Bill Heffernan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, the day has arrived. It has taken a couple of hundred years to figure out that rivers do not stop at the borders. Governments of all persuasions for all time should take a lot of discredit for what has happened till this point in time. At the same time the previous government should get as much credit as the present government for where we are today. You can play all the words you like into that, but what is happening now was instigated by the previous government, and I think there is equal opportunity between governments and political persuasions to at last get the thing right. So I am not going to disagree with the proposition, which they figured out after 100 years on railways when they actually got all the gauges the same, in relation to state borders. If you want to do a bit of blaming, how could you have a resource operating plan for the Culgoa or the Warrego River in all seriousness that stopped at the Queensland border? What better example do you need of stupidity, of political crassness, of states holding the system to ransom? What greater example do you need of a state holding the Commonwealth and the people of Australia to ransom than the Victorian government in the lead-up to the last election with this stupid proposition, as a political convenience, for the pipeline in Victoria? There are endless examples of why this legislation, the Water Amendment Bill 2008,fundamentally makes sense, if we can get some rules around it that make it manageable.

There are potentially some fundamental flaws in this legislation—none greater, Minister, than the ultimate veto power of the states over reallocating the states’ individual consumption from the Murray-Darling Basin. The science for the future says there is going to be a serious decline in run-off in the southern parts of the Murray-Darling Basin. The same science, which of course is always subject to vagaries, says there is the potential of increasing run-off in the northern parts of the basin—particularly, strangely enough, in some of the south-west of Queensland, which would be the Warrego, the Paroo and the Culgoa type areas—if we are to reconfigure the contribution coming from a particular state. And, as we all know, 38 per cent of the run-off in the Murray-Darling Basin comes from a very specific two per cent of the landscape here in the southern parts of the Murray-Darling Basin. We all know that there is a prediction of somewhere—and I see Tom Hatton produced his document yesterday, which we have all known about for a long time, but at least it is written out now—between a 25 and a 50 per cent decline in run-off in a very sensitive part of the catchment.

I am unaware what the answer is on the final veto power of the states. We have an amendment that will turn up in the Senate report, which is not there at the present time—I suppose you would say that it was a misprint, it not being in the actual report, but it will turn up as an addendum—to deal with the potential of the veto powers of the states. For too long the states have held people to ransom for their own political crassness, for their own insecurities on understanding things as basic as the contribution of the groundwater to the river system. We put the cap in in 1996 and then all the farmers, being the likeable rogues that we are, got stuck into the groundwater. Before we understood the connection between the groundwater and the river water we had allocated a whole lot of licences, which have put a whole lot of added pressure on the system—all of those sorts of things. Nothing is more stupid—and every government of every persuasion can take the credit for this as well—than that we agreed some years ago to allow overallocations. Tim Fischer, who works for Minister Penny Wong, would know all about this—how are you, Tim? He will be watching. How stupid is it that we allowed the overallocation of water to be converted to a financial instrument? People with sound minds apparently did that. The consequences of that are a further burden on the financial compensation package that will have to be paid for water that was fundamentally free. The river got to a certain point, or it was in flood, and they said, ‘All bets are off; go for your life—it is overallocation.’ It was fundamentally free water which we converted into a compensable financial instrument.

In recent days, Tandou Ltd have rescued themselves financially by having taken advantage of that decision some years ago. In a business sense, good luck to them. In its wisdom, the state government, with the assistance, but not necessarily with the full knowledge, of the federal government, agreed to pay $34 million for what they now call supplementary water, which is just an old-fashioned way of saying overallocation. This water is overland flow water that is available when the Darling system is in full flood. It has not been accessed since 2001 by Tandou, even though it had a 49-gigalitre extraction history from 1984 to 1988. In some years they have been able to take 260 gigalitres. It is not metered. It is almost an honour system to own up to the fact that they have it. As I say, good luck to them, if the system is that stupid and the taxpayers are so generous. But we have agreed to do that and in effect it will deliver 35 gigalitres gross and about 26 gigalitres net to the Murray River, at a cost of $34 million. A state government instrumentality brought that into motion—the same state government that, in the same week, announced that, as a cost-saving measure, to save $8 million in the same budget, they were going to make people who were using donated blood pay for that blood. How bloody stupid is that?

As I have said, all governments have managed to stuff this up. This could be a step in the right direction. There are some serious problems which will come up by way of amendments to the bill. I do not doubt that the intent of the previous government was absolutely on the money and the intent of this government is on the money. But the trick for its implementation is in the detail. I put the minister on notice that, at the present time, the Victorian government has 94.6 gigalitres of credit for the pipeline, and they are already claiming that they can shove those 94.6 gigalitres down the pipeline. I can table the document. Let me just tell you that all this is sheer bloody lunacy.