Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I refer to the member for Wills’ questions relating to the Living Murray Initiative. As the honourable member correctly observed, the Living Murray Initiative is an intergovernmental agreement an essential part of which involves the recovery of 500 gigalitres of permanent water for environmental purposes—that is to say, for the purposes of watering six important environmental sites on the river—by 2009. In the intergovernmental agreement, a number of methods of water acquisition or water recovery were covered. They included: funding infrastructure, water savings infrastructure and water efficiency infrastructure, with the water saved being transferred over to the environmental account; purchases on market; purchases by tender; and a number of other methods of acquisition.

The relevant governments agreed to proceed initially on the basis of acquiring water through funding infrastructure which would save water through efficiencies. There are a number of these proposed investments, the largest part being from Victoria but with investments coming through from New South Wales and new contributions, as at the last Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council meeting, from South Australia. The best estimate that I could give the honourable member is that around 300 gigalitres is most likely to be recovered by 2009—maybe more than that, but it is very unlikely to be less. So concern has been expressed for some time that the 500-gigalitre first-step target will not be met.

The Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council recently approved a new policy proposal of the Commonwealth’s to acquire water from willing sellers via a tender, which will be launched shortly. But it is a tender with a twist, because the water that is to be bought must be water that either has been or will be made available through water efficiency measures. ‘Why are we doing that?’ the honourable member may ask. It is because we are seeking to achieve two objectives. We are seeking to recover water for the environment—which, of course, is the objective of the first step under the Living Murray Initiative—but at the same time we are seeking to promote the more efficient use of water in the agricultural sector, which is mostly irrigation in that part of the country.

The aim is to ensure that the amount of water actually available, or productively available, for agricultural use will not be diminished. Plainly, if a farmer has the right to extract 100 megalitres but, for reasons of inefficient infrastructure or inefficient practices, only 50 per cent of that is being put to productive use, and if the amount of water that is being lost through inefficiencies can be recovered through more efficient infrastructure and is then acquired for the environment, you have genuinely achieved a win-win situation: some water has been saved for the environment and the infrastructure is more efficient. This is exactly the same philosophy as underpinned the first approach—that is, the direct funding of infrastructure approach—but this measure enables the dollars to get down onto the farm rather than go only to finance large-scale infrastructure. It enables the water efficiency dollars to be accessed by individual farmers often for small-scale measures, nonetheless which in aggregate will prove very important in recovering water for the environment.

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