John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

The reason the amendments that we support to the Water Amendment Bill 2008 are being disagreed to by the government is quite obviously the fact that they have absolutely nothing to lose politically. They have not one seat in the basin that is affected by all their decisions. There are something like 17 seats in the basin and the government touches just fractionally on three of them. The coalition and one Independent are in the rest of them. On one day the government bought Toorale Station and about 13,000 megalitres of water. This took about 10 per cent of the annual turnover of the shire of Bourke. The next day they gave permission for a pipeline capable of carrying 110 gigalitres of water. Yes, it might only be 75 gigalitres at the moment, but that pipeline has the capacity for 110 gigalitres of water. If they are serious about desalination or reusing waste water in Melbourne, why do they need this? What Brumby wants, and what the Prime Minister is agreeing to, is to take away the necessity for the Victorian government to spend money on desalination. They are going to steal water out of the Murray-Darling Basin instead.

It is very plain that this is a political decision. It is meant to make Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide happy—although I am not quite sure it is going to make Adelaide very happy at all. It is certainly intended to make Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane think that they are dealing with the Murray-Darling Basin. They are dealing with it, but they are just buying everything out of it and heaven help the two million people who live in it. They will have to suffer simply because there is no political backlash as the government do not hold any seats there. Why are they buying water from people at the most vulnerable stage of their careers? They are drought ridden, such as those on the Lachlan River, which has had no general allocation in six years. Of course they are in trouble. They are looking to sell water because banks are on their backs and all those things we know about.

If that is the case, and if the government want to be fair dinkum about this, why did they not agree to the amendment on transparency, which would have ensured that those buying knew what their water, in a particular part of the river system, was worth so that they would be not be cheated? This government are trying, at this time, to buy the most airspace rather than water, because the water is quite obviously not in the dams. They are trying buy water as cheaply as possible under secret tender. They might become transparent about it after the event, but they are not going to let people know what the going market price is while they are doing it. They have allocated $3.6 billion so far towards buying water, and when they do buy it, nobody else will be able to compete against them, nor will they try. This is probably the most heartless thing we have ever seen. They have got rid of absolutely all of the restructuring money. They are totally unconcerned.

Do not laugh and shake your head, the member for Maribyrnong; your own minister quite bluntly said that there would be no restructuring money. It is not just my electorate that is going to suffer here. It will be everyone in the Murray-Darling Basin. It will not just be the people who use water to irrigate who will suffer from this. There are many towns, communities and workers that will suffer. When the government knocked off the station of Toorale, gave it to the New South Wales government and made that a burden on the Bourke community—rather than the bonus it had been, as the best station west of the Darling River—they turned their back on that community. And I have heard them, including the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, who is opposite, stand up in this House and skite about that.

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