Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

As Senator Ruston has rightly said, we have different parties who've now pointed guns at each other's heads. We've had the Labor Party here in the Senate acting in concert with the Greens and the Xenophon party, threatening to walk away from a key element of the plan and, indeed, walking away from that key element last night. That has resulted in those upstream saying, 'We'll walk away from the plan altogether.' The only way to put the pieces of this plan back together is for everybody to lay down their arms and come back to the table, and to recognise that the plan that was stitched together carefully in 2012 is the one we should see fully delivered and fully implemented. The Labor Party needs to stand by what they agreed to in 2012. And upstream states need to stay at the table to make sure they give certainty to their river communities that ends what has been, as I said, more than a century of arguing over water and gives us the sustainable, healthy river and communities that we all want to see.