Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you for your protection, Mr Deputy President, but I do not need it from someone like Senator Sterle. Nobody takes too much notice of what he might say. Senator Wong, the minister, has been an abject failure in relation to water and certainly in relation to the Murray-Darling system. Mr Garrett gave EPBC Act approval for this pipeline, which will suck some 80 billion litres out of the Murray-Darling system to go down to Melbourne to flush toilets. It did not take him all that long to make that decision.

It seems funny the way that the Labor government and Mr Garrett deal with applications under the EPBC Act. You see, up in my state of Queensland Mr Garrett has just made a number of decisions under the EPBC Act—quite quickly—to stop developments in Cairns and Townsville and much needed coal port developments in the Rockhampton area. It did not take him long to determine those. But it has taken him at least nine months—because that is as long as he has been there—to not make a decision on the application under the EPBC Act in relation to the Traveston Crossing dam in Queensland, an environmentally disastrous proposal by the Queensland government.

I am just making this point: what is the difference between the decisions that Mr Garrett makes elsewhere and the decision that he has made in relation to the north-south pipeline and the decision he has not made in relation to the Traveston Crossing dam. The answer is this: the decisions that he has made in Queensland have been against developers, who would have helped with some of the infrastructure that we need. In relation to the Victorian decision, it was an application by his mates in the Victorian government. In the Queensland decision, he clearly should rule against it, but it is an application by his mates in the Queensland Labor government to allow approval for that particular dam. This whole incident and the impact of Senator Fisher’s question clearly show that the Labor Party is in disarray when it comes to water policy. This needs to be emphasised.