Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Opposition Business (House)) Share this | Hansard source

You used to be responsible for my safety! I'll remember that interjection. But the Basin Plan meant that, when we got there, it ended up quite different as a result of a series of community meetings, small meetings and consultation, where I don't think anyone would argue that the consultation was anything but real. People saw the document change as it went through and saw, effectively, the architecture of a critical compromise. Two parts of that compromise were, in fact, the subject of the different disallowance votes in the Senate.

There were three major moving parts. The first was the Northern Basin Review. I ordered that there be a Northern Basin Review, and I'll be honest: what the authority came back with were numbers that surprised me on the extent to which they changed what the earlier advice from the Murray-Darling Basin Authority had been. It didn't surprise me, though, that the numbers had changed. When Craig Knowles headed up the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, we talked about it at some length. The south of the basin—and those members here in the chamber who are from basin seats all know this backwards, but I'll explain it for the benefit of the House—is highly regulated. For water to flow, it's being released from dams and weirs. There'll be an extent of flow, but largely we have in the southern basin a river system that is now, in many ways, a set of interconnected dams and weirs. That's largely how the water works. In the northern basin you have a much flatter system and a system where, when there's heavy rainfall, it flows and, when it flows, every time much of the water will flow in a slightly different fashion to how it did previous time. That is something that's seen in the southern basin when you get an overbank flow, but largely in the southern basin the water is far more predictable. That meant that, when we and the authority were determining for the purposes of the plan what the northern basin numbers should be, there was a high degree of uncertainty because, as the years of data build up, those numbers will always be subjected to new information and the water will continue to flow differently in the north. Therefore, when some people say, 'How could Labor ever support reduced numbers?' the concept of the original numbers in the north always relied on the best available data, but we wanted it reviewed because there were always going to be more questions in the north than there were in the south. That's the reason for the Northern Basin Review.

But, when I say the numbers came out differently to what I'd anticipated, why is Labor then supporting them? There is a really simple principle here: I believe having an independent authority is essential. We will never resolve anything in the basin unless we accept that the independent authority, when it makes a call, must not then be litigated gigalitre by gigalitre by this parliament. We've established an independent authority and, once we start litigating each gigalitre of the recommendations they come down with, it's effectively all over in terms of whether or not we'll ever have a plan for the basin and whether or not we'll be able to deliver those sorts of outcomes.

For that reason, it was important to accept that whether the numbers were what I thought they would be or not wasn't actually the point. We need to have an independent authority. They were the numbers the authority came back with, and my view was, and I made it clear, that in any negotiation with the government—I acknowledge the minister responsible, the Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources, is now at the table—at no point were we trying to alter what the authority had recommended.

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