Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

I also would thank the member for Murray for bringing forward this matter of public importance today. Like the minister, I wish to use it as an occasion to invite the opposition to reflect on how this debate about a matter which is undoubtedly of national importance is to be conducted. By that I am referring to the need for the bipartisan spirit that was reflected in the legislation that was passed by the Howard government, by the Liberal Party and the National Party when last in government, in 2007. I invite the opposition to reflect on how that bipartisanship brought to bear on an issue of national importance can now be recreated. It has been sorely lacking in the last few days since the release by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority of the Guide to the proposed Basin Planwhich is what it is.

We have had all sorts of what appear to be wilful misreadings of the legislation that was passed by the Howard government and, I regret to say, a great deal of fearmongering, a great deal of misreading or misrepresentation of what this guide to the proposed plan actually is, and indeed the spreading of misinformation about the process. This MPI helpfully raises the process for implementation of the Murray-Darling Basin plan and it is worth bearing in mind just how we came to be in the present situation where, on 8 October, this guide to the proposed plan was released by the authority.

I take it that very many factual matters about the environmental state of the Murray-Darling Basin, about the preciousness of the basin as one of our most important environmental assets and about the status of the basin as the food bowl for the nation are simply beyond question. They are not in dispute between the major parties in this country. I take it as a given that there has been poor management and the lack of a national plan—certainly up to the passage of the legislation in 2007—and I take it as a given that the health of the basin reached a critical point over the past decade, that there has been devastation of precious wetlands, that many of our irrigators went out of business, that we have had algal blooms and acid sulphate soils that make much of the water unusable to farmers and destructive to the environment and that the way in which we have been sharing water in the Murray-Darling Basin is not working to support the long-term viability of rivers or of rural communities.

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