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

Petty parochial politics broke out over how we were to manage this river system. As the Howard-Turnbull plan for national management was discussed, the Victorian Labor government dug its heels in. It dug its heels in so emphatically that very little progress could be made though the course of last year. The foundation stone for this bill that we are debating today was of course laid in the last few months of the Howard government. It tried to establish a pathway to true national management of the river. It was supported by the allocation of some $10 billion in funding, funding that was there to support the purchasing back of water, which the Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Wong, likes to make much of and which I have acknowledged my support for. That support is very clearly on the record and I am happy for it to be recorded again. But I emphasise that that is but part of the solution and it needs to be done in an appropriate way. The funding provided support for the structural adjustment necessary in the communities that needed to deal with living with less water. It provided support for both on-farm and off-farm infrastructure, privately owned and publicly owned infrastructure, to ensure that it could all be delivered in a more efficient and effective manner to ensure that ultimately, given the finite resources of the river system, we would be able to do more with less. So a great framework was laid down but, sadly, it could not be taken up at the time of the election thanks to the Victorian Labor government’s recalcitrance.