Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, they will demand a high price. They will have to maximise their price. In maximising their price they are going to maximise the pain that anyone who buys that water will undergo. Irrigators are going to be completely at the mercy of the biggest water holder in the Murray-Darling Basin by far—the Australian government, which will supposedly be acting in the interests of all taxpayers but will be acting in their own fiscal interests. I am not overstating the case to say that people are very angry and frightened. They are angry with me. They are saying, ‘You need to do more.’ I am feeling extremely frustrated because I cannot get through to the water minister. She does not answer my letters and she does not really want to see my constituents. She does not want to come down to the electorate of Farrer. She made a drop-in, drop-out visit lately. She probably thinks she has bigger fish to fry.

It is enormously worrying for us because we can see ghost towns appearing along the Murray River where once there were traditional, proud, flourishing settlements. I thought it was a bit ironic that one of the ministers of the government had leave today. It was not the agriculture minister—or maybe it will be at a later time this week—to attend a food meeting in Europe where the subject matter would be feeding a hungry world and, presumably, the interaction between growing grain for ethanol fuel and growing grain for food. I thought it was interesting that this is a government that is ripping out the water that grows our food in the southern Murray-Darling Basin but does not seem to realise the consequences. We contribute enormously; there is no question about it. I think that the previous government had the balance right between the environment and production, because we cannot afford to ignore either. That continues to be something that I worry about year after year and I certainly will not stop until we get that good drenching rain.

In the recent budget about a billion dollars was taken out of rural Australia, and that was enormously disappointing to my constituents. It is interesting that prior to the election Mr Rudd talked up the clever country image quite a lot. He talked about innovation and doing things smarter. They were good words, but what he actually did was take about $500 million from research and development. There were huge cuts to the CSIRO. I do not always agree to the CSIRO.

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