Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Basin Plan 2012, made under Part 2 of the Water Act 2007, be disallowed.

I rise today to speak in favour of this motion. It is with a heavy heart that I do, because I would have preferred that we could be celebrating the passage of a plan that would have set the river up for a living future—set the river up over the next 20 years to be a system that is healthy and can sustain itself and, of course, the communities and the ecosystems that rely on it. Unfortunately, the plan as tabled by the minister earlier this week does not do this. I know the minister talks about the fact that it does, but when you look at these things the devil is always in the detail, and the devil in the detail in this plan is that we do not have the water being returned that the best available science says we need if we are to set the river up and give it a fighting chance. This plan is meant to be the blueprint for how the river system will be managed for the next 20 years, yet this plan does not even include the impacts of climate change or how to deal with the system in an increasingly drying environment.

We know that the coalition and the government have agreed to endorse this plan and pass it through this place today. This plan has had the support of the coalition to pass through this place, because it is not a plan that will save the river; it is a plan that appeases those who did not want to give back as much water as they have been greedily taking. It is not a plan that is set up to support the long-term interests of the environment. It is a plan not based on the best available science. It tries to balance interests rather than the long-term health and resilience of the basin overall.

This process has been all political, not scientific; and, unfortunately, that is backed up by the very fact that the Murray-Darling Basin Authority has not even done the modelling for its long-term forecast of the impact that this plan is going to have. The modelling that has been done has been limited and has no comparison. There is no modelling of the impact of the massive increase in groundwater extraction, which is allowed for under this plan. I know the coalition have now decided they do not like figures; that was Tony Burke, the minister, 12 months ago. The coalition have now adopted this and do not want to talk about the figures. Unfortunately, the figures do not add up to the rhetoric of the outcomes that this plan is meant to achieve.

The whole point of this plan is to set the river up for a healthy future, to get back the water that has been overallocated for generations. I stand here as a representative of my home state of South Australia. We know that, when there is less water in the system, when the drought years come, it is South Australia at the end of the system that always cops it the hardest. That is because we are at the end of the river. When there is less runoff, when there is less water in the system, the upstream states continue to take, take, take and leave basically nothing for South Australia down the end. That means, of course, that our precious environment—our Coorong, the Storm Boy country, our Lower Lakes—and the irrigators in the Riverland have to scrape by with the little amount of water that is left.

Let's not forget that South Australia takes only seven per cent of the overall water within the basin. When the drought is on, it is even less. During the millennium drought, which South Australians remember wholeheartedly and which was not that long ago, we were not even getting that seven per cent flowing across the border. We had far less than that.

As I have said, this plan as tabled today and debated this afternoon is, unfortunately, not the plan that will save the Murray-Darling Basin system. It will not give river communities, particularly in South Australia, security into the future, because it is not based on what we need to do in order to save the system. A friend of mine put it to me like this: if you have any infection and you are seriously sick and you are prescribed by the doctor a course of antibiotics yet are only given a few of those antibiotic tablets and not the whole packet, you are not going to knock that bug off. Everyone knows you need to take the entire course to get your health back on track. That is how antibiotics work. In this instance we have the minister and many others acknowledging that this system is not healthy and that we have to build resilience back into the system because it has been so crippled after decades of overallocation. We really need to realign what the environment is entitled to to keep itself going, to give itself some resilience, to keep the ecosystems alive, particularly in those harsher and drier years. And yet we are not giving the river and the environment the opportunity to do that, because we are not prepared to give it its full course of antibiotics. We are not allowing it even the best fighting chance to get its health back on track.

The best available science says we need 4,000 gigalitres. We have not been given that under this plan. We then saw modelling released by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and backed up by Minister Burke. He flew with the Prime Minister all the way down to the Murray mouth in South Australia and said, 'Hey presto, we know now that 3,200 gigalitres will be somewhat what the river needs if we are even to try to give it a sense of being able to get healthy again and to keep it healthy.' The Greens would have been more than happy and supportive of working with the government to guarantee that minimum amount of 3,200 gigalitres, which would have kept our river red gums alive; which would have flushed out that two million tonnes of salt each year to keep the water healthy and to ensure that the water quality is good enough for domestic use, for stock use, for Adelaide to keep drinking from; which would have ensured that we could protect the iconic Coorong and Lower Lakes. But this is where the devil is in the detail. This plan does not even give us that minimum amount of 3,200 gigalitres, and that is of course why people like Senator Barnaby Joyce, who is sitting in here this afternoon, are I am sure going to stand up and tell people all about how they got a good deal for their constituents and the irrigators upstream—because they have. This plan is for the irrigators. This plan is not about protecting the environment. There are no guarantees in this plan for the water the river needs, particularly to keep South Australia going when the dry years hit. That is not the water that is guaranteed under this plan. When you add in the massive extractions of groundwater—1,700 gigalitres—that has a big impact on how much water is genuinely being returned to the river system.

The coalition do not want to talk about figures. Barnaby Joyce does not want to talk about figures.