"Barnaby Joyce comes back from his leak still smoking, phone in one hand, doing up his fly with the other. He didn't go around the side or find a post to lean against. Just stopped four metres from the back step and went in the open gravel, under a pale moon, out the back of the Punt in Darlington Point, as is the custom.
He stands next to Angus Taylor and looks out at the dark.
"They're growing rice out there, I think," Barnaby said.
Angus has been staring at his stubby. He looks up at the paddocks beyond the fence line. At the channels. At the water sitting there in the dark doing essentially nothing for anyone with a sophisticated understanding of liquid asset management.
"Rice," Angus said.
"And wheat. Cotton too, some of them."
Angus takes a long drink and says nothing for a while. They've been at it since three. It's nearly eleven. The Riverina sits flat and enormous around them and somewhere out in it, in the dark, people are using water to grow food. Actual food. In the ground.
"You could just trade it, why waste it like this," Angus said.
Barnaby lit a fresh cigarette off the butt of the last one and nodded slowly. The nod of a man who has, hypothetically, considered this exact question at considerable length and then forgot what he was thinking about.
Because hypothetically, and this is purely, strictly hypothetical, you wouldn't grow a single thing. You'd hold the entitlements in an Australian subsidiary of a Cayman Islands parent entity. You'd wait for the relevant state government to quietly amend the legislation so the commonwealth could buy overland flows. You'd make yourself available to the department on a closed tender basis, having previously had the asset valued at roughly half what you intended to charge. You'd receive eighty million dollars of public money, book a fifty-two million dollar profit, and move the bulk of it offshore before the dust had settled on the paperwork.
Hypothetically.
The ATO would have a look. They'd settle quietly. A London-listed fund with a ten percent stake would disclose a tidy return to its shareholders in a filing almost nobody read. The rest of the beneficiaries, whoever they were, would remain a matter of some ongoing public curiosity.
"People down here are very attached to the water, understandably," Barnaby said.
He seemed to mean it as an observation rather than a criticism. A genuine anthropological puzzle. The Riverina. Good people. Simple people.
Angus finished his beer and looked at the moon. Behind them through the pub window the barmaid was collecting glasses and someone was having one last crack at getting a longneck for the high-range voyage home.
"Beautiful, isn't it," Angus said.
"poo I'm pissed.”
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