Peter Costello (Higgins, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

The Commonwealth’s offer of $10 billion is new money—that is, it is additional to all of the money which the Commonwealth had previously committed in relation to the National Water Initiative and in relation to the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, and it is in addition to the top-up which I announced in last year’s budget. If the states hand over management of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission—get a load of this—there will be a significant saving, a huge saving. If the Labor states hand over to the Commonwealth, they will save money. They will take money which they otherwise would have been required to put into the Murray-Darling Basin Commission. They will save it because they will not be putting it in. There are the bona fides of the Commonwealth.

If you talk about looking a gift-horse in the mouth: is any state premier seriously going to have us believe that you can manage an interstate waterway better by having four separate governments with competing aims and objectives, and would any state premier seriously say that they will reject an offer to get a significant new injection of $10 billion, which does not actually cost them and which will produce savings? If the states want to maintain their expenditures in relation to the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, in addition to the Commonwealth’s $10 billion, I am sure that we would accept that as well. From a party that is interested in water and climate change, maybe that offer will be made this afternoon by the state governments concerned. We will be watching very closely in relation to that.

I come back to this point, which I made on radio this morning: is this investment something that has just become apparent now? No. This investment has been something that most people who have thought about it would have thought should have been done over the years—maybe even years ago. Why wasn’t it done at Federation? Why wasn’t it done at the time of the Second World War? Why was it not done in the sixties?

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