Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Early Childhood Education, Childcare, Women and Youth) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise this morning to speak on the No. 1 issue in many parts of Australia and certainly the No. 1 issue in my electorate of Indi in north-east Victoria, and that is water. We are suffering the effects of drought and diminishing water supply. Many irrigators in the local area have not received their full water entitlement for some years now. Many local communities have had water trucked in to fill their tanks so they can have water for household use, and towns with larger water supplies are on water restrictions for much of the year.

We have had a disastrous decision by the Victorian government to build a pipeline, commonly called the north-south pipeline, the construction of which has almost been completed. It is to take water from the already strained Murray-Darling Basin in the north and send it south to Melbourne for human consumption. We have seen the federal government complicit in the irresponsible reallocation of water from this stressed part of Victoria to Melbourne. The Rudd government has been careful to pretend to distance itself from stage 1 of the proposal, which was the north-south pipeline, although the environment minister approved stage 1 of the project under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. The water minister recently issued an ultimatum to the Victorian government threatening to withhold a promised $1 billion of funding if the Victorian parliament does not pass a bill relating to the north-south pipeline, which is blatant blackmail of state MPs in Victoria who are representing the concerns of country Victorians.

The savings generated from this upgrade of irrigation channels in stage 2 are supposed to be shared between environmental flows and local irrigators. Stage 1 works were to generate water savings to service the pipeline to Melbourne. It is inexplicable for the water minister to now be making stage 2 funding conditional on the actions of non-Labor MPs who happen to be opposed to water being piped to Melbourne. There is local concern about this, and obviously both state and federal governments do not really care because it does not seem to affect them electorally, irrespective of their responsibility to govern for all Victorians and all Australians.

We have the disastrous policy by the Victorian state government to have no more dams. They want to increase Australia’s population but they have absolutely no idea and no plan for one of the basic, vital needs of a growing population—that is, water. So they come up with all this rhetoric but have no plans. We have seen the desalination plant—another disastrous proposal for the environment and for future taxpayers. We have seen the financing arrangements through the PPP, which will be poor value for taxpayers. And the list goes on. Unfortunately, Labor is a disaster for water and for country communities. (Time expired)