Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased and proud to second the motion to disallow the law that is the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. I rise to speak on behalf of the people of the electorate of Murray, which I represent. As the name implies, this is an area in northern Victoria with a boundary of the great Murray River. It is not in our nature in Murray to simply look the other way when governments deliberately or knowingly do us wrong or are so incompetent that their actions have the power to literally destroy our environment and to destroy our food-growing capacity, which in turn destroys us in the future as economically independent Australians.

This is not the first time in Murray that we have had to say no to bad government policy. Ironically, it is typically Labor government policy. We have had to say no before to policy that had the potential to destroy us. In 2007, the Bracks Labor government announced that the drought was seriously hurting Melbourne. They had been forced to put restrictions on people watering their lawns and their concrete and washing their cars. Since that government had failed to build an extra dam or put in decent water-recycling works or stormwater harvesting, there was a problem, but they had a great idea: they would push a very big pipeline over the Great Dividing Range and into the Goulburn River at Yea, and then the mighty pumps would be turned on and they would suck up 74 gigalitres a year out of the irrigators' resource. Bear in mind that this was in the middle of the worst drought on record, and the irrigators at the time were on less than 30 per cent allocation and many of them on zero allocation. But we were told that that was not really a problem, since a total of 220 gigalitres a year would be saved in the Goulburn-Murray irrigation area, in particular by changing how the irrigation water was measured and by plastic lining some of the channels.

Of course, this figure of savings was fictitious. It was a nonsense. It was immediately challenged and discredited, but the pipeline was built. There was no business case. There was no detailed public or in fact any public consultation. It was a done deal inflicted on the Goulburn Valley and the people of the electorate of Murray as simply the right thing to do for the people of Melbourne. No-one thought about the food production capacity that was to be lost. No-one thought about the devalued irrigation properties. And certainly no-one from the government seemed particularly concerned that there was no business case to support the project that they had in mind.

A special new bureaucracy was set up to manage this business of finding these mythical savings of water, and it had a billion-dollar budget to do it. The Northern Victoria Irrigation Renewal Project, as it was called, was of course immediately abolished by the incoming coalition Baillieu government, and the tasks of the NVIRP were rolled into the Goulburn-Murray Water authority. The Baillieu government did this because they were responding to the damning ombudsman's report that identified NVIRP's corrupted behaviour, its unprofessional behaviour, its inefficiencies, its probity issues, its failure to consult properly, failures to properly tender, failures to protect farmers' private interests, insider trading and so on. I recommend that the minister reads the ombudsman's report.

The remainder of the transcript will be available online on Friday, 30 November 2012.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER (M r Georganas ) took the chair at 09:54.

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