House debates

Thursday, 24 June 2021

Bills

Water Legislation Amendment (Inspector-General of Water Compliance and Other Measures) Bill 2021; Consideration of Senate Message

11:37 am

Photo of Anthony AlbaneseAnthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you. What we have now is a major test for this government: do they allow the National Party to keep the water portfolio? That's the big test for this government. We now know what the National Party think about water. They want to trash the centrepiece of water policy in this country, the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, which has enjoyed widespread support, has gone to election after election and has survived changes of government, but won't survive the chaos that has now infected this government. The infections around this country aren't confined to COVID-19; there's an infection over there—an infection of chaos and disunity that has spread from the National Party room onto the floor of the Senate and is now spreading onto the floor of the House of Representatives.

The fact is that this legislation is still very weak. There were a range of things that were promised by this government with respect to the inspector-general bill that we are dealing with here. In August 2019 the government announced 'a tough cop on the beat'. One of the things that they announced as part of that was that the inspector-general role—wait for this—was going to be able to report things to the Commonwealth integrity commission. What do you think the weakness in that is now? What's missing? There's no integrity commission. So we have a process to have an inspector-general to report things like when there are rorts. So why is it that there might be an issue here with the inspector-general, a national integrity commission, water and the Deputy Prime Minister—the current bloke?

What is it, do you think?

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