John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

He was saying that, and all the while he has his three amigos endeavouring at every turn to undermine the plan. It would have been quite easy—if the Leader of the Opposition or any of his frontbench had wanted to know whether the claim made in that document was correct, all they needed to do was ring up my office or ring up my department and they could have been told. But no, it is rather like what happened last week with Work Choices. There you had the Leader of the Opposition soft selling it to the business community, but the next morning the Deputy Leader of the Opposition brought him into line.

The truth is that the Leader of the Opposition has played a double game on this water issue. He has pretended that he is bipartisan and that he is above politics, but at the first opportune moment he has got his colleagues out there saying there is a funding hole, that there is no bottom line, that the document lacks integrity. This visionary plan—which I believe is the greatest single attempt by any national government to solve the problem of the Murray-Darling Basin—will provide $10 billion of entirely new money over and above—

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