Andrew Broad (Mallee, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to be able to talk about the issue of water in this place. I have always said, for a very long time, that, in the driest continent of the world, we should have a water minister around the Cabinet portfolio, not just looking at the Murray-Darling Basin but also looking at the salinity issues with water in Western Australia, looking at the capping of the Great Artesian Basin and looking at putting purple pipe in when we put in new suburbs so that we have recycled water whenever we build our suburbs, because water management is critical.

I just want to run people through a little bit of the journey, because, unfortunately, in this place there has been too much politics around water. The danger of that is that it takes away the confidence for people to invest. And, if people don't have the confidence to invest, we don't get the water efficiency measures that we should have and must have as a country, particularly, as our population grows from 24 million to 40 million to 50 million. The challenges around water require people in this place to have a little bit more vision than we've seen in the debate today.

The allocation of water used to be linked to the land. The only reason you could actually use that water was if you had a legitimate usage for that water. There was a view under the National Water Initiative to decouple that and allow water to be traded separate to land. This, of course, created two things. It actually created a great opportunity for water to go to the places where it had the highest value. This facilitated carrots in my patch; it has facilitated the investments in almonds; it's facilitated the movement of water along the Murray-Darling Basin—you can trade water. But this created a new challenge. And that is that people who had sleeper licences, people who didn't have or weren't using that water, then had something they could trade, and they could put that into the marketplace. So, for the very first time, we saw the impact of the over allocation of water on the Murray-Darling Basin. As a result, the Murray-Darling Basin Plan determined that we needed to return some water back to the river health. Whether it was agreed scientifically that this was the best figure, politically a figure of 2,750 gigalitres of water was determined. Of that, only 1,500 gigalitres—for those who want to know what a gigalitre is, there are 1,000 megalitres in a gigalitre, so one billion litres is a gigalitre—would be done by buybacks.

Currently, the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder holds about just under 1,200 gigalitres of water. The challenge for us, firstly, is: how do we use that effectively? Before we have a debate about getting more water, we need to have a really good discussion about: how do we best use the 1,200 gigalitres of water that currently sits in the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder? That, I've got to say, is in the vicinity of a product worth about $3.6 billion.

Regarding the upper catchment and the lower catchment of the Darling River, I flew it last year because there was a lot of angst going on in my community around the fact that the water wasn't coming down the Darling River. So I got in my little lawnmower engine, actually travelled the full length of the Darling River, landed at Bourke and had a look, and flew over Cubbie Station and had a look at the upper catchments. The reason there wasn't water in the Menindee Lakes in the Darling River was there actually wasn't water in the upper catchment—it hadn't rained. So the angst that was created out there in the community was based on misinformation. That said, it then went on to rain later in the year and the Menindee Lakes filled and the Darling River flowed. I think the thing that is needed in discussions around water management is good information, because a lack of information creates angst in communities. That's what we see South Australia often playing on—that somehow those upstream are robbing them of their birthright because they aren't getting the water downstream—when, in fact, there could be legitimate reasons for it.

There does need to be good metering in the system. If we're going to have a Murray-Darling Basin Plan, we need to have reliability in the metering. We need to have a trust in that, and we need to have policing for those who infringe that. The response by the government has been very wise because it has allowed the policing to be done by New South Wales. They've got not only very stringent laws but also a responsibility to report back to COAG, which is also wise.

There does need to be, I believe, some removal of speculators out of the water market. If you are going to purchase water under the temporary sales and hold water, you need to nominate an extraction point. I think that this is a reform that needs to take place because, ultimately, the first view of the National Water Initiative was for water to flow from a legitimate user to a legitimate user, not for a speculator. But we have the knowledge about this. We're not politicising it, and we're ultimately committed to delivering a healthy river system and surety for irrigators.

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