Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

I have to take that interjection from the chair, Senator Heffernan, about putting up with him—I didn't say it, he did! We are a rather unorthodox and unusual committee, so we are very appreciative of the time and the dedication and hard work that the staff put in. We do try to be collegiate on this committee and we do try not to give too much grief to the secretariat staff, so we thank them very much.

I want to make a couple of brief comments today, mindful that other colleagues also want to speak. We started this inquiry, two years or however long ago it was, because we did not have confidence that the process of determining the Murray-Darling Basin Plan was going to be right, that it was going to be good enough and robust enough. There were so many unanswered questions. There were so many concerns out there in the community around what the government was doing in relation to the Murray-Darling Basin and the plan that we felt it was absolutely imperative that this Senate committee try to provide some oversight and some mechanism through which we could look at evidence, look at all the issues and come up with a balanced report and a balanced set of recommendations for the government to consider and, indeed, for communities and the nation as a whole to consider. I think we have done that with due diligence and a very real concern. Even though those of us on the committee come from different states—thank you for your contribution, Senator Edwards—we do have the interests of the nation as a whole as our primary driver on this committee. While there were a few different views along the way, to say the least, I think we have managed to collectively provide something that is very useful.

If the government had been doing this process properly, in such a way that people in those communities and people outside those communities who were watching this unfold would have expected, we would never have had to do this. A point that has to be made is that the process was extraordinarily bad from this Labor government—probably one of the worst processes I have ever seen. It relates to the fact that there was so little consultation with the rural communities. No attention whatsoever was paid to the triple bottom line until it was raised by those on this side of the chamber. I have to commend my colleague Senator Joyce for the work he did in raising that particular issue and how important it was to underpinning any decision making that was going to happen around the Basin Plan. The government was just leaving out whole sections of the impacts of the plan on the community. It was looking at the environment, but it was not looking at the social, economic and environmental impacts as a whole because it was so focused on the environment.

We all want a cleaner, healthier environment in the future, but we also want sustainable regional communities into the future. What this government was saying for a period of time, and the minister at the time Senator Penny Wong said it herself, was that farmers were just going to have to get used to doing more with less. I was pointing out that the government was providing a man-made continual drought for these farmers, for these irrigators and for these towns—because it was not just about farmers and irrigators, it was about the impact on whole towns—but she said farmers were just going to have to get used to doing more with less. It is just appalling to think that that was part of the mindset that was underpinning this process to get to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.