Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

From the outset I make it clear that I support the position outlined by the member for Port Adelaide and other Labor speakers in their contributions to this debate on the National Water Commission (Abolition) Bill 2015. I have listened to almost all the speakers thus far with a great deal of interest. This is a matter that does interest me because it is important to the state I represent, South Australia, and because I was part of the committee, along with the member for Riverina—who is sitting across the table—that was known as the Windsor committee, which looked into the Murray Darling Basin in recent years. It probably did so more extensively than any committee previously.

I noted the member for Murray's contribution, and I would like to make some comments about that before I get to the substantive part of my contribution to the debate. I can well understand her comments and I certainly respect her for standing up for her community, but in my view she highlights just why we need a Murray Darling Basin Plan, why we need agreement to that plan from each of the four states and the ACT and why the National Water Commission should be retained. It should be retained to ensure that, once that plan is in place and once there is agreement to it, it is complied with. If there needs to be any changes to it, those changes should be based on objective and independent evidence, which to date has been provided by the National Water Commission.

I want to correct another point, which I hear time and time again from members in the eastern states with respect to what happened in recent years. The claim that there was a push to ensure that South Australia got more water simply to save the Lower Lakes is simply wrong. The reality is that in the years leading up to the last drought we had, which commenced in the late nineties, water allocations and water use in Victoria almost doubled and in New South Wales they trebled, whilst in South Australia water use had remained pretty flat line over the previous 40 years. It was because of the over allocations in the eastern states that we reached the point where the system was totally unsustainable.

The purpose of this bill is to abolish the National Water Commission and transfer its tasks to the Productivity Commission. Those tasks include the five-yearly audits of the implementation of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, the triennial assessments of the National Water Initiative and the biennial National Water Planning Report Card. The National Water Commission was established in 2004 by the Howard government. It was a coalition government that put it in place, and it did so for the right reasons. It did so in response to the need to better manage the water resources of this country, and it did so because the issue came to ahead in the midst of a drought, when there were serious problems confronting Australia widely with respect to that drought. In particular, those problems threatened the future security of the agricultural sector and primary industries—literally right across the country but certainly in the Murray-Darling Basin region. Those problems threatened the future of farming families, the country communities and the environmental assets that all relied on that water.

Indeed, national water security had emerged as a national priority a decade ago, just as it has across the world today. Climate change and population growth have seen a serious depletion of water resources right around the world. The National Water Commission has put Australia, over the last 10 years, at the forefront internationally of good water management policies. It has provided consistency and certainty for both government and the private sector, and it has provided non-political, evidence based guidance on national water management issues. Whilst my remarks will be focused on the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, I take the point made by the member for Forrest in her contribution that the commission was indeed responsible for more than the Murray-Darling Basin Plan and that responsibility extended to all water resources across the country.

In respect to the Murray-Darling Basin, the basin spans the four states of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia and also covers the Australian Capital Territory. It is an area of about a million square kilometres. It is home to over two million Australians and it produces almost half of Australia's irrigated agricultural products. It is a major Australian economic, environmental and social asset. Its sustainability is vital to Australia's future. The last drought exposed just how poorly the basin had been managed in the past. Indeed, that mismanagement resulted in the distorted water market, in the buybacks that we had, and in growers and farmers being unable to access water at critical times in the production of their crops. The result was that farmers lost properties or sunk into debt, towns struggled to survive, businesses closed down, farms were abandoned, and environmental disasters occurred across the basin—nowhere more so than in South Australia at the Lower Lakes and at the Coorong.

That drought highlighted the urgency of a national agreement on the Murray-Darling plan—something that the states had been bickering over for about 100 years. Labor, after 100 years, led by the minister at the time, Tony Burke, was able to secure an agreement that we, on this side of parliament, believed would at least provide the necessary security for the future of the basin, and the families, communities and businesses that lived within it. The Murray-Darling Basin Plan and the National Water Commission were both critical to the security of the two million people that lived within the plan.

It seems that—just because in recent years we have had some good rain falls and water inflows have been restored into the basin—we have now slipped back, or at least the government has slipped back, into a position of complacency about management of the basin. The reality is that water security is still under extreme uncertainty, with both climate change and mining activities in the basin area adding to the need to carefully manage the national water resources that we have. Yet what has occurred is the opposite. We have seen the Council of Australian Governments abolish the Standing Council on the Environment and Water. We have seen the Great Artesian Basin Sustainability Initiative ceased. We have seen the water buybacks cutback to 1,500 gigalitres; indeed, in South Australia we have seen the cuts to the water buybacks threaten the additional 450 gigalitres that had been secured as part of the 3,200-gigalitre target by the previous government. This government has pushed those water buybacks back by a couple of years and capped the total number of water buybacks to 1,500 gigalitres.

We have also seen a government that does not take climate change seriously. It is still clear that climate change sceptics in the coalition continue to influence government policy on their side of this House. Indeed, when the world response to climate change appears to be growing, and when leaders in countries like the US, China, and India are all increasing their commitment to tackling climate change, the responses that we see in Australia are sending Australia in the opposite direction. I focus on climate change because, in my view, it remains the single largest threat to water security across Australia—as it does across the world. That threat transfers directly onto farmers, primary producers and country communities whose livelihoods depend entirely on access to water. Good management of Australia's water resources minimises the risk and provides added security. That is why having a body such as the National Water Commission is so important.

It is very likely that we will see another drought sometime in the future. Even the climate change sceptics who claim that droughts are a feature of the Australian landscape will have to acknowledge that if that is the case sooner or later we will face another drought. When it does come, it would be much wiser for us to be prepared as a country—unlike during the last drought. An independent, expert and objective body overseeing Australia's water resources serves the national interest—as the National Water Commission has done for the last 10 years.

The Abbott government's approach of transferring responsibility to the Productivity Commission is a change that, as other speakers on this side of the House have made clear, has very little support from the stakeholders—the people who understand best what is required and how to best manage the water resources we have. We have no guarantee, from listening to the government speakers on this bill, that the Productivity Commission will have the necessary expertise or the necessary resources required to competently carry out its job. It is not a question of whether the people there are expert or not; it is a question of whether they are going to be given the support staff and the resources they need to carry out the role. And if they are, at what cost will that come and what will the savings be, given that the government claims that this measure is going to save some $20 million? Equally concerning is that, rather than having such a national asset managed by a group that is solely focused on that role, it will be transferred to a department that has oversight of so many other roles. I do not believe anyone can seriously claim that managing water resources will get the same level of scrutiny and attention that it would have had the National Water Commission continued.

I suspect the real objective in abolishing the National Water Commission, apart from the meagre savings referred to by the government, is to remove scrutiny of the Abbott government's commitment to water resources in this country, and to avoid any criticism of the government for mismanaging Australia's water resources. In other words: get this group out of the way so the government cannot be scrutinised in the same way. We have already seen the Abbott government cut some $650 million of water buybacks, which, as I said earlier, seriously jeopardises the government's ability to get to the 3,200 gigalitre target that was set by the previous government. South Australia, the state I represent, is at the end of the river system. South Australia will be the loser if that 3,200 gigalitre target is not met. That may not matter to the people in the eastern states, but it certainly does matter to South Australians.

I heard the contribution from the member for Barker. His predecessor was indeed a member of the Windsor committee that looked into the Murray-Darling Basin. I doubt very much that his predecessor would have agreed to the abolition of the National Water Commission, and I will say something about that in just a moment. But what I noted from the member for Barker's comments was that he talked up the importance of the farming community that he represents, and its reliance on the waters that come into South Australia, but then said nothing about how he is going to take a stand to support and secure those water resources. The Windsor committee, which the previous member for Barker was on, made 21 recommendations with respect to management of the Murray-Darling Basin. The first thing I do not know is how many of those recommendations the Abbott government is committed to. What I do know is that recommendation 21 clearly stated that the National Water Commission would be tasked with a whole range of responsibilities, including the very responsibilities that this bill seeks to take away from them.

This bill flies entirely in the face of, and is contrary to, the recommendations of the last committee of this parliament that looked into the management of Australian water resources. By and large, the committee's recommendations—and certainly recommendation 21—were not contentious. They were bipartisan recommendations from both sides of this parliament, and yet the government now chooses to throw them out the window for nothing more than its own political agenda of, firstly, not having to face up to the scrutiny that would be applied to it by the National Water Commission, and, secondly, claiming that it would save a meagre handful of dollars. As the member for Grayndler quite rightly pointed out, we are talking about a basin that sustains a $66 billion economy, and yet we are prepared to put it at risk for the saving of a few meagre dollars. (Time expired)

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