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

I gather that the honourable member wanted to know if we had an estimate of the amount of water likely to be recovered under the new tender arrangements I just mentioned. The answer is we do not. It is a tender. Tender is a price discovery process. We are not advertising the price which we are prepared to pay, nor are we stipulating the amount of water that we would seek to recover. Plainly, and I have said this publicly in many places, we would not be seeking to acquire more than 200 gigalitres because that is probably about all that we are short as far as we can currently see. But I do not think we are likely to have water in those volumes being tendered in any event. So we do not have an estimate.

It will be an informative exercise and we may not acquire any water. I think it is likely that we will acquire some. We are looking at every way in which we can acquire water for the Living Murray Initiative. But our aim is to, as far as we can, always acquire water in a way that ensures that the amount of water available for productive use in agriculture in the southern Murray-Darling Basin is unaffected. In other words, our aim is for a win-win situation where the water that is recovered for the environment is effectively water that was not being productively used.

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