Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Childcare and Early Childhood Learning) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am delighted today to speak in the parliament on the report Of drought and floodingrains, resulting from the inquiry into the impact of the Guide to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. As members will know, this report and the Standing Committee on Regional Australia had an interesting history, coming about mainly because of the savage and bewildered reaction that basin communities had to the release of the first draft of the guide to the plan by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. No-one who lives and works in the Murray-Darling Basin could have escaped the feeling and the passion that was released about 24 hours after the first draft of the guide to the plan hit the decks.

One of the problems of course was that the authority was doing a quick swing through basin communities to spruik this document, which really only came off the printers the day before, and it made people angry that it was so sudden, that it was so rushed. When they picked it up and looked at it, it was so tough on their communities in terms of the direction in which it was heading. It also demonstrated that the authority at that stage really had very little understanding of what life was like, what the investment landscape was like and what people's circumstances were and had perhaps relied on desktop studies, scientific input—models that really did not mean much in the real world—and created this document that caused so much angst.

This committee was established and chaired by Tony Windsor, the member for New England, and it was truly a bipartisan committee. Four additional members were co-opted onto the committee apart from its regular membership, because of course it still continues as the regional Australia committee in this parliament, and I was one of those members. I am delighted that I was able to be a co-opted member on the committee, because, as the member for Farrer, whose electorate has a substantial part of the Murray River and a large part of the Darling River, I know the future of the basin is of very real concern to my constituents.

We as members in embarking on this inquiry took it very seriously. That goes without saying: every member of parliament that works on a committee does that in my experience. We travelled extensively throughout the basin. We made our first visits to Broken Hill and the Menindee Lakes in the middle of December last year. We travelled for 10 days in January when some members were taking a well-earned break—I am not saying all of the parliament was not working, but we were on a long bus tour throughout the basin. Then we visited Queensland, we visited further north in New South Wales and we had a really good look on the ground. We had many hearings in Canberra. I should know the number of submissions we received, but it was in the many hundreds—over 700 at least. I tried to read as many of them as possible. We took our job very seriously. But we realised there was not much point if we all approached this committee from the perspective of the individual areas that we represent because we would simply have a myriad of different views hitting the table at the end. It was important, therefore, that we all agreed on the final recommendations. It took us quite a few days, locked up in a committee room in Parliament House, but agree we did and that is why I will always be proud of the work that this committee did. Labor members, Liberal members, National Party members and the Independent chair came up with a set of recommendations that we all felt we could live with. And anyone who knows the politics of water knows how difficult that really is. We had members who represent the Lower Lakes and we had myself and the member for Riverina, who represent the biggest rice growers in the Basin. So if we could agree on something then surely that is something the government needs to take seriously, and I very much hope that they do.

I want to mention how disappointed I was in the relevant minister in parliament yesterday trivialising this issue. He made reference to 'apparently divergent views' within the federal coalition on Menindee. He perhaps needs to take a look behind him because it was a little over two months ago that the water minister's colleague, the minister for regional Australia, gave indicative support for a $100,000 grant to help the Menindee Lakes apply to become an internationally important wetland and tourism area. The minister yesterday was remarking on a tweet I posted saying I was pleased to see the memorandum of understanding between the Commonwealth and the New South Wales government effectively torn up with a view to being recreated later. That somehow pointed to these 'divergent views' within the coalition. But it really is essential for the future of the Menindee Lakes that we do not have this tit-for-tat argument. And as the local member who represents the lakes and represents Broken Hill, my perspective was that for my local community anything that trashes the future of the lakes, that does not look after them sufficiently, is going to be bad. There is nothing in coalition policy that suggests that. I do not think there is anything in government policy that suggests that either.

The point is that for a long time people have looked at the Menindee Lakes as a source of evaporation and savings. We will argue about the extent to which savings can be made there. There are four engineering options on the table and there are discussions around which one of those options will be the best one, that ultimately does save the water that can be saved in Menindee. I have always been supportive of the re-engineering of Menindee Lakes, so for the water minister to suggest that somehow I was not and therefore I was not aligned with coalition policy is disappointing.

It is also disappointing that inherent in his remarks was a suggestion that the New South Wales government was not either. Minister Katrina Hodgkinson's media release begins by reaffirming her commitment to investment in water-saving measures and environmental works in the Murray-Darling Basin. The main reason I welcomed the ending of the memorandum of understanding between the Commonwealth and New South Wales was because one of its key ingredients was Broken Hill's water supply. Sure there was the re-engineering of Menindee Lakes, which I have just talked about, but there was also a 'solution' for Broken Hill's water issues—that is, an underground aquifer. Anyone who has visited the area and not just done the desktop studies that Geoscience have done—I am probably being a bit unfair; they probably have visited the area, but I do not think they have taken much in—would know that to cut off Broken Hill from the Menindee Lakes as its permanent water supply and to instead suggest that it gets its water from an underground aquifer, the science of which is still not decided, and that the people in the far west should be happy with that is quite patently ridiculous.

This MOU that quite sensibly the new minister in New South Wales has torn up was put together in a hurry by the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, during the last election campaign and her unfortunate counterpart in New South Wales, Kristina Keneally. It was cobbled together in a hurry and it certainly is a good thing that it is now finished. However, I stand behind coalition policy, which does recognise the need to re-engineer Menindee Lakes and does say that we need a discussion about how that happens and does say that we need an agreement that every user in the basin can be happy with. I was disappointed that the water minister trivialised the issue to such an extent yesterday, because he is actually the one who is tasked with sorting this problem out. He has a set of recommendations in front of him which were made by a group of members of parliament from all sides. Those recommendations are quite sensible and have been well received by the communities. So I would ask the minister to actually focus on that and not the trivial politicising of the issue. I do not think people want to see a water minister trying to wedge the states against each other in a bid to cover up the lack of action and a completely botched report by the authority that he is supposed to administer. Let's face it, that is what happened. So, instead of spending their good time monitoring my Twitter account, perhaps the minister and his staff would be better off actually reading the report thoroughly and implementing some of the well-constructed and fully researched views of the Australian people, whom they claim to represent.

In the time I have left I want to briefly comment on the colour and flavour of the recommendations without going through every single one of them. Essentially the committee said that the Murray-Darling Basin Authority had not done a good job up until now. But we recognise that the authority's direction has changed under the new chair, Craig Knowles. It is much more responsive to communities, much more interested in what they think and certainly much more willing to take on the ideas of the communities. When you live in a regional area you do not see a lot of the activity happening in Canberra that relates to you. There is nothing worse than relying on models, bureaucratic studies and desktop studies by institutions in Canberra that do not ask for your input, use their own ideas and think they know what is best. That is why it is so important that Craig Knowles spend some time among basin communities. He has done that. I commend him for it and I am delighted that he has.

The committee saw some good models of water recovery which still look after the interests of the community. I commend the Water for Rivers model. The evidence that the Water for Rivers people gave us certainly demonstrated that you can have savings while investing in infrastructure but also leave behind something of value for the community. The Productivity Commission might say that, in strictly economic terms, this costs more, but we have to include other measures of value and benefit—that is, the sustainable nature of the community and the fact that the community will endure long after the spending takes place. We should not just confine it to what happens in terms of dollars saved per megalitre of water. And we all know how we could do that most cheaply. We could wait for the market to be where it is now and go in and buy out stressed sellers. But we should not be doing that.

I was disappointed that, very soon after these recommendations were released, another water buyback was announced. One of our first recommendations was that we stop non-strategic buybacks—in other words, that we listen to the communities and take on their ideas. People come to us with ideas about how we could better save water—I have a significant one in the lower Murrumbidgee in my electorate and there are many others. The communities are saying, 'If this is what you want to do let us show you the way.' A Swiss cheese type buyback that just sees water bought from all over the place in a patchwork sense leaves communities decimated as a result. It is actually not necessary. You can achieve the same result in a much more strategic way if you apply what is not much more than basic common sense.

I really want to commend the people who came forward and spoke to us as committee members. We all have our favourite towns in our electorate. The 2½ days we spent in Deniliquin were very special to me, as was the time in Menindee and Broken Hill and in Mildura and Wentworth, where we saw the significance of the junctions of the Murray and Darling rivers and quite a different type of agriculture from that of the general water security users further upstream. We also went to South Australia and visited the Lower Lakes, and I understand how difficult life has been for them as well. The heartache, distress and concern on the faces and in the voices of the people who spoke to us made me realise how important our task was. I can remember people one after the other, in the chance that they had at the end of the meeting, standing up and saying in just 1½ minutes how they felt. That meant more to us than a ream of carefully constructed arguments, to be honest. People said that they were not farming in order to survive and that they were sick of governments saying to them, 'What do you need in order to survive?' One woman said to us: 'We do not want to survive; we want to thrive; we want to have something to pass on to future generations; we want to do something that's meaningful. We have a history here; we can remember how our forefathers developed the area, digging irrigation ditches with a shovel. We can remember how the horse drawn carts were involved; we have the pictures in our homesteads. This is something that matters a great deal to us in terms of our heritage. And you people from Canberra'—as they said to us—'just do not get it, do you? You want to come down here and tell us what we need in order to survive, and it is just not about that.' Many indicated that they were not going to give up what they had worked so hard for without a fight.

Unfortunately, in some media that was portrayed as them being a bit bolshie and aggressive. But that was not really the argument; that was not really the perspective that they were coming from. They had just reached a point of exhaustion and distress and had no other way of expressing themselves. I thank everyone who stepped up and talked and poured out their heart and soul or wrote us submissions and say to them that this was an example of their voices being heard—they really were. Everything that they said mattered.

I also thank the members of the committee, the secretary and especially Siobhan Leyne, who came on every single visit and had to put up with perhaps sometimes a bunch of spoilt parliamentarians, although I like to think that we did not behave that badly too much of the time. She did a fantastic job in supporting our work.

Debate adjourned.

Main Committee adjourned at 19:31