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

It pains me to rise on this motion tonight about the government’s handling of the water crisis, which affects my electorate more than any other throughout the country, because I have half the Lower Lakes in my electorate—the other half being in the electorate of Barker. The Lower Lakes are now at the point of no return; they are at the point of environmental crisis. Last Friday I was lucky enough to be part of an outdoor broadcast by the 891 Morning Show hosts David Bevan and Matthew Abraham, who went down to what used to be the Goolwa yacht club—the oldest yacht club in the country—and had an outdoor broadcast with interested members of the community, and there would have been at least 200 people there. For a small community like Goolwa, that is a reflection of the intense interest that these people have in the water crisis.

I recognise that this has no simple solution. This is not an issue which can, at the click of the fingers, be fixed by some easy policy move or some easy decision. We are in this situation for a couple of major reasons. Firstly, over a period of time both sides of politics, particularly at the state level, in multiple states have made decisions which have made our great Murray-Darling Basin system reach this point. We are also in the middle of the worst drought in the southern part of the basin that our country has seen in many, many years. So there are a couple of reasons for where we are, and I do not lay the whole blame for the situation at the feet of the current government. But what I do condemn them for is their lack of action since they came to government. They will stand up and say that they have purchased water and done certain things, but we are seeing no real improvement in the situation. That is because they have not done the really hard and necessary job of investing in on-farm and off-farm infrastructure, particularly in New South Wales and Victoria, which would get real savings back into the river system and would mean greater environmental flow into the system. As we stand here today there is no environmental flow into the Lower Lakes. The government will claim that 350 gigalitres a year flows through environmental flow but, if truth be told, that is conveyance flow—that is, flow to flush salt out of the system so that the Adelaide water supply is not putrefied.

So we have a situation where there is actually no environmental water flowing into the Lower Lakes. Just Thursday a week ago I was fortunate to take the Leader of the Opposition and the member for Barker to Mannum to see the situation. The pool level in Mannum is 1.5 metres below the average pool level. The situation in the Lower Lakes as of Friday a week ago was that the water had dropped to 1.48 metres below sea level. So we are now at the point of no return. We need some real action very quickly. I urge the government to purchase 30 gigalitres off the water market—which they can do; it is available there today—in temporary allocations to get the Lower Lakes through this crisis period. And I urge them not to flood the Lower Lakes with salt water, not to install the Wellington weir.

I do bemoan the national agreement, which we were told last year was historic, because I believe the government took the easy way out—I suspect the minister for water was focused on the ETS at the time, rather than on the river crisis—and let Victoria off the hook. That is what has caused this agreement to capitulate. How do we know the agreement has capitulated? The Rann government underlined this two Thursdays ago when they announced they would look into a High Court challenge into the very agreement that they signed not 12 months ago.

The Rudd government has failed so far, in the first 16 months of its government. I genuinely hope it improves, because no-one wants to see this area die. I am sure the member for Kingston, in her remarks following mine, will agree that no-one wants to see this area die. I do not think the government wants to see this area die, but I think it can do more to make sure it does not.

I also bemoan the way the state government is going about managing this issue. For instance, on Friday we had a representative of the state government—the minister was not able to make it, which is understandable; I am not criticising—in the so-called independent water commissioner, Mrs Robyn MacLeod, who claims to be an independent authority on this issue. It just turns out that, with a little bit of research, we can establish that Mrs Robyn MacLeod was a candidate for the Australian Labor Party in the Victorian seat of Mordialloc, at the state election in March 1996 and also in March 1999. (Time expired)

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