Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Justice and Customs) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak on this matter of public importance and add the perspectives of rural and regional Australia, particularly those of western New South Wales. This is a subject very dear to the hearts of all regional members and, indeed, of all those who live west of the Great Divide in New South Wales. If I look at my own electorate and consider what our infrastructure needs are, they very much come down to water infrastructure to deliver water for irrigated agriculture and productive farming in order to create the wealth that we very well know how to do in our part of the world. The other thing that I look at and see the need for day by day is telecommunications.

I pick up on a sentence that I heard earlier about schools infrastructure not being nation-building infrastructure. I think I can attribute that to the member for Kennedy. Only this morning I received two separate emails from constituents in my electorate whose children go to small schools and who are concerned about the appalling waste of public money in the Building the Education Revolution program. I do not have a copy of the emails in front of me, but one asked whether I as their elected representative had heard of examples where schools want a $600,000 facility and the education department has suggested to them that they apply for $1.2 million. There are other examples where schools are told that they might think they want something but that the education department would prefer it if they had something else, with the result that the cost of the project becomes exorbitant.

As I travel around my electorate and look at the beginnings of some of these projects, I am picking up an alarming trend, and that is the proportion of money costed in the project that goes to consultants, to overseers and to project managers who fly in and out often in charter aircraft, not on regular flights. The amount of money that hits the ground for a school building, assuming that it is a school building that the school wants, is a mere 50 or 60 per cent of the total cost of the project. Nobody likes to see such waste of public funds, and I, along with my colleagues, do urge the Minister for Education to take a close look. I know the Auditor-General is taking a close look at what these funds are being spent on—and I am delighted to hear it.

Today we have had a lot of debate about the possible purchase of Cubbie Station. Water issues matter a great deal to those who live along the Murray in New South Wales, and I represent a large part of the Darling and the Menindee Lakes. We seem to be looking at this from the wrong perspective. The question that should be asked about the purchase of Cubbie Station is whether $450 million is the best use of taxpayers’ money, given that land and water are not disconnected in the state of Queensland. The other important consideration is that those who imagine that you can turn a tap off at Cubbie and turn it on at the mouth of the Murray is to demonstrate the impossibility of this.

Remember that there are flood plain licences in north-west New South Wales that allow farmers to harvest water above a certain level as it flows past their property. It would be a ridiculous situation if Cubbie Station were purchased at astronomical cost—and the federal government should not be in the business of farming, that would never be the case—and the water that flows past Cubbie into north-west New South Wales gets harvested in an opportunistic fashion by the flood plain licensees there. I do not think that the Minister for Climate Change and Water has even thought of that. It certainly should have been considered as an alternative to her purchase of water with Toorale and also the Twynam group of companies.

We desperately need the $600 million that we dedicated as a government to replumbing rural Australia; to actually provide the infrastructure to allow people to continue with their farming operations. That has been snatched away, and instead we have a government which is not interested in the infrastructure that is needed on farm and the upgrades to that infrastructure, but which only looks at a superficial green agenda that says, ‘Add more water at one end of the Murray-Darling system and you will get the same amount of water out at the other end.’ You will not. I hope that common sense prevails and $450 million of taxpayers’ money is not used to purchase Cubbie Station.

It is true that we need to look at how we manage our water resources, and Cubbie is an important part of that. I think there are issues about the amount that that one property harvests from the flood plain and things that we could address but, please, remember there are many farmers in the system and they all need help. (Time expired)

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