Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance and Administration) Share this | Hansard source

As I said in my answer to an earlier question, the government does treat the issue of the drought, and particularly the pressure on the Murray-Darling Basin system, as very serious, and therefore has called a meeting with the relevant premiers and water ministers to discuss what options are open to governments jointly to seek to ameliorate the worst impacts of the drought on water supplies, essentially to irrigators and towns along the river and those who rely on the Murray-Darling Basin for their livelihoods.

It must, of course, be remembered, that there are interesting constitutional issues at stake here—given that the fact of the Constitution is that the Commonwealth does not have the primary responsibility for water—but increasingly, because of the obvious fact that rivers and water involve more than one state, the Commonwealth has been taking a role in seeking to ensure as cooperative an approach as is possible is taken to the careful stewardship and management of our water resources within the constitutional restraints.

I think it is accepted on all sides that, over the course certainly of the postwar period, there have been excessive calls upon our river system, that perhaps too many licences have been issued with too little recognition of the costs thereto and to the environment, at prices that do not reflect that cost. You cannot blame the irrigators or the farmers for that. If you are offered a licence, you quite properly and sensibly are going to take it. With the benefit of hindsight, I think it is now conceded on all sides that far too many licences were issued, particularly in the postwar period, and the pressure on the Murray-Darling Basin has been too great. The reality is that any number of communities have now developed around those arrangements and many livelihoods are dependent upon those arrangements. Unwinding those arrangements sensibly and in a mature fashion in the interests of the communities, the industries and the Murray-Darling Basin itself is going to take very careful management and, no doubt, the investment of resources on the part of taxpayers at the Commonwealth and state levels. From our point of view, we are doing that.

The Commonwealth has committed substantial sums of money to that. So far—I stand to be corrected—we have put in place arrangements to enable irrigators to seek to sell back into the system their trading rights to water. We are not contemplating compulsion in this area but we are very conscious of the demands on the river and its incapacity to meet those demands at the moment. This is a terrible situation facing many communities along the Murray River and the industries that are dependent upon it. I am glad all the Labor state premiers are attending the meeting tomorrow in a spirit of goodwill so that we can attempt to fashion some sensible responses to what is really a crisis.