point that the remaining third will be harder to recover because the low hanging fruits gone. The easy projects have happened and whatever remains to be done in terms of modernization will be a lot more expensive. And in one of the ironies of the whole arrangement, the fact that 1900 gigs has gone out of the 1950 has gone out of the productive pool means that the price for recovering more gets higher. So the next third's going to be a lot harder than the first two thirds. We've got a critical thing happening supposed to be happening this year and that's agreement on a constraints manager across the basin states. That's going to be a lot more problematic I suspect than many people realize. And it will be interesting to see just how much agreement is actually reached. We've got a raft of offset proposals whereby the 2750 can be brought down if we can do smart things to recover to which mean that we don't have to. We can water environmental targets more efficiently. That's a really challenging proposition but one that everybody agrees is critical to landing the place, the plan somewhere in a space where we can in fact declare that the triple bottom line has been met. There's a raft of policy measures and rule changes being contemplated. That industry has very little visibility of but the visibility that we've had so far suggests that there are not going to be any win-win outcomes. Now bear in mind that one of the promises made by government is that they won't bring about changes, rule changes, if there are going to be third party impacts. So reconciling this question of no third party impacts with rule changes will be quite a challenge. There's still contention around whether or not some of the flow targets that are predicated in the plan actually can be met. And in some cases the MDBA has been gracious enough and intelligent enough to acknowledge that and has adjusted the flow regimes downwards because it's a recognition of the fact that what was being said locally was not just somebody dragging the chain but it was a reality. But there's still a lot more work to be done in that respect. Philips talked about the work being done to understand the social and economic impacts. That's absolutely critical because if you don't understand the level of impact that the plan has had thus far you can't contemplate what the level of the remaining third is going to be nor what the impact might be if you recovered an extra 450 gigalitres of water, so-called upwater, what that impact will be. And in fact it's critical because that upwater can only be recovered if it can be shown to be socially and economically neutral at least. So how do you actually make that declaration that it's going to be economically and socially neutral if you haven't yet understood the current level of impact, let alone getting to the 2750, let alone getting another 450 above that. Really, really critical stuff. And one of the answers that was given to me by a person in the department only a few weeks ago was that providing we get that water off willing, off farmers, providing we get it off farm and not out of an irrigation system then that will be the test. Well I put it to you that just because a farmer is happy to hand that water over doesn't necessarily mean that that's a net gain across an entire community. When you aggregate the loss of that extra water it might tell you something different again. So this is really complex stuff. But progress is being made and I say that quite sincerely. Most recently, we've had legislation which put a get would put a ceiling on buyback. We've had an amending bill before the upper house at the moment which seeks to make a raft of changes that came out of a Water Act review or review of the Water Act. And of the 24 odd recommendations I think industry is very comfortable with about 23. So that's progress. But Philip Glides made point that the level of pain across the basin communities does in fact vary. And in some communities the pain is is very real. And leaving that community to question whether or not they've got a future. Okay, so I now want to turn to the more fundamental question of of whether or not the the public funding of modernisation, both being on farms or in irrigation or across irrigation systems is smart or whether it's actually publicly funded large yes. And you got to start off with the proposition that what's the alternative and the alternative is buyback. And there are people who strongly argue that the whole basin plan could have been done and dusted if the government had just gone and bought all the water back at market rates. So if you're an economic dry. If you remember the Productivity Commission, this is great stuff more buyback if you're a lot of environmentalists say get on with it just buy it back. Those people then defend that argument by talking about alternate futures for the communities get it over and done with because these communities have alternate futures. And when I asked some of these people what what the alternate future for for the community of Coley Ambrie because it's a sole purpose is is irrigation, everything hangs off it. I was told ecotourism. Now I don't know as any any of you have been there any of you out there been to Coley Ambrie. Okay, so you've got a pocket full of ecotourism dollars and you've got the opportunity to go to Kakadu, Great Barrier Reef, go and swim with the whale sharks at Ningaloo, or you're going to go to Coley Ambrie to spend your ecotourism dollars. That's clearly patronizing crap. And yet that's what people say to you. All they talk about structural adjustment programs. Well, I don't know how many successful structural adjustment programs you've seen. I've seen very few. Typically what happens is somebody paints you come in with the money. We paint the football shed. We put some heritage lights down the down the center of the street. And that's a structural adjustment. Two, you know, three or four years later, you've got one third less population admiring the streetscaping. And then five years later, the town's virtually dead. It's really tough stuff structural adjustment. And I put it to you that the most intelligent structural adjustment that can be had in the context of the Basin plan is to invest in the sustainability of irrigation, because that's the future for those communities, not some half ass notion of ecotourism, or we're going to give you a new streetscaping. So we argue that public investment. This is the entire irrigation industry in the modernization of government operated. Sorry that in the modernization of irrigation is the best form of structural adjustment. But it shouldn't just be seen as the modernization of on irrigation on farms or irrigation systems. It's got to be the modernization of the entire system. The modernization of the storages, the modernization that allows you to have real time information about what's happening in the river system, and the modernization of the barrages down at South Australia so that those things don't take all day to be adjusted. They can be adjusted in the same way that an irrigation scheme can be adjusted. So think about that modernization across the whole system, because it is indeed a system. Philip made the point. Philip Glide talked about the fellow in Cobram, who had got a grant to modernize his irrigation system. I've got to tell you, Philip, it's not a grant, it's co-investment. That farmer handed back water, took a valuable asset off his balance sheet, handed that back to the government, and the government provided him a two-tiered payment. First tier was for the market value of the water, and the second tier was a premium. That's a contribution to structural adjustment. These so-called grants are misnamed. They should be seen as co-investment, because the owner of the water is investing the money that comes at the market value. That's his investment in the modernization, and the premium is the government investment, which is by way of structural adjustment. It's a really important notion. It's offensive to irrigators and irrigation communities to be told that they're being sustained by grants. Irrigation delivery systems need to be seen as nationally significant infrastructure. They contribute to the national wealth. They are the basis on which a whole range of communities exist, and increasingly they're being used by government to affect the delivery of environmental water, or to in fact deliver water on behalf of the state. The coal irrigation system is used to deliver water to irrigators well beyond Coley-Ambly, because that's the most efficient way to get that water to state water's customers. It means that state water can deliver water much more quickly and lose less water in the process. So increasingly these are assets that are not just being used to service your own customers, but also to service other people's customers. Case study. In Coley-Ambly, every farm has done soil density testing on every farm. So here's a schematic where you see brown and red soils. That's very sandy soil. Where you see green, it's heavier quality soil. Where you see dark green, it's virtually clay. Every farm has been soil density tested. And so if you have farms with a whole lot of red or sand, you not only wouldn't grow rice on that farm, you're not permitted to grow rice on that farm. So this was the start of our sort of modernisation, was to investigate our soils, but also a 16-year program with a minimal government investment, 16 million bucks, triggered $104 million co-investment to actually start improving the biodiversity in the local habitat and to produce more water-efficient production. So that's the start of it. But since 2003 we've been in the process of returning water to the Commonwealth via a series of programs to modernise our irrigation system. To the point now where a farmer can be anywhere in the world, and if he's got an internet connection, he can control his water like that over his iPad or his mobile phone, not touched by a human hand. Okay, so this is another sort of, this is world-breaking stuff, first time, done first time in Coley Ambly. So a PhD student believes that you can map leaky channels by detecting changes in salinity. So basically hang a boom arm off a four-wheel drive vehicle, tow an array of sensors and he covered our entire system in the space of about four weeks, detecting changes in salinity. Because the change in salinity detects, is a subset of interaction between surface water and groundwater. So that produces a map, a 3D image which shows you where you've got that interaction. And significantly when we placed those two different systems, the soil density mapping and the salinity mapping over the top of each other, we got very, very close correlations. That then tells us where we have to realign irrigation channels. All irrigation channels align, what happens is the lining breaks down over time, typically in our case, 50 years old. So a lot of scientific effort to map it and very high degree of correlation to give you a sense of the scale of these things. This is our main canal. This is the process of realigning. And they're not vinkies that we've situated in the big earth moving equipment. So it's a big system. And there's some rubber lining, which is a different technology when you can't have access to, to clay or you've got to cut it too far. So it becomes uneconomical. These are three. This is one set of three new sets of regulators we put in two years ago. This is under the modernisation program. Each one of those gates will allow 950 mega litres of water to pass through them a day. So this is large-scale stuff. So in terms of a case study, modernising since 1999, we've produced water savings of approximately 60,000 mega litres per annum. We reduced our staff by 30%. Farmers can access water in two hours rather than 24 hours. What's the significance of that? If you're a farmer and you, and you place your water order 24 hours notice and it rains, you're stuck with it. Conversely, two-hour water ordering you can be sitting off sweating, sweating, sweating. Is it going to rain? Is it going to rain? Is the Bureau going to get it right? Bureau gets it right. A Bureau doesn't get it right. Bang! I can get my water order on before my crop gets stressed. We've got peak flow rates onto farms which have gone from 8 megs a day to up to some cases 100 mega litres a day. Fast watering is efficient watering. The process of getting a lot of water on and off the farm in back onto a recycle system means a plant can start growing again. Fast watering is the most efficient watering and this kind of modernisation has allowed us to leap forward. We've got a minimum level of supply across our entire system has gone from 8 megs a day. By the end of this winter it'll be 14 megs a day and as I said 24-7 access from anywhere in the world. That's the sort of modernisation that is being funded under these co-investment arrangements. I suppose in the absence of that kind of modernisation, Collier irrigation, which is New South Wales' newest town, would have been its most short-lived town. We recognise that you can't stay in the game of irrigation now if you're burning water. There's too much pressure on the resource for start and the resource is too valuable not to be using it to best effect and in the smartest possible way. So basically smart water recovery provides the basis for a sustainable industry and sustainable communities and it's about the most meaningful form of structural adjustment that government can be in. So little wonder that there's a lot of interest in how we're going about this internationally and that's just not interested in the basin plan. I mean I'm hosting international delegations every month from all over the world, including countries from the former Soviet Union. So there is huge interest in this modernisation and in the basin plan itself. This is the best possible way of achieving a balanced basin plan and the much promised triple bottom line. So I hope for those people that reckon that buyback is the way to go and we should have stopped mucking around with this kind of stuff, that's a very blunt instrument that just simply leaves communities, basin communities devastated and then it means that you know the whole bunch of consultants will be able to go around and get a whole lot of government money and do studies about alternate futures only to find out that there's bugger all alternate futures for most of these communities. The future is sustainable, irrigated agriculture. Thank you.