Mark Vaile (Lyne, National Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

that the market should set the price of water. The market should determine which crops farmers grow, not some central committee of the ALP politburo. The member for Grayndler says that the Murray needs a drink but he does not acknowledge that there is a drought on. In one of the comments he made in this speech he said: ‘Labor firmly believes the overallocation of water licences is a primary source of the water crisis.’ The primary source of the water crisis is that there is a drought on! I do not know whether you had noticed, but there is a drought on! We want to responsibly address better managing water resources for a sustainable future. It is quite clear, as we travel around regional Australia, that working families in regional Australia know the Labor Party’s form on forestry, the decisions they took at the last election at the last moment; they know their form on coalmining—their attitude towards coalmining versus climate change. We know their form on uranium mining and the deployment of uranium. The regional communities do not trust Labor on the management of water in the future. Labor try to be all things to all people. They have spent 11 years opposing the government’s measures to improve the economy, and now they want to get their hands on the loot and spend the benefits of that hard work. No amount of gloss on top of this new team in the Labor Party is going to hide the rust that we know exists underneath. They are anti jobs, anti development and anti regional Australia.

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