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

Last week, the water minister, Tanya Plibersek, revealed information that confirmed the country's worst kept secret—that the Murray-Darling Basin is in peril and that the Murray-Darling Basin Plan will not fulfil its objectives on time. This, of course, is not new. This is not new to those who have been watching and fighting for the river's survival for decades. It's not new for those of us who live at the bottom end of the river in South Australia. We have known that for years politics and greed have trumped science when it comes to managing the Murray-Darling Basin. Despite $13 billion being spent to implement the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, the plan was always set up to fail the river, to fail the environment and to fail South Australia. It was a broken promise to suggest the plan could be delivered in full and on time. But, worse than that, it has been a broken promise from both sides of politics, from both the major parties, for well over a decade.

We don't just need a delay in meeting the objectives of the plan; we need a new plan. We need a plan based on science, a plan based on fact, a plan that puts the objective of saving our most precious river system for the future first, a plan that puts the objective of looking after the environment first, a plan that says enough with the greed and the over-extraction of upstream states and corporate irrigators, and a plan that pushes the federal government to stand up to their Labor Party mates in upstream states and to stare down the corporate and greed interests of the big corporate irrigators. We need a plan that puts science first.