Fran Bailey (McEwen, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I present the Saving the Goulburn and Murray Rivers Bill 2008. We need a national management plan that returns water to the Murray-Darling system, regulates the usage and ensures the efficient delivery of water to cope with the variability of seasons and weather patterns. We need the states to cooperate in the national interest by way of an intergovernmental agreement, or IGA, but the reality is that the government’s plan is flawed and doomed to failure because one state, Victoria, with the imprimatur of the federal Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts is flagrantly breaching the conditions of the IGA at the expense of all communities throughout the basin. And for as long as the Rudd government allows the Victorian government to act in this rogue manner they cannot claim to achieve a national management plan for the Murray-Darling Basin.

This private member’s bill will stop the Victorian government from taking a net 75 billion litres of water each year from the Goulburn River, which it claims is water saved from its Food Bowl Modernisation Project, and stop the construction of the north-south pipeline that the Victorian government will use to pipe the 75 billion litres of water to Melbourne. This is a clear breach by Victoria in not returning saved water to the Living Murray Initiative. Yet the Rudd government has been prepared to turn a blind eye to this rogue action that destroys the only real chance to achieve for the first time a national management plan to achieve sustainability for the Murray-Darling Basin.

The principles outlined in this bill will, however, deliver a national management plan by preventing the unauthorised extraction of water from the basin, by preventing the construction of the north-south pipeline as the means of delivering this saved water to Melbourne, by ensuring that the states of Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales comply with their obligations to return audited, saved water to the Living Murray Initiative and by ensuring this water is not used for any purpose other than the Living Murray Initiative.

Only when these conditions have been met can the government claim to have achieved a national management plan that has a hope of achieving sustainability. As long as the government fails to act to bring Victoria into line with the other states, it does not have a legitimate or workable IGA and the other states would be justified in demanding that Victoria comply in the same way that they must comply. As things stand today, Mr. Brumby’s cavalier action will send the 75 billion litres he is claiming that he has saved from modernising the irrigation channels in the Goulburn Valley down the north-south pipeline to Melbourne. The other states and the Commonwealth not only deserve better co-operation from Victoria than this but cannot in good faith enter into a so-called national management agreement with a state that cannot even convince its own Auditor-General of its bona fides in regard to its management of water.

The rogue action by the Victorian government has already had devastating consequences.  I could never convey the true extent of the emotional, physical and financial hurt experienced by my constituents as they have been arrested for trying to protect their own property and having to watch as heavy equipment gouges a path of destruction across their land, destroys pasture locked up for hay, destroys local areas of national park—all to build a $1.5 billion pipeline to extract water from a region in drought with historically low water levels and, under the IGA, as proposed by the government, water that is meant to go into the Living Murray Initiative.

Not just for my constituents but for all Australians dependent on the water of the Murray-Darling Basin who want a true national water management plan I urge all members to support this bill. Those who fail to insist on these principles being included in a national management plan for the Murray-Darling must accept the responsibility for failing to grasp the opportunity for real, sustainable reform. We have an opportunity to cut through tokenism. Any national water management plan that does not incorporate the principles outlined in this bill lacks real credibility and can never achieve its purpose.

Bill read a first time.

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