Mark Coulton (Parkes, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Hansard source

As I stand here today as the member for Parkes I represent 30 per cent of the Murray-Darling Basin, from the Macintyre River in the north to the Lachlan and right down to the lower Darling below Menindee. That puts me at a difference to the speakers on the other side, including the member for Hindmarsh, who's leaving the chamber now. His electorate is not in the Murray-Darling Basin. His electorate gets water, due to the good grace of the residents of the Murray-Darling Basin, via a pipeline. So, I'll say this right from the outset: any illegal activity needs to be dealt with in the full force of the law. There is no argument from me. But to have members of the Labor Party saying that the coalition and the Nationals, in particular, are not committed to the basin plan is scurrilous and a great nonsense.

Only a month ago a meeting of all the water ministers, including Minister Hunter from South Australia, agreed to the next stage of the basin plan, the Northern Basin Review. There was agreement right across it. This Four Corners show is being used by some as an excuse to blow up the plan. There is no-one more committed to this plan than me and my colleagues on this side of the House. What's happened is that the Labor Party haven't learnt their lesson from the Four Corners program on the live cattle trade. They make a knee-jerk reaction based on a Four Corners program. The member for Wakefield was talking about billions of litres. Just to put this in context, the A-class water in the Barwon-Darling is 10 gigalitres. That's how we measure water in the basin—in gigalitres or megalitres, not individual litres. If there has been any dispute about that, it's a very small percentage of that. But, unfortunately, residents downstream and elsewhere are now using this as an excuse for other political posturing.

At the moment, in my city of Broken Hill, we have the ridiculous situation where the mayor is calling for the pipeline not to proceed, to have a moratorium on the pipeline. A pipeline from the Murray will for now and ever more secure a regular water supply for the City of Broken Hill. Because of the emotion around this issue, a moratorium has been called. We are so close to getting the basin plan committed in full. We have seen the recent purchase of water from Lake Tandou, which will put more water back into the lower basin, more water into South Australia, and give the New South Wales government more ability to reconfigure the Menindee Lakes so that those people who rely on the water at Menindee will have that water in there for longer.

This is a crucial point: the irrigation communities in my electorate have been undergoing this change not just since the Murray-Darling Basin Plan but since the New South Wales government water reforms that were undertaken 15 years prior to that. This has seen major changes. While our honourable friends from Adelaide might be wringing their hands about what they saw on Four Corners, they need to know that they are the last people to run out of water, not the first. The basin that I represent is an ephemeral stream. When it floods we have water and when there is drought we don't. Western Queensland has not had rain for five years and so water has not run into the rivers. This is one of the reasons why there is a shortage at the moment. The water in Menindee now, which I saw flowing down, is part of the 7,000 gigalitres—we're talking about 10 gigalitres in the Barwon-Darling river system—that flows out to sea over the barrages every year. It came from central New South Wales last winter because of an exceptionally wet winter and the flooding in the Lachlan, Bogan, Castlereagh and Macquarie rivers. The idea that this is some sort of constant system and that we can, just by setting policies in this place, turn water on and off is very short-sighted. It's a complex system. Mother nature is completely in control.

We have come to an agreement. We are nearly there—where everyone gets their fair share. Wait and see where the four inquiries that the Four Corners show spawned go. The first of those is due to report back to the New South Wales minister at the end of this month. Wait and see where that goes before we make any knee-jerk reactions to what was seen on a television program two weeks ago.

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