Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Water Resources) Share this | Hansard source

Exactly. He was dreaming about that. But every premier has given support to the plan. We will have some discussions, no doubt, about finetuning aspects here and there, but there is a recognition that this is a great idea whose time has come and which was only waiting for a Prime Minister who had the courage to make it happen. That Prime Minister is the very man that the member for Grayndler derided in his 15-minute speech, the first 11 minutes of which said nothing at all about water, notwithstanding that the MPI is devoted, so it is claimed, to the mismanagement of water resources.

As the member for Grayndler knows, the management of water resources in Australia historically has been in the hands of the states. That applies whether it is urban water or rural water. We are not playing the blame game here. It is a simple fact: water has been managed by the states, just like urban bus routes have been managed by the states. It has been on their side of the ledger. In the Murray-Darling Basin, that management was plainly dysfunctional, not because people were maligned or misguided but because they had competing interests. The four states had competing interests. It was a case of four states in the same bed—in the same riverbed perhaps—but with very different dreams.

The South Australians were right in 1898. The far-sighted founders of our Constitution were right: this is a matter for federal control. Thanks to this government, thanks to this Prime Minister—and we are hoping that the states will combine together as they are indicating they will—for the first time we will have the River Murray and the Darling and all of their tributaries as one integrated system. When we do that we will address the overallocation and we will deliver the security our irrigators need.

It is vitally important to remember something that the opposition always forget about water in this country. They think of the River Murray as though it were a bathtub. They say: ‘There’s not enough water in the bathtub, so we should put a bit more in. We need 1,000 gigalitres more here and 1,500 gigalitres there. Put it back in.’ They fail to recognise that the rivers of Australia are very volatile. We have inherited a complex ecology. Our country is very flat. Our rivers are very slow and they are incredibly variable. The Darling River varies 10,000 to one between its highest flow and its lowest flow. Some of our most famous rivers, viewed from other countries, would be regarded as nothing more than ephemeral streams.

We have to understand the hydrology of Australia when we manage it. We have regulated our rivers. We have built great dams. We have created an environment where farmers can irrigate, where permanent crops can be planted. Prior to these great storages and irrigation systems, you could not have permanent horticulture in Australia because you did not know whether you were going to have a flood or no water at all—‘droughts and flooding rains’; that is what our hydrology is about. Understanding that is key, and that is why the plan here will not simply secure more water for the environment but will underpin the security of irrigation.

By reducing overallocation, buying water back, making irrigation more efficient and thereby securing more water for the environment, not only do we make irrigation more resilient and more efficient—because an irrigation system that is piped, particularly if it is pressurised, is vastly more productive than one that is fed simply through gravity-driven open channels—but we will have a massive reserve of water, an environmental reserve of water, which will be used to water the natural wetlands, the red gum forests along the river and the many other iconic environmental sites that have been neglected as the river has been regulated.

The plan will make more water available for the environment in the years when water is around; but also, when there is no water at all, when there is a desperate drought, we will be able to underpin and support the security of irrigators. The volatility of Australian hydrology means that there is a complementarity between the need of the irrigator to have water security in the driest of dry times and the need of the environment to have additional water when there is a lot of water around. Understanding that complementarity, that volatility, in Australian hydrology is key to the plan that is presented, because it will mean that we will have a better watered environment, an environment that has the water that it needs, but we will also have a more secure irrigation sector.

Many people on the Left, the Greens and the left of the Labor Party, hate irrigated agriculture. They hate it almost as much as they hate the coal industry. They do not want to grow anything in Australia; they say we should import our food. Around the world today the menace of water scarcity has never been greater. Large parts of the world—northern China, the North China Plain in particular, and northern India—are going through periods of extraordinary water scarcity. And it is not just a function of drought or even climate change. Modern pumps have enabled millions of farmers to pump groundwater to unsustainable levels so that the groundwater is exhausted. In the North China Plain alone, World Bank hydrologists estimate that within 15 years the groundwater resources, which currently supply 75 per cent of irrigation water in that vast district, will be exhausted. The world will have a lot less food production in the decades ahead. We cannot afford in Australia to walk away from agriculture. We have to have a more efficient agricultural sector; we have to grow more food. We have to recognise that this left-wing idea that we can abandon irrigation, abandon agriculture and import our food from somewhere else is a fantasy and flies in the face of the major changes that are occurring in the world today.

The Australian government has presented this visionary 10-point plan for water reform and water management in Australia. It is the most important statement about the future of water any government has ever made in our country’s history. It has been widely praised; I will not read all the glowing editorials and the praise from the conservationists, the water experts, the irrigators and the state premiers. This has been an outstanding effort. And what did the Leader of the Opposition say? He said:

I’m adopting a positive bipartisan approach to this ...

The national water crisis in this country should be placed above politics ...

Well, he obviously was not talking to the member for Grayndler, or the member for Grayndler was not listening to him. But let us consider the position of the Leader of the Opposition. He has demanded—with a furrowed brow and earnest look through those academic spectacles—that he be told whether the plan will be available outside of the Murray-Darling Basin. ‘We need to know this,’ the Leader of the Opposition said. If the Leader of the Opposition was as attentive to his homework as he seeks to make us believe he is he would have known—because the Prime Minister made it quite plain in his speech and in all the materials produced at the time—that this money is available across Australia, and he cited a number of irrigation districts outside of the Murray-Darling Basin which would be eligible.

The Leader of the Opposition went on to say, ‘We need to know what the governance arrangements are,’ and he said this after he had met with the premiers. This was a very curious question to ask because the premiers had just met with the Prime Minister. I was at that meeting and we had given the premiers a very detailed two-page statement setting out our proposals for all of the roles and responsibilities between the Commonwealth, the Murray-Darling Basin authority and the state governments. It is all set out, and this is a public document. The premiers had that; they knew exactly what we were proposing. So one has to ask: did they give it to the Leader of the Opposition? Of course it was available on the internet; he could have downloaded it himself. But did the premiers give it to him or not? Or, if they did, did he not read it? So we have this professed concern about the water plan from an opposition that is not even prepared to read it.

I have to say that while the challenges of our rivers and groundwater systems and rural Australia are obviously the most challenging because that is where most of our water is used, the water in our cities has been at crisis point for many years. Urban water is probably the most frustrating part of the whole water challenge in Australia because it is completely fixable. At the end of the day, the irrigator at Mildura depends on what the heavens deliver for his irrigation water, but our cities can recycle, they can desalinate, they can manage their water in so many ways. Each and every one of our big cities can have all the water that they need. It is simply a matter of investing—making the decisions and investing.

And we have in the Leader of the Opposition a man who should stand in the hall of fame—or, should I say, the hall of infamy—of water neglect in Australia because when he was the right-hand man of Premier Wayne Goss in Queensland they chose not to build the Wolffdene dam in 1989. When they chose not to build the Wolffdene dam they ensured that Brisbane would be short of water. They looked down on the Nationals, they looked down on Joh and they said, ‘We’re smarter; we’re smart young men—we’ve been to university.’ But Joh knew that Brisbane needed more water; he knew it needed a dam. They stopped the dam and then did nothing else. When people in Brisbane complain about the water restrictions and wonder why they are building so much infrastructure in such a great panic, it is because of the neglect of the Leader of the Opposition. (Time expired)

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