Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Moreton says that's not a bad thing! But we love Queensland. It is a great place. But we cannot have the state governments finger-pointing upstream and downstream. We need a National Water Commission as an independent umpire and trusted body providing that expert information so that we can make sound public policy decisions and so we can be judged on those public policy decisions. We do not want to go back to the situation that Sydney McHugh talked about in one of his first questions in the old House to Prime Minister Menzies. We do not want another 50 years of inaction. As I said before, this was Prime Minister Howard's framework. This was largely his policy design. Yet we have a coalition government destroying it and ripping it asunder at a time when it is not right to do so because we have not fixed the job.

We oppose this bill, and we oppose it for good reason. There has been plenty of evidence to the Senate inquiry to say that this is a foolish move by the government, it is a silly save and it will do long-term damage. That is something we should not welcome.

This is one of those broken promises. You see them with the National Water Commission. You see them on the river in South Australia. You see them in the car industry. Every week I see the damage inflicted on my state by decisions of this government on the car industry. We have seen them with the submarines. We have seen them in health and education across the country. We know this is a government of broken promises, and they should be held accountable for this broken promise.

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