Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you. How is this relevant? President, I know you're from WA, but this is actually about the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. That's how it's relevant. I know that the National Party doesn't support the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. I know that they say that they really don't want to support it, and they won't recognise the enormous amount of environmental and economic work that was done for the plan. Your government adopted the plan, but the problem was you adopted it so that Senator Birmingham and Senator Ruston could go to Adelaide and say, 'We've got the Murray-Darling Basin Plan,' but you just made sure you never did anything. So you actually didn't deliver, almost, any water. The great political solution for the coalition and their enormous division on water policy was that you adopt a plan but you don't actually do anything about it. Well, that isn't the approach we'll be taking, because we recognise, as Malcolm Turnbull did, that you have to have reform in the Murray-Darling Basin.