Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This government has never seen an evidence based policy that it did not want to unpick. That is one of the many reasons that it is a very, very mediocre government. They are working on trying to unpick Gonski now, an historic agreement to introduce needs based funding reached under the last Labor government. They have done a great job of unpicking the arrangements put in place to tackle dangerous climate change, putting us in the embarrassing position of being one of the few nations internationally that has actually removed an effective emissions trading system designed to deal with climate change.

Now this government is turning its sights on the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. The Murray-Darling Basin Plan is more than just some technical instrument. It is not just some government plan that can be toyed with at the whim of the Deputy Prime Minister. It represents an incredibly powerful consensus, one which was hard fought, one which was hard to achieve, and one which was achieved under the last Labor government. There has been conflict about water use along the Murray-Darling Basin for longer than Australia has existed as a nation, and it was something indeed to come to an agreement about how we would handle that conflict when the Murray-Darling Basin Plan was put in place. Contrary to some of the views that are given in this place, it is not a radical environment plan. In fact, it most explicitly seeks not to return the system to a natural state but rather to deliver a healthy working river system that could not only deliver for agricultural communities but could also deliver on the ecological needs of all of those amazing systems that exist up and down the Murray-Darling Basin.

So I completely sympathise with the anger and the frustration of my South Australian colleagues here in this chamber, because there are many sensitive sites in South Australia that do need watering, and the Murray-Darling Basin Plan needs the water so that we can keep those sites alive. It is also the case that the South Australians, quite reasonably, would like a healthy channel in the Murray, because that is so important for them as a source of drinking water and so important as a source of agricultural water. So I stand by South Australian colleagues—and I stand by South Australians—when they stand up here and push back hard, quite rightfully, against the Deputy Prime Minister's outrageous plan, because, as has been talked about often in this chamber this afternoon, he is actively walking away from a constructive process that was put in place to try to find the additional 450 gigalitres that the scientists tell us are necessary to deliver a healthy working river—not to return the system to pristine environmental health; simply to deliver a river that can perform all of the functions that we demand of it as the Australian community.

I worry too about the way the Deputy Prime Minister talks about the Murray-Darling Basin system. He quite rightly points out that it is not an interconnected system of hoses, and I agree with that; it is not. But the implication he seems to draw from that is that you can take as much water as you like out of the northern basin and it will not make any difference, because it does not make any difference to South Australia. He seems completely oblivious to the amazing assets that are in the northern basin, and we are starting a consultation at the moment about the northern basin. There have not been any decisions made about how much water the recovery targets are for the northern basin. But we do know that there are some assets there that will come under pressure if the recommendations are implemented. As we work through this consultation process, we need to be scrutinising that. We need to be looking at the implications for the wetlands on the Barwon-Darling. We need to be looking at the implications for the Culgoa. We need to be looking at the bird breeding on the Narran Lakes, an incredibly significant international site. We need to be coming to some conclusions about what it will mean if we change the arrangements and the water recovery targets in the northern basin. I have not drawn a conclusion about that, but I will say this: when the Deputy Prime Minister talks about it, he talks about it as though these things mean nothing, as though ecological sites mean nothing, as though the only value in the basin—and in the northern basin in particular—is its agricultural value. That is simply not so.

I had the very good fortune to visit the Paroo in early 2000. I remember the Indigenous people who were there, the Indigenous people who right now are saying that they are angry about the lack of consultation, the lack of involvement and the lack of opportunities for them to be involved in decision making about water in the northern basin. They were there back in 2000 when we declared the Paroo River a place a special importance. We said that we would not regulate it any further under a Labor government. I say to those people: we will stand by you as you seek to be included in the process for making decisions in the northern basin. People need to be very careful about this—very careful, indeed. (Time expired)