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

I represent a large piece of western New South Wales, and both the member for Mallee and I constantly talk about water in this House. I made some remarks the other night that I am sure he would have endorsed had he been here. We will look at western New South Wales, and I will use a statistic to illustrate the point. This area is not all my electorate—some of it is in that of the member for Calare. Forty-two per cent of the state of New South Wales is west of, probably, Balranald, in the Western Division, and it contains only five per cent of the population. That becomes progressively less of an extreme distribution as you move closer to the sea, but it does illustrate the effect of the city-country divide, because in that 42 per cent of New South Wales that has five per cent of the population we have very poor roads, for obvious reasons. We just do not have the population that uses them, so we are constantly battling to get decent roads to drive our cars on.

The measure that the government has brought in about luxury cars has been, frankly, quite insulting to the people whom I represent, because to consider a four-wheel drive, and the necessary additions that you would have to make to such a vehicle in order to safely traverse these roads, a luxury is absolutely crazy. As the Leader of the Opposition, Brendan Nelson, put it, if you are in your 10-year-old Mitsubishi queuing up at the petrol station, being told by the Rudd government that the reduction in excise of 5c a litre that we suggest is meaningless and does not matter to you, and you are trying to balance the family budget, you would be insulted too.

There are two things: the luxury car tax and the fact that the government thinks that the cost of fuel is not something that matters a great deal to these people on relatively low incomes. In fact, the government believes that these people would not really appreciate a drop of any description. That is absolutely crazy. I have to be honest: it is a subject that absolutely consumes people everywhere you go. If I say to them, ‘What about a 5.5c a litre drop?’ they say, ‘Of course we’d like more, but anything will help.’ I think sometimes governments lose touch with the small amounts that matter in a family’s fortnightly budget.

Small amounts do matter in my electorate because we have been struggling with the drought for a long time now. In some areas we have had 10 years of lower than average rainfall. Particularly in the southern Murray-Darling Basin we are battling over the scarce resources that the Murray-Darling system offers us. There is no doubt at all that we really cannot achieve very much until it rains. The storages in the Snowy Mountains are woefully low and woefully inadequate. The arguments that governments are having with irrigators in rural communities are particularly sad and distressing for those on the receiving end, because they know that, although the government is ‘offering’, to put it in its politest possible terms, to buy their water by coming into the market with a $3 billion chequebook, all they are buying is air space in a dam or empty buckets of water. Perhaps in the government’s mind—but certainly not my mind—it is to help them out. Until we actually know what an allocation will be in any year, the government does not know what it has bought. What it has done is remove control of an irrigation licence from a rural town or a rural community.

There is an analogy here with the end of the wool floor price. There was a lot of discussion then that we should burn the stockpile of wool because then we would have it out of the system and out of the way. I am not saying I supported it one way or the other, although I was a wool farmer at the time. The stockpile sat there and it sort of trickled onto the market in stages. Every now and then a bit more wool would come out and everybody would say, ‘What has happened here?’ and the market would rock from this entry of wool that everyone had forgotten about. This is exactly what is going to happen with this water. The water will be owned by an environmental water manager who is part of the Australian government. Like all responsible government departments, their job will be to maximise the income they make from these water licences. We know that environmental allocations do not work the same every year. If you are looking at your wetlands you might say, ‘I want to water that one this year but not the next year,’ or ‘I want to top up a flood here,’ or ‘There’s no rain still so I’ll hang onto this water in this part of the catchment.’ It is a delicate balancing act, as it should be. If that water is not needed for that wetland or that environmental flow in a particular year, the government are not just going to sit on it; the government is going to put it back on the market and offer it for sale. Inevitably that is what will happen.

See this speech in context