Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I wish that I could share the optimism of Senator Sterle. I genuinely wish that I could. I wish that I could feel that the Water Amendment Bill 2008 was about to serve all of the grand purposes that Senator Sterle mentions. I wish that I could believe that all of Senator Sterle’s rhetoric would deliver the results for the river that we all wish for. Because, Madam Acting Deputy President Hurley, I believe that Senator Sterle, like you and I as fellow South Australian senators, actually does want the best outcomes for the river system. I genuinely believe that most, if not all, in this chamber wish to see the best outcomes for Australia’s greatest river system and to ensure that it can survive into the future and provide the types of benefits—environmentally, ecologically, economically and in a community sense—that it has for so long. Tragically, politics has continued, as it has for decades, to plague the future of the Murray-Darling system. It is politics that continues to get in the way of delivering the ultimate outcomes that could provide the river with its best chance of long-term health.

I wish to read a brief passage to the chamber. It starts:

Somehow as time went on the national spirit of the people changed, and petty rivalries between the colonies as to how much water each was entitled to use hampered progress, and thus it came about that Victoria and New South Wales entered into large schemes of diverting the waters of the Murray and its tributaries. Several active associations were formed in various settled parts of the Riverina country to protect the interests of navigation, and meanwhile successive Governments of South Australia played ignominious parts, spending years attending useless conferences, discussing and wrangling with our Sister States over the division of the water calculated to flow for given periods through certain gauges. So far as New South Wales and Victoria were concerned, the true object of these conferences was to discover how little South Australia could be induced to accept, and to gain time to push on with their own works in their respective States.

The memoirs of Simpson Newland were published in 1926. In 1926 we had these debates raging about the future of the place known as the Murray-Darling Basin. Of course, by then the debate had been going for some decades because, in the Federation conferences that led to the establishment of this Australian parliament and the Commonwealth of Australia, we had grand attempts made by some South Australian statesmen and others around the country to ensure that the management of river systems, systems that by their very nature do not know or recognise state borders, was vested in the hands of the Commonwealth. At the 1897 Constitutional Convention a proposed clause of the new Commonwealth Constitution was debated. It would have given the new Commonwealth jurisdiction over fisheries in Australian waters beyond territorial limits and in rivers which flowed through two or more states. We wish that our founding fathers had had the foresight to actually adopt those recommendations at that time, some 120 years ago, when they were under debate. If there is a fundamental mistake that was made in the establishment of our Federation, it certainly relates to the management of our rivers and waterways.

It is a tragedy that we stand here today still debating how to achieve national management of our river systems and how to achieve the things that many of our forefathers knew were right some 120 years ago. We are still grappling today with trying to get things right. Tragically, we are not getting them right. It is now nearly two years since John Howard and Malcolm Turnbull outlined a plan for national management of the Murray-Darling Basin. They had put a clear plan for true, genuine national management, a plan that would have sought that all of the basin states and territories clearly refer their powers to the Commonwealth, to provide the Commonwealth with the capacity to actually manage this, our nation’s greatest river system, in the best interests of the nation and in the best interests of the river system. Instead, petty parochial political squabbling broke out, as it has done throughout the history of attempts to manage this river system.