Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

It will happen to you because the longer you wait, the worse it gets. The closer you get to annihilation, the more it turns into an issue. The Australian people do not respect you. If you try to repent at the last minute, they will not respect you, so you have to fix it up now. I know you have that in motion, so get it moving and fix it up.

The National Water Initiative was agreed to and, under it, it was clearly and frankly recognised that there will always be a trade-off between achieving economic, social and environmental outcomes. The government's approach is to wish this trade-off away. Even now, we hear that the government is telling some that it cannot do what it would like to do on water policy because the Water Act puts the environment first and everything else second. This is something we have been saying all along. Reclaim the 2.1 million people who live in the Murray-Darling Basin. They are an exemplar of the people whom you want to vote for you. If you look after them, you are looking after the outer suburbs. Show how you would respect their views and you will get the respect of a much wider constituency.

Under the coalition government, we recovered 823 gigalitres for the environment in the Murray-Darling Basin. That was achieved through programs like the Living Murray Initiative. Cooperation between local communities, irrigation operators, state governments and the Commonwealth government was the foundation of schemes. Unfortunately, the government have failed to heed the lessons of these approaches and have embarked on a course of explicit confrontation with state governments and local communities. You cannot get anywhere with water reform unless you get the local issues right. Take the WELS reform. These are great reforms because everybody is on board with it. The retailers are on board with it. The consumers are on board with it. Local governments are on board with it. You have to start from the ground up. That is where the hard work that I know people such as Senator Farrell and Senator Polley are capable of. They are very capable people.

If you start at the local level and build up, you will always get your program through because you absolutely are able to deal with the inconsistencies and the ructions that can happen. But if you try to start with it from a macro level and then enforce it on the micro, you just end up with a massive fight. You have that on the carbon tax and you are going to get it with the Murray-Darling Basin scheme. You cannot do it that way. It is a lot harder starting from the micro and building to the macro. It requires a lot more work. But it is the only way it ever succeeds. Politics is about hard work, but you cannot have macro decisions enforcing the micro because the macro thinks that the micro does not know what they are talking about, so the luminous orb of the illuminati will be enforced down onto the micro. They will just knock you for six every time. A person in the local community knows far more about the Murray-Darling Basin scheme and how it affects their community than someone who lives on the blue carpet and lives in an inner urban seat. Likewise the retailer in the shop knows what is going to sell. Star ratings sell; it is going to work. Build from the micro, work to the macro and you stay in government for longer than six years, which is what the current crowd will stay in for.

This approach is not going to work over the longer term. The test for the minister, the Hon. Tony Burke, will be whether he can work with all state governments to get an outcome from this process. At the moment, we have a plan that has cooperation between levels of government built into its DNA. Without the support of the states, the Murray-Darling Basin Plan becomes more difficult to implement because the plan calls for states to both operate the system and develop the detailed environmental watering plans. You cannot get an environmental watering plan or a Murray-Darling Basin Plan. The states are going to be the ones who have to kick in the dollars to make an environmental watering plan work. The states do not want to kick the money in. They decided to extract themselves from the process, and the whole thing became mindless and defunct and now does not work. For instance, chapter 7 of the plan calls on state governments to write the environmental watering plans, which will tell the government where the water needs to go. It is the best place to undertake this task, due to the existing expertise. They must remain engaged to ensure the best outcomes for the states and the system as a whole.

Labor has failed to outline a water recovery strategy for the basin. The government has spent $1.8 billion in water buybacks, but just $430 million on investments that will deliver water into the basin. For every one litre of water that has been saved through infrastructure, five litres have been taken out of the community through buybacks. You know and I know, Madam Acting Deputy President, that the water that comes from buybacks is the water that destroys communities. I know that Senator Farrell knows that and I know that Senator Polley will probably know that as well, although she is from Tasmania and probably does not have to deal with this.

We want the working families of the Murray-Darling Basin to be maintained and to exist in the longer term. I know that Senator Farrell wants that as well, but he cannot do that by removing the mechanism of commerce. He cannot do that because it is not just about the irrigators. It is also about the people who have bought a house for $300,000—maybe that is a cheap house. They went to the bank. They borrowed the money. All of a sudden we find the commerce in the town has been ripped away and therefore the house which was worth $300,000 is only worth $150,000. That person who, in the scope of things as far as urban Australia is concerned, is probably poor—poorer than they are—and made poorer by a stupid decision to rip the economic rug out from underneath them. We cannot let that happen.

If we are smart about this, we can come to an outcome without destroying these people's lives. They are the people we have to be worried about. We get so worried about yelling and screaming across the chamber—calling Dougy 'Lord Douglas' and all that sort of stuff just to stir him up—but we have to remember that these decisions affect real people's lives and we have to make sure that we look after those lives. We are not going to do that if we keep buying water back, rather than doing the hard work of trying to get the micro right and the environmental works and measures in place, so that we can save the water and let water go down the river for South Australia.

We can do that if we are diligent. If we work hard, we can do it. If we work lazy, we cannot. I am open in saying on the record that I am prepared to work with Minister Burke and to work hard to get the outcome. I want an outcome; I want a result. I want to get a positive result that deals with this problem, but I do not want to unnecessarily hurt people whom I have never met in some street in Mildura or some street in Griffith. I do not want to hurt them, because it is not right. They did not buy this ticket; they should not have to pay for it.

In the current Basin Plan more than 1,000 gigalitres remains unallocated and resides in shared allocation buckets. Communities throughout the basin cannot plan and invest in the basin with this uncertainty hanging over them. Worse, under this plan the minister says that the amount of water recovered could go up or down. I do not know what that means. If you have a plan that goes up or down, you do not have a plan. We have been arguing for decades on this. People want a resolution, but they do not want a minister giving the Greens another window to campaign for 7,600 gigalitres and that is what Senator Hanson-Young wants. That is destitution. She does not have to deal with this; she does not live there. I live in the Murray-Darling Basin. I might be the only senator who does; I am pretty sure—