Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to speak on the Water Amendment Bill 2015. As Dorothea Mackellar once said, we live in 'a sunburnt country', a land 'of drought and flooding rains'. That is why this water bill is important. We need to try to get the balance as right as we possibly can in this country. We will have at times in this country shortages of water and periods of drought, and at other times we will have periods of flood. The Water Amendment Bill gives effect to the government's commitment to legislate a cap on surface water purchases in the Murray-Darling Basin to 1,500 gigalitres. We hope that the opposition gets on board, and we also hope that the Greens get on board, because they need to realise how important the Murray-Darling Basin is to our Australian economy with the jobs and the wealth that it creates in our nation.

Here are a few numbers. The Murray-Darling Basin—and these are the numbers from 2012 and 2013—accounted for over 50 per cent of Australia's irrigated produce, which included nearly 100 per cent of Australia's rice, 96 per cent of Australia's cotton, 75 per cent of our table grapes, 59 per cent of our hay, 54 per cent of our fruit, 52 per cent of the production of sheep and livestock and 45 per cent of our dairy.

As other speakers have raised in this debate, there is an enormous opportunity in Australia if we are able to balance our water rights in the Murray-Darling Basin, because the potential that we have, through the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement, to increase our agricultural exports is a once-in-a-century opportunity. We have seen China go through enormous change. We have seen them drop their communist and socialist policies and open up their markets, understanding that free markets are the way to lift people out of poverty and to raise prosperity for the nation. That is what they have done. They have gone through an enormous manufacturing cycle. In doing so they have raised the living standards, prosperity and wealth of that country. That gives us, here in Australia, an enormous opportunity to export to them, because it is true that Chinese citizens, the people who live in China, are prepared to pay a premium price for Australian produce. We have seen it where they have had the scares about their own products, like the melamine scare with the baby milk formula; that was just one of many scares that gives great faith in Chinese consumers paying a higher price for Australian produce.

We need leaders in this country that have the vision and the foresight to see these once-in-a-century opportunities and to grab them with both hands, because that is where the future prosperity of our nation lies. So it gives me great disappointment, when I look back over the history of the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement, to see a quote from June 2005—over a decade ago, when the agreement was first being negotiated—of something said on Meet the Press by one Bill Shorten. This was his foresight about the future of agricultural exports. He said: 'What is it that we are going to sell to China in the future that we are not selling them now?' This is quite frankly an unbelievable comment. To think that someone would have such little vision that they could not see the potential of exports to China! To think that, back in 2005, they made such a bald-faced and ignorant comment as, 'What is it that we are going to sell to China in the future that we are not selling them now'! Well, I will tell you—

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