Patrick Secker (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In the matter of public importance debate on Tuesday this week, the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts attempted to rewrite history and at the same time tried to account for his approval of 100 billion litres of water to be taken out of the Murray River to provide water to Melbourne via the north-south pipeline. Does he not know that we have recognised that mistake in South Australia—recognised the need to wean Adelaide off the Murray? This minister thinks it is a sensible idea to go the other way and take water out of the Murray for Melbourne’s water supply. It does not matter whether or not it is coming from savings elsewhere; the savings should go back to the river.

We made the same mistake in South Australia where, through the Loxton rehabilitation scheme in my electorate of Barker, some 42 billion litres of water was saved annually so that it could be put into the Murray River when it is needed most. These savings alone could be enough to save the Lower Lakes. I point out that these savings of 42 billion litres annually occurred under funding from the Howard government. The water was recovered and then sold off by the state Labor government.

The minister went on to suggest that when the Howard government came to office in 1996 it had warnings about climate change impacts on water allocations within the Murray-Darling Basin. One might ask: from whom? Not from the climate change office—that did not exist at the time; not from Kyoto, because that did not occur until 1997; and not from the Murray-Darling Commission, because they had not done any work on it and really did not make strong comments about this until many years later. So who gave these warnings? This is simply the minister rewriting history through figments of his own imagination, and he should return to the House to correct this fallacy.

On several occasions the government has claimed various figures for water purchases under the $50 million water purchase program. I have heard and seen ‘34 gigalitres’, ‘32 gigalitres’, ‘27 gigalitres’—a gigalitre being a billion litres—but, as we have learnt during budget estimates this week, the actual water purchase is less than one gigalitre—although I think Minister Wong got her zeros wrong when she claimed 850,000 megalitres or 850 gigalitres. She was only 1,000 times out!

The minister also claimed that only 1½ of one per cent of the $10 billion was committed in the 2007-08 financial year. Of course, this was a 10-year program. You would not expect all the money to be spent in the first year. But guess who was in power for most of the 2007-08 financial year? Rudd Labor. Who stopped the referral of powers to the Commonwealth? Labor in Victoria. Who still has not paid the irrigators at the Yatco Lagoon for a commitment made 15 months ago? Rudd Labor. This was a commitment that was a win for the environment, a win for the Murray and a win for the community, but Labor will not pay their obligation to a contract with the people. This is an outrage and should be corrected today. For a small, in relative terms, investment by the federal government of about $2 million, we are saving five billion litres of water every year. That is a bit over $2,000 per megalitre, which is—funnily enough—about the going price for buying water. So it is a very important initiative. We have already done the work under the Howard government’s $10 billion Water Initiative. We have returned the wetlands to their normal wet and dry cycle and have saved water out of the Murray as a result of things that were done 60 or 70 years ago. It is time for this government to honour that commitment. It is time to fix up the problem that they have created by not paying out what they should have.

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