Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

I want to endorse the remarks of the previous speaker, the member for Flinders, and express my disappointment about these government amendments and indeed my concern about the motives which underpin them. They look very much to me like another round of Greens pay-off. We are aware that the proposal to exclude the words 'up to' was at the insistence of the Greens. It was their proposal—one that the government indicated earlier that it was not prepared to accept. The committee has brought in its report halfway through the debate. After considering all of these issues the committee was unanimous that this was not an appropriate amendment to agree to. Yet the government, in spite of the advice of its own committee and in spite of the laudatory remarks that the minister made about the member for New England and his contribution, is now ignoring the member for New England's advice and the advice of the committee and excluding those two words.

It will certainly be seen by the basin community that this is in fact an increase in, a ramping up of, the amount of water that will be taken from them. I can recall saying in my remarks last night—and it was close to midnight so not too many people were listening—that the Greens have a long record of agreeing to one thing today and then turning around the next day and demanding more and more. It has taken only 15 hours for the next increment in the demands for more water to be made and the government has simply rolled over.

I am also concerned in the same context about the exclusion of the word 'dams'. The Greens again are well noted for their distaste of any dams. I do not know how they expect water to be stored. They drink the stuff that comes out of the dams, but they do not want them. Clearly, if you are going to use water wisely for the environment, you have to store it somewhere. It has to be available when you need it, or are we only going to have work done and environmental measures undertaken during flood times? If you want to actually do things in dry times, you have to store the water. Surely, therefore, you have to have a dam. The minister has sort of said that we are not going to have any dams. Perhaps you can explain how he is going to achieve the objectives without having access to the capacity to store water in appropriate places.

All these measures again give rise to heighten my concerns that were expressed last night. The government have demonstrated through the whole of the Murray-Darling Basin process that their favoured way to obtain water for the environment is to simply resort to buybacks. They have not done the engineering works. They have not undertaken measures that could deliver this water. We could be delivering this water without paying local communities. It is almost as though they prefer the painful approach or they just do not care about people who live in the regional communities who are wearing all of this. They have adopted the lazy way in going to the buyouts. Frankly, by raising the high jump, as they are doing again tonight with these amendments—firstly, by insisting on achieving absolutely the whole of the 450 gigalitres and then by ruling out one of the logical ways in which you might achieve that objective—they are setting up a situation where yet again they are going to resort to mass buyouts. There will be more pain, more suffering, more losses and more damage to regional communities.

I would really ask the minister to stand up also for the regional communities. I know that he is the minister for the environment, but where has the minister for agriculture been in this? Where has the minister for regional development been? Where have the people been who should be standing up for those who live outside the capital cities? They ought to be there ensuring that we not only deliver good environmental outcomes, but also that it should be done with a minimum pain to the communities who have to give up this water.

I am very disappointed by these amendments. The coalition has reached a position where it will not be opposing the bill, but now the government has made it so much harder for us to accept that kind of a position by ramping up the pain, ramping up the suffering and making it so much more difficult to achieve the objectives that it proposed in the bill.

Finally, it is a nonsense to be proposing all these detailed matters in the bill. They should be in the plan, not in amendments of this nature. (Time expired)

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