Damian Drum (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

The amendments were unavailable at the time of publishing.

It is tough to have to stand here in this place, when you live in the Murray-Darling Basin and you experience the hardship each and every day, to hear from the Leader of the Opposition, who spends all of his life in Sydney, and from the opposition water minister, who spends all of her life in Brisbane, standing up telling us what's fair and what's reasonable in relation to water policy. These amendments are effectively what the various state governments all agree on, with the exception of the City of Adelaide. So, throughout Queensland, right through New South Wales and right through Victoria, these amendments are very well received.

In late 2018 another 450 gigalitres of water was effectively ruled out because of a new socioeconomic neutrality test. It effectively said that the new socioeconomic neutrality test could not take more water out of agriculture for the environment if it was going to have a negative and detrimental effect on the communities. That was agreed to by all states. So what we're doing here is simply legislating that. So the 450 is out—that's been proven.

Then we have the 605s. It's another 605 gigalitres worth of water. Some of the states are effectively saying that the 605 projects, which are environmental projects, are having trouble reaching the required time lines by 2024 and they may fail. What these amendments do is actually give the states the time and the flexibility to make sure that the 605 gigalitres worth of environmental projects can come to fruition, and, if the projects that are currently on the list cannot be done, then we're putting into legislation the flexibility that the states can find new projects and they can have extended time lines to make sure that those environmental projects are in fact met. These are the issues that are again heavily supported by the states in relation to the Murray-Darling Basin. So, the 450 is out and the 605 is given greater flexibility and greater time lines.

In amongst this whole recovery of water, what has been the worst policy by any government has been the concept that you end up getting a big chequebook from government, you go and find desperate farmers that need to sell their water to retire debt and you pay them a premium for their water. That water effectively just leaves the agricultural districts, and it just goes straight to the environment. So we're going to put a line through buybacks, simply because buybacks are most destructive, dangerous and damaging. From a government, they're also incredibly lazy. We're saying no more buybacks, and this is primarily aimed at the Labor Party because the Labor Party still have buybacks at the top of their policy direction. That is what the Labor Party want to do. Should they ever be back in government, their first port of call, their first action, would be simply to go back and buy water off desperate farmers. We're saying we want to legislate that, even though it's already government policy, and no more buybacks.

We want to create certainty for our agricultural sector. Everybody in the House always wants to talk about what a great job our farmers are doing during this pandemic, about how we're able to keep the supermarkets full of food and about all the benefits that we have. The opposition love talking about how our farmers are doing a great job and how our supermarkets are doing a great job. But they forget about the most important component of this, which is the component of water. You can't have it both ways, but the opposition love to have it both ways. Unfortunately, there is a finite amount of water that we get to deal with each and every year. Sometimes it's plentiful, as it is at the moment, and sometimes, in drought, it's very, very scarce. These amendments would make a little bit of water a little bit less scarce.

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