Ian Macfarlane (Groom, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Energy and Resources) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities for the opportunity to respond to his statement and also for the receipt of the legal advice, which clears up one aspect of Labor’s botched basin plan process. The Murray-Darling Basin Authority and the minister, under the Water Act, can produce an outcome that delivers the triple bottom line approach. It remains unclear why Labor got this wrong in the first place and why they took six months to develop a water policy, 18 months to establish the authority and 36 months to commission a proper analysis of the socioeconomic effects on the basin—an analysis that was delivered by ABARE the morning that the guide was released by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. Why has it taken three years for Labor to commission this advice? This is what the coalition believed all along—that the act initially passed by the Howard government did provide an effective balance between economic, social and environmental issues.

The mishandling of this policy area by the government has produced enormous angst, enormous upset and enormous fear in the communities that I represent and in the communities that run all the way down to the basin’s mouth at Lake Alexandrina. The failure to deliver the promised water-saving infrastructure projects has only heightened community concern that most of the required water will come from buybacks. The failure to engage communities in the strategic process for buybacks has only heightened fears that the buybacks will continue to add to the stranded assets that already exist in irrigation plans and will occur in a way that maximises instead of minimises the pain to both rural producers and their communities.

The failure to ensure that the MDBA undertook a thorough socioeconomic analysis before releasing the guide has only added to the fears that social impacts will not be considered. The failure of the minister to front up in basin communities for two weeks has further added to that concern and to the concern that the government not only is not listening but will not listen in the future.

The failure of the government to seek legal advice at the first moment the MDBA chair raised the matter with the minister, apparently at their first meeting, only perpetuated the concerns and myths that the act was flawed. We welcome this advice today as a first step to easing the fears about this reform process and as a first step to providing some—not a lot, but some—confidence that the reform process may be back on track.

This is an important reform which the coalition were proud to start and we do not want the Labor Party to totally bungle it. We want to see the plan successfully implemented. We have cleared up the legal issues which clouded the water debate over the last few weeks. What we need to do now is clear up what exactly the Gillard government’s plan is for the Murray-Darling Basin. What is their plan? Two million people who live in the basin have an immediate and vital interest in what that plan may be—and, dare I say, all 22 million Australians want to see something done to fix the Murray-Darling Basin. We hope the government and the MDBA will respond to the advice they have received today in a way that ensures the original objectives of the triple bottom line—that is, an environmentally, economically and socially sustainable basin—are achieved.

From the outset, this government’s handling of the Murray-Darling Basin has been a shambles. It is little wonder that the plan is running late, with the release of the guide delayed three times—and still it is underdone. Labor released the guide proposing the extent of cuts without providing any analysis of how those cuts may be achieved with the least possible impact. Labor’s bungling is adding to uncertainty about the future of the entire reform agenda and threatening the health of both the river and the rural communities that live there. The MDBA’s chair admits that the guide is lacking and that the socioeconomic impacts need more work.

I attended the meeting in Dalby on Friday where the MDBA chair and other people involved in this guide attempted to answer farmers’ questions. I have to say no questions were answered in a way that provided any certainty, any security or even any understanding of what the guide set out to do. How can anyone—farmers, particularly, with a practical nature and a good understanding of how this all works—have any confidence in a guide that says there will be only 800 job losses? There are individual communities in my electorate and in the member for Maranoa’s electorate where hundreds of job losses can be identified—from machinery dealers right through to coffee shops—because everyone is affected when water is taken out of a community. How can people have confidence that this plan that the Labor Party is formulating behind closed doors without consultation will not just decimate rural and regional towns? Last week we found out that ABARE and the Bureau of Rural Sciences provided the authority with its final report only on the morning that the guide was released. What sort of incorporation into the guide could possibly have come from that?

The other thing that concerns the coalition is the confusion and contradiction we are seeing from the opposite side. One moment the government, according to the Prime Minister, will do whatever it takes to implement the MDBA’s plan. The next moment we have the Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities, who is sitting opposite me in the chamber, saying that the MDBA is an independent authority and the government will not interfere in its deliberations. And the minister for regional affairs says it is up to the government to produce the plan. This all says just one thing: this is a mess. It is so typical of everything that this government does. It is a mess that is causing an incredible amount of heartache in the rural communities that we represent. We on this side of the House who grew up in those communities—who understand the importance of water, who understand the stewardship that we have—are seeing more uncertainty, more concern by those communities that their futures are anything but secure.

May I conclude by saying that the coalition started this process of reform with a 10-point, $10 billion plan, which Labor and the Gillard government have strayed widely from. The coalition had a good plan which would return the river to health, primarily by investing in river communities to ensure they are able to produce more food with less water. Everyone understands that water has to be returned to the environment, but not at the cost of farmers in that community and not at the cost of Australia feeding its own population and producing very essential export dollars.

We foreshadowed the problems that have now engulfed the Gillard government and we called for a full socioeconomic study of the impacts of the basin reform. We outlined a plan that would get greater water-saving infrastructure projects back on track. We proposed more funding for community adjustment and established a fund to identify and kick-start new projects for sustainable water use. Labor has botched the efforts of the Murray-Darling reform, and that will hurt basin communities. Only the coalition have the insight and commitment to deliver the difficult reform in a way that does not cause panic and deferral at every turn. Australians deserve a plan that gets the balance right between the environment, the community and jobs.

The question marks over the assumptions made in the guide, especially on the number of jobs that would be lost, require a full and, most importantly, independent review. I do not have any problems with the MDBA. They do the job that is set. The task is set for them by the government, but they are involved in the outcome. They cannot be independent in their review of the socioeconomic impacts because it will affect what they have in front of them. There needs to be a fully independent body, separate to the MDBA, and that is why we are proposing the Productivity Commission. That will ensure that the answers are right, without prejudice and done in such a way that everyone—the government, the opposition and the rural communities who will be most affected by this—can have the confidence that the answers are right. If the government are serious about engaging Australians in real consultations, they will support the referral of this, as affected communities deserve to know what these proposals mean for their towns, their communities, their farms, their lives and their future.

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