Coca-Cola's deal to take free water from Perth's aquifers for decades

Linda Moore has never seen her family's cherry orchard in the Perth Hills so dry. There's hardly any water in the dams. There's hardly any water in the creeks. And of course we're we're still having to do some irrigation or the trees will be dying up the road. Coca-Cola takes an unknown amount of water from a boar located in unproclaimed groundwater, meaning it gets it for free. Trucks carry almost 30,000 litres of water each to be sold as bottled water. There's, you know, 30,000 litres of water that is escaping our system and is not available not only for the orchardist, but it's not available for our neighbour Araluen, or for the Canning River. Coca-Cola argues it only takes 2.7% of the annual groundwater, but will not publicly say how much that is. The company was first given permission to take water from here way back in 1992 and since then the arrangement hasn't been reviewed, although the government is now saying it's going to take a look at it. That's why Minister McGurk has undertaken a body of work at the moment to understand just in relation to these soft touch regulated water resource allocations and whether we need to do more in that space. The beverages industry says it's willing to share more information. We are all poor, more transparency, more reporting. We're very willing to do that as an industry and like I said, we're talking to the government at the moment. However, it needs to be a level playing field and so all users of the groundwater resource should should be willing to be doing exactly the same. Linda Moore wants Coca-Cola to voluntarily pull back. I call them out to be good corporate citizens and just say this year the Perth Hills cannot afford to have water going out of the system. A system already under severe strain.