Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts for the opportunity to contribute to the debate on these amendments to the Water Amendment Bill 2008. Firstly, I want to speak about the comments the member for New England has just made about the Lower Lakes and the Coorong, about Lake Alexandrina and Lake Albert. In relation to the barrages, they are there because the rest of the system is overextracted and overregulated. You cannot argue that historically the barrages were not there, so we should return to that situation. To do so you would have to remove all the weirs and locks along the way to give the flow back to the system. It simply does not make sense to argue that we should take the barrages out and flood the Lower Lakes with salt water and that that is how it used to be, because the rest of the system was not regulated as it is today. It just does not make sense, and I will make some comments about that later in this contribution.

I wish to speak in support of two amendments in particular: amendment (6) in relation to the pipeline and the extraction of water for the pipeline, and amendment (15) in relation to the assistance package for the people of the Lower Lakes and the Coorong. I will speak to the assistance package amendment first. The disaster at the Lower Lakes is very hard to understand from this place. The livelihoods of the people down there are suffering enormously. They rely very much on the tourism industry in many respects. The irrigators along the Lower Lakes can no longer access water and have not been able to for some time. We need to help these people in their hour of need. It is not good enough for the minister to throw up his hands and say, ‘We are doing all these different things to reform the system.’ I understand that long-term structural issues are being dealt with. They were laid out in a plan by the Leader of the Opposition and the former Prime Minister in January 2007, and if the Premier of Victoria had not stood in the way—

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