Mr Pike said he was leaving the Yoogali Club recently when he was approached by a woman and her mother, an 84-year-old “Italian matriarch”.

She put the question to Mr Pike: “Why are they doing this to us?”

Mr Pike said she explained how they had come to Yoogali and worked hard to grow crops for years only to have their water taken away.

“I looked her in the eye and I couldn’t answer her question,” Mr Pike said.

The retired irrigator said Malcolm Turnbull had been the architect of the Water Act, a piece of legislation that had paved the way for the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.

“I want him to come to the seat of Farrer, preferably to Griffith and answer her question,” Mr Pike said.

“I want Malcolm Turnbull to debate me on water policy because he is destroying communities, wrecking businesses built over four and five generations and destroying families. It’s taken away hope from the people.”

The importance of water could not be ignored, according to Mr Pike, who predicted a dire outcome if water storages continued to drop.

“If they think it’s tough now think what it might be like next year,” he said.

“This Turnbull policy is allowing green bureaucrats to flush stored water down the river into the sea.

“Anyone who thinks you need more water in the sea is from some place I can’t even comprehend.”

The solution to the water “crisis”, Mr Pike said, was to expose the “fallacy” that the Murray River flowed directly into the sea and not the Coorong estuarine system.

“The only way it would flow to the sea is if water ran uphill,” he said.

Mr Pike said he had an 18-month plan to fix the Murray River and save 3000 gigalitres of water for the basin, including massive pipes to “flush” the Coorong’s water with the sea as it once did.

“This plan is the only way to fix it ... we want to force whoever is in power to implement our plan,” he said.