Patrick Secker (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

First off, let me say that I totally agree with the member for Makin on a couple of issues. I think the submission by Ian Mott as an alternative way of fixing up the problems of the Coorong and the Murray mouth should be seriously looked at and assessed by this government. Anyone who has looked at that submission, and I have pointed out this submission to the chair of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, Craig Knowles, as well, will see that it does warrant as a possible cost effective way to fix up a lot of those problems. One has only to look at what has been done at West Lakes in the western suburbs of Adelaide to see that, on a smaller scale, it has worked quite well. I plead with the government: at least spend the money to make an assessment of whether this could work, because it creates big possibilities for fixing up some of those problems.

I also support the observation by member for Makin about how hard this committee worked. In my time, and I have been here twice as long as the member for Makin, I have never been involved with a committee—and I been involved with a lot—that has worked so hard on a report. We actually met in December, which is virtually unheard of for a committee. For obvious reasons it is a very busy time for members of parliament, with schools breaking up and different functions that you need to attend in that period. On top of that, having a 10-day tour of the basin in January is also unheard of in my experience. That all members of the committee were prepared to make time to be part of this committee's deliberations is an indication of how important they felt this inquiry to be. For example, in December we went up to look at the Menindee Lakes. Six months earlier they were dry, but when we were there we saw that they had filled up. An enormous change had been brought about not by government or communities but by Mother Nature—I think Mother Nature is a lot cleverer than any of us. To see the enormous change there and to speak with the people of Broken Hill, who rely on the lakes for their water supply and their irrigation, was an important start.

We started our tour in my electorate, at the bottom of the system. We went over the barrages at the Lower Lakes, which gave every member of the committee a hands-on approach to the effects the barrages have had and how important they are. Again, I agree with the member for Makin: ripping down those barrages is not the answer. It is one of the fallacies that have been put out that all would be fixed if we just let the sea into the lakes. I think it would actually destroy the lakes. The Lower Lakes have never been naturally saline except for very small periods in our time. Like most estuaries they are mostly freshwater but occasionally, during droughts, they become saline for perhaps weeks at a time—certainly not for centuries, years or months. It is very much a very minor thing.

I remember one Melbourne Cup day, I think it was in 2006, when the federal government had just set up a water bureaucracy. We suddenly found that there was a real concern with how the states were reacting to the drought. I remember the Premier of South Australia coming back, almost like Neville Chamberlain with 'peace in our time,' saying, 'We're going to build a weir at Wellington.' We have spent millions at the proposed site, but no weir has been built. They had to do up all the roads so they could eventually, perhaps, build a weir. I do not think the weir was ever going to be the right answer. Perhaps a lock of some sort might have been the answer, but certainly not the weir as proposed by the government. I am very thankful that Mother Nature, again, stepped in and stopped the pressure to build the weir at Wellington.

I represent all of the Murray River in South Australia, all of Lake Albert and half of Lake Alexandrina. In fact, the boundary of my electorate basically goes through the middle of Lake Alexandrina and through the Murray mouth, so I suppose you could say that one side of the Murray mouth is represented by the member for Mayo and the other side is represented by me, as the member for Barker. I remember in the last election campaign that the candidates were often asked by the media or by people what we thought the biggest issues were. I always replied that the three biggest issues were water, water and water. That is very much a South Australian thing. It is an iconic issue.

Having the honour of representing the Murray in South Australia is an iconic issue for me and will continue to be. Water supply is so important, not only for our communities but for our capital city Adelaide and for our industries that rely on the Murray. It is a very important part of our community, but the fact is that South Australia only takes six per cent of the allocations of the water that is diverted from the Murray-Darling Basin. I think Queensland takes about six per cent and the rest is basically taken by New South Wales and Victoria.

I have never taken the parochial view that you should only look after your own dung heap, because the Murray-Darling does not recognise electoral boundaries. It does not recognise states. So, if you are ever going to fix up this whole problem, you will have to take an overview of the whole basin and not just your own dung heap. It always concerned me that wherever you went in the basin there was always a view that you blamed everyone upstream and said, 'Blow those downstream!' Looking after your own dung heap is not the way to fix the Murray-Darling Basin; you have to look at the basin as a whole. That is why I have always believed that we need an independent Murray-Darling Basin authority, as John Howard proposed on Australia Day 2007. That did not come to pass because all the states bar Victoria would not sign up to referring their constitutional powers for seven or eight years to this national body. Unfortunately, we still have a bit of that problem but we should not ignore the wealth of knowledge that the state bureaucracies have when it comes to the Murray-Darling Basin.

I also thank the secretariat, who I think did a great job. They worked as hard as us—probably harder in many ways. As a supplementary member for the purposes of this inquiry I was able to provide a voice for the constituents of Barker and also the whole Murray-Darling Basin. I think it is very interesting, if you look at our history, to see that the member for Braddon, the member for Farrer, and the member for New England and I were on a similar inquiry during 2003 and 2004. Not a lot changed except that I became even better informed as a result of being part of this committee, and I hope the other members did as well. We created a bit of controversy with that report, but the fact is that I think most of the recommendations that we made then were borne out. History often has a way of proving people right or wrong and I think in this situation we were pretty right. So, interestingly, we had the corporate knowledge of people who had previously been on an inquiry into water resources in Australia generally, because most of those seemed to be around the Murray-Darling Basin. I think it was important that we had that corporate knowledge and I think it was very useful to the committee that we did. In my electorate, water and the Murray-Darling is pretty big—I think that goes without saying. We have had some problems. On the one hand there are the irrigators that are struggling to keep their crops alive and the families and wider communities that are affected by the flow-on effects of, especially, the drought we have gone through. Some people have said it is the worst drought in our history. I think the records will show that the Federation drought from 1895 to 1903 was very similar in its effect. Of course, in those days we did not have the locks and we did not have the extraction from the Murray-Darling Basin that we have now. So I think the effects of the drought were exacerbated by what humans have done over the last 100 years. I am not saying we should get rid of the locks. Please do not get me wrong on that—because I think we have a pretty good regulated system that works pretty well—but we were found wanting when it came to the drought and it showed that we needed to take some serious action if we wanted to keep this a sustainable river system.

Part of this inquiry was purely to get out there and listen to all those people up and down the system. They wanted their opinion and the situation to be known and what decisions are made. I think people should realise our committee did not have the power to say, 'The Murray-Darling Basin Authority should take this action'; we were there to listen to how the guide to the plan would have affected the communities if it had been taken holus-bolus. I think we all agree that the PR that went out with that was not particularly good and it caused a lot of anger in the communities. So a large part of our job was to listen to those concerns and make some recommendations as a result. To be fair—I'm not blowing my own trumpet—I think the committee did a very good job. I think we helped the communities get their message across but also feel that they had been listened to and that we were prepared to make some pretty strong recommendations about the way ahead.

I certainly attended both public meetings in my electorate. In fact, I remember the member for Makin being at one of those meetings. Yes, there was a bit of heat. It was probably not as bad as we saw in Griffith, but there was a bit of heat. It was packed out. They had to use two rooms and try and set up a video and audio display so that people could show their concerns and needs.

It gave a voice to people. We made a list of recommendations to the government—21 in total—and it would be a real shame if the government did not take notice of these because they are as a result of the consultation with the communities and that is where it counts, I believe. Any member of parliament worth their salt would always recognise that you have got to listen to your community and take the respective actions that come from talking to those people.

I want to speak about a couple of those recommendations. The most important one, I believe, is recommendation No. 7—an immediate end to non-strategic buybacks. That had widespread support across the committee but I think also through the whole community. It needed to be listened to and I do hope that government take note of that.

As Mr Rel Heckendorf put it, for people to sell their water at the price the government is offering, they would be desperate sellers, not willing sellers. If you do not have a strategic buyback you also have the problem of the Swiss cheese effect. I think everyone on the committee understands that. There is another thing we should be looking at—this is my suggestion—that every community, every irrigator take a 10 per cent cut. The government say that they will not do it could do it compulsorily, but there could be a 10 per cent cut stretched out over 10 years, one per cent a year, and fully compensated. I think that would return 1,200 gigs to the river and be quite successful. (Time expired)

Debate adjourned.

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