Opinion
The current pandemic has been distressing, there is no doubt about it.
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But if there is a silver lining to COVID-19, it has to be the way we as a nation have taken stock and are reassessing what sort of Australia we want to be in the future.
Do we want to be a nation that grows its own food or one that imports everything from overseas? Manufactures locally, or surrenders our sovereignty? Create jobs for Australians, or offshore jobs abroad?
Sometimes a crisis brings forward the best policy decisions, because we are forced to evaluate the status quo.
If you think back to 1919, the Spanish flu, or our World Wars, it was post these periods when we built some of our most important food producing infrastructure, like the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area or the Snowy Hydro Scheme.
We understood clearly as a nation that if we were to grow prosperity, we needed to manage our water.
We knew we needed to grow food to sustain Australia and in turn, it paved the way for highly sought after food and fibre. This, in turn, created a lucrative trade industry.
But fast forward to today and again, water is the issue that's holding us back.
Our farmers are on their knees, after years of drought, begging for water so they can plant crops to feed this country, but not because we don't have water.
It's because of green ideology, a flawed Murray-Darling Basin Plan where water rushes past the farm gate down to the lower lakes of South Australia and out to the ocean in the name of environmental flows.
We have the best farmers and the best produce, which the export market has an insatiable appetite for, and our producers can demand a high price.
I've always bought into the line that Australia shouldn't be the supermarket for Asia, but be the delicatessen. High quality, high value Australian produce.
Off the back of this crisis, the Australian public will be demanding that we become more self-sufficient - in manufacturing, in food production, not just for export but to grow the sector and feed our growing nation.
Vietnam and Thailand have closed their borders and are no longer exporting rice. Well this may be a good thing, because it's ludicrous to think we can't produce rice for ourselves.
There is no better time than now to introduce a water stimulus. I'm grateful that our pleas have been heard and the Federal Government has agreed to bring forward a crisis meeting of the Murray-Darling Basin water Ministers to get this sorted.
Because if we don't fix this issue around water there will be an uprising.
They will rise in the streets of the Riverina with pitch forks, because what we are doing is robbing these people of their livelihoods.
And I'll be there leading that charge, upfront, with my own pitch fork, because it is our farmers who will get us through this crisis and give us back the country we once were.
- John Barilaro is the NSW Deputy Premier
