How Queensland cotton farmer John Norman masterminded a historic water fraud

Australia Broadcast Center

18-07-2025

In 2010, John Norman was on the up.
Normy, as he was known, was a respected cotton grower in his mid-30s, running the family's multi-million-dollar business from an expanse of farmland in the Border Rivers region of southern Queensland.
In an industry brimming with whispers and rumours of dodgy operators illegally pumping or redirecting water from rivers and flood plains, Normy was staking his claim as an honest broker.
"Profitable irrigation farms must work with the environment to ensure longevity, because we need its resources to succeed," he explained at an event as Cotton Australia's newly crowned grower of the year.
But at the same time that he was being publicly celebrated as an industry success story, John Norman was secretly and fraudulently claiming millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to enrich his own business.
Fifteen years later, the mention of Normy around Goondiwindi reminds people of a crime that has left a permanent stain on the farming community, and derailed lives and businesses.
This week John Norman was sentenced to at least three years behind bars, and now the public will finally learn the story of how he masterminded one of the most significant water frauds in Australian history.
Farming was in Normy's blood — before he took the reins, it was his dad Arthur at the helm of the family farm.
In the early 1980s, the Normans started buying up property and developing the land around the tiny town of Toobeah, a 30-minute drive west of Goondiwindi, in southern Queensland.
This country, taken from the Bigambul and Gomeroi people, had been largely used as grazing land after colonisation. But entrepreneurs like Arthur Norman began transforming this Macintyre River flood plain into high-value grain and cotton farmland.
Around this time, locals say Arthur Norman was driving a custom-made tractor imported from the US, known as a Big Bud.
It was on brand for Arthur. Presumably he needed a Big Bud to pull his 33-metre-wide wheat planter, described as the biggest in the world at the time.
Arthur's reign was sadly cut short when he was killed in an ultralight aircraft crash on the family property in 2002.
His youngest son and protege was first on the scene, having returned from his honeymoon that same day. But John Norman wasted no time in expanding the family empire.
By the time Normy was running the show, Norman Farming controlled more than 18,000 hectares of land across two properties bordering the Macintyre River, a major tributary in the northern catchment of the Murray-Darling Basin.
More than 5,000 hectares across the two properties — Kalanga and Mobandilla — was high-value irrigated farmland.
And Normy squeezed every last drop out of it.
According to people who knew him at the time, he was relentless in his work, maximising every opportunity to improve the business and find efficiencies.
Former employees say "a wheel turning is a wheel earning" was a common catchphrase of Normy's. "Because we are Normans," he would proudly proclaim.
The story of a particularly creative solution to one of the day-to-day challenges of life on the farm has become something of a legend around town.
Some time in 2013, a bridge appeared on the southern boundary of the Normans' Kalanga property, crossing the Macintyre River.
It's not clear why the bridge was built, but one theory is that it would have offered shorter routes to nearby cotton processing facilities.
Every April and May, after farmers pick their cotton, the bails are transported to a cotton gin — a large processing plant where the seed is separated from the lint before export.
On the north side of the Macintyre River, there was a cotton gin near Goondiwindi to the east. But on the other side of the river, there were two more options for Normy — a cotton gin near Boomi, and another at Ashley, north of Moree.
As a farmer, it's good to have options. It means you have leverage when negotiating to get your cotton processed.
And the drive time to both of the cotton gins to the south would have been significantly cut down with the new bridge across the Macintyre.
But not everyone was happy about the construction. At the nearby Toobeah pub, some called it Normy's "bridge over troubled waters".
In the 2000s, the Millennium drought — one of the longest dry periods on record across eastern Australia — led to a monumental shift in Australia's water policy.
Scientists and governments realised the water in the Murray-Darling Basin had been over-allocated for irrigation, and more was needed for the environment.
Farmers had for years been encouraged by state governments to develop irrigated farming industries and stimulate their regional economies. And that's exactly what agricultural pioneers like Arthur Norman did.
But after growing their land holdings, and their wealth, irrigators were being asked to give some of the water back.
In an effort to compromise, the Queensland government launched a $510 million program in 2008, called Healthy Headwaters. Funded by the Commonwealth, it was set up for "the purchase of water entitlements and to improve water use efficiency" in the northern Murray-Darling Basin.
About $115 million of that fund was dedicated to encouraging farmers to invest in "water efficiency measures" and improved irrigation infrastructure.
In exchange for grants, farmers would transfer a portion of the water savings back to the government for environmental use.
It was welcome news for John Norman.
"Programs such as [Healthy Headwaters] … are very welcome in our communities," he told an industry event in 2011.
Of that $115 million in irrigator funds, Norman Farming would eventually receive close to $20 million.
But one of the Normans' neighbours soon became suspicious about some of the construction work happening on the property.
Chris Lamey used to grow wheat and chickpeas on a farm next to Kalanga, and was one of the first people to draw the attention of authorities to Norman Farming.
The Lameys weren't irrigators — they relied on the natural flows of the Macintyre River, or the soil moisture left behind when the area was flooded every 18 months or so, to grow their crops.
In 2011, for example, widespread flooding across south-east Queensland saw waters rise to 10.84 metres at the Goondiwindi river gauge, lingering for about three weeks on the Lamey property.
But farming this way is a delicate balance — if flood waters don't drain in time, it can do more harm than good.
In the years following the 2011 floods, Mr Lamey says things changed.
Around 2012, he noticed an increase in earthworks on the Normans' property, and the construction of the bridge across the Macintyre River in 2013.
He soon began to wonder if the changes to the land could have been exacerbating flooding on his own property.
In August 2016, a 7.5-metre flood in the Macintyre River lay on the Lamey property for several weeks. It killed his crops, and left him in debt. Subsequent floods also ceased to drain in time.
By this point, he had enough information to take his concerns to local authorities.
Mr Lamey contacted regulators in New South Wales and Queensland to try to find out if the bridge had been approved.
He was told that "whilst development approval wasn't necessary for the bridge constructed", if he had wanted to build something similar, he would need to seek approval.
According to the Queensland regulator, the bridge in question still "does not appear to be" in breach of the state's water act, and is exempt from requiring approvals because it's on private property and "does not interfere with the flow of the waterway".
But that wasn't how Mr Lamey saw it.
He argued that the Normans' bridge had not spanned the entire river, and so earthworks were built to fill the gap, effectively constricting the flow of water in the Macintyre River and changing the way flood waters could drain off his property.
Mr Lamey also started asking questions about whether other earthworks on the Norman farm had been funded with Healthy Headwaters grant money.
A departmental investigation revealed there was no evidence that was the case, and these particular earthworks were later approved by the council.
But another whistleblower much closer to John Norman was about to call the authorities.
Sometime in 2017, a former employee of Norman Farming started talking with police, wanting to make a deal.
They were worried they had been implicated in a major fraud and were ready to give evidence in return for immunity from prosecution.
After months of negotiations, police met with their informant on a quiet evening in a small Queensland pub, and Operation Papa Denver began.
The allegation was that John Norman and his chief financial officer had either falsified invoices themselves, or pressured contractors into doing so for them, and were fraudulently claiming money from the Healthy Headwaters grant scheme.
Norman had allegedly been falsifying invoices for general farm work, like planting and harvesting, and claiming these were "water efficiency measures".
It went as far back as 2011 — the same year he'd been a finalist in the Australian Farmer of the Year awards.
On the morning of October 24, 2017, a convoy of police cars whipped up dust on the gravel road into Kalanga and Mobandilla. Detectives found no sign of John Norman himself, who was at his waterfront home on the Gold Coast.
But at Kalanga they discovered a shipping container with boxes full of paperwork. The exhibit officer who had joined the raid soon had their work cut out for them logging files and other confiscated materials.
The raid at Kalanga and Mobandilla took three days, and in the weeks that followed, police realised the scale of the fraud was bigger than they first thought.
For close to a year, no-one was charged. But John Norman was about to see a return on the money he had spent developing his farms.
Just a month before the raid, Kalganga and Mobandilla had been listed for sale, with a hefty $100 million price tag.
"No expense has been spared in the development of the aggregations," one of the selling agents explained in the listing.
"[This] has significantly increased their productivity through expansion of land area and redevelopment of irrigation fields as well as the introduction of bankless channel irrigation and efficient water management."
In 2018, a subsidiary of US investment company Hancock Natural Resource Group bought Kalanga and Mobandilla, for a privately agreed sum.
Subsequent sale figures are widely available, but the exact price that Hancock paid for the Norman properties has not been made public.
After a tip-off by police, the Queensland Supreme Court ordered the proceeds of the sale be handed to the state — "the amount of $15,770,000 … made payable to the Public Trustee of Queensland".
In August 2018, John Norman and his chief financial officer surrendered themselves at the Brisbane watch house.
Norman was charged with six counts of aggravated fraud and his CFO faced four charges, all related to falsifying invoices for six water efficiency projects that were part of the Queensland government's Healthy Headwaters scheme.
A lengthy legal process followed — disrupted in part by the COVID-19 pandemic — and the former Norman Farming colleagues parted ways.
The CFO pleaded guilty in April 2021 and was sentenced to four years and six months imprisonment, which was suspended after he served nine months.
But Normy chose to fight on, ploughing money into his defence.
In early 2025, dozens of witnesses were preparing to give evidence in John Norman's looming trial. Many were ready to put it all behind them, scarred by the experience of being caught in the storm of a major criminal investigation.
Then another twist in the legal saga emerged: nearly seven years after he was first charged, John Norman decided to plead guilty in April 2025.
On May 14, a humble figure held the court door open for lawyers and media attending his own pre-sentencing hearing.
Normy had more wigged KCs in black robes on his side of the court, but somehow he looked like the loneliest man in the room as he took a seat behind his legal team.
The scene couldn't have been further from his glory days holding court at the Toobeah pub. He'd only turned 50 in March, but now, looking pale with wispy grey hair, the ordeal appeared to have aged him.
Norman's defence team got into detail, and argued against the scale of the fraud he had been charged with. Both sides conceded that not all of the nearly $20 million paid to Norman Farming was tied to fraudulent claims.
The defence pressured the Crown to identify which line items on which invoices were relevant to the charges. The prosecution countered that a fraudulent invoice — even if some charges were legitimate — was still a fraud.
Judge Bernard Porter KC rocked back in his chair and considered the arguments.
"I personally, as you can well imagine, don't really care either way."
At his next court date in June, Norman was prepared to spend his first night behind bars.
Having swapped his leather brief case for an overnight duffel bag, he entered the court alongside his wife and son, his elderly mother not far behind.
Inside, the Goondiwindi contingent had turned out to support their mate. Blokes with hands like bears, wearing Wranglers and slip-on Ariat shoes squeezed into the gallery, filling the entire back row.
As Normy took his seat in the dock, his defence rose and asked the judge to delay sentencing until a separate legal process could be finalised in the Supreme Court, relating to his $15.7 million in frozen assets.
The concern was that if he was jailed before that, his assets would become tangled with the public trustee.
Judge Bernard Porter agreed, on the condition Norman be taken into custody.
As pre-sentencing submissions continued, the Norman team tabled multiple letters from medical experts, claiming a recent ADHD diagnosis was a mitigating factor. The judge didn't buy it.
The prosecution proposed 10 to 12 years' imprisonment, while the defence suggested eight to nine years was "around the mark for this offending".
In discussions about the protracted legal process and Norman's delay in entering a plea, the court heard there was "an entire LandCruiser load of boxes" of files and hard drives that had not been made available before the initial committal hearing, which the defence said had taken a year to process.
The court adjourned and John Norman mouthed goodbye to his family, headed back to their $4.2 million macadamia nut farm in the Byron Bay hinterland, while he was bound for the Brisbane Correctional Centre at Wacol.
This week, on July 16, a smaller group of Normy's supporters gathered at the Brisbane District Court for his sentencing hearing.
After nearly a month in custody, he appeared in court in a crinkled suit, with a new haircut courtesy of the prison barber — a fresh fade and styled side part.
The legal teams had settled on the figure of $8.7 million as the total amount Norman Farming had fraudulently claimed from Healthy Headwaters.
The separate civil proceeding in the Supreme Court ordered that the Normans pay the state $11.1 million, and the remaining balance of the restrained $15.7 million was paid back to John Norman's mother.
Judge Porter summed up the case as a "wide-ranging fraud" that had "exploited" local families and businesses.
"[John Norman] involved his farming contractors and employees in this, benefiting only himself and his enterprises at their expense," the judge told the court.
John Norman was sentenced to a maximum of nine-and-a-half years in prison. He will be eligible for parole on June 24, 2028.
In his sentencing remarks, Judge Porter noted the wide-reaching impact of Norman's crimes on the local community.
He cited just one example from the dozens of contractors Norman had pressured to falsify invoices, a small husband and wife operation under financial strain.
"While there was no evidence of any threat by Mr Norman to withhold payment, it was exploitative of him to involve the couple in his fraud when they were financially vulnerable to Norman Farming," Judge Porter said.
The relatively brief summary, Judge Porter said, did not do justice to the complexity of the police investigation.
That original team of detectives has since either retired or moved on, but Detective Superintendent Troy Pukullus said the effect of the crime on the Toobeah and Goondiwindi communities was still raw.
Legal experts say the Norman Farming fraud is among the biggest ever prosecuted in Australia, and there are hopes the "significant" sentence will serve as a deterrent for others in the industry.
"Environmental crime is very much seen as a sort of victimless crime, even though it's not," said Kirsty Ruddock, managing lawyer at the Environmental Defenders Office.
"Having a custodial sentence given to anyone is a huge deterrence to people and sends a very strong signal about what the courts think about these things, and they reflect community sentiments."
After years of complex police investigation and backroom legal wrangling, John Norman will spend the foreseeable future as an inmate — perhaps, his lawyer pointed out, he may have "something to offer" at the Palen Creek prison farm.