Andrew Broad (Mallee, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Penny Wong destroyed the viability of our irrigation bodies and she ripped up irrigation agriculture. It has taken us five years to restore confidence. As VFF President I listened to the then environment and water minister—now the Manager of Opposition Business—copping all the flak. In some regards, he took a lot of heat out of the debate, and I commend him for that. He had to sit on his hands and listen to the venting of anger about the terrible management by the water minister before him. But I've got to say he probably sat on his hands a little bit too long; there are a few things I would have liked to have seen you deliver.

But they were delivered by Barnaby Joyce, who was shadow water minister and then became Minister for Agriculture in the new government. He delivered $103 million of irrigation infrastructure to give confidence back to the irrigators in my patch. He delivered tax deductibility status for people who wanted on-farm irrigation—so, drip tape irrigation. With Andrew Robb, he delivered the free trade agreements, and they also put a cap of 1,500 gigalitres of maximum buyback. We put confidence back into water, so I refuse to get lectured from the other side of the parliament about how to manage water. We have done stuff that actually has to happen.

There are things that need to take place. We have to have confidence in the irrigation industry. We have to have confidence in the environmental management. We have to have confidence in the community. Without those things, you cannot encourage people to put modern irrigation on their own farm. If they think their water's going to be taken away, they're not going to put new infrastructure in.

Confidence means there has to be integrity in metering. Confidence means there has to be monitoring of metering—they must be working. Confidence means that there has to be prosecution for those who aren't upholding their obligations under the law. The law does have a level of compliance around it. The New South Wales compliance regime is strict. There is currently an investigation, which I think is the appropriate current investigation, which is answerable to COAG, to come up with the conclusions about whether their regulation regime is being carried out.

But I am very reluctant to sit here as a local member and listen to the rhetoric from that side and think that I could support a judicial inquiry into this—because this is the bill that you're going to try and put to us, and then this is the thing you're going to try and roll out in our own media to say that we haven't done it. The reason for that—

Mr Burke interjecting—

A good political game, I get it. But the reason for that is that the one thing that people must have at the moment is a confidence that the government has got this under control, that the COAG is working, that the Murray-Darling Basin Plan allows investment in agriculture and has a cap on water and that the water is not going to all be taken to downstream users in South Australia. So it disappoints me that many of your speakers on this debate are only South Australians.

There must be some more things done on the water market, which I think need to be addressed. We do need to remove speculators out of the water market. You must have a legitimate reason. In my mind, if you want to buy water, you must have a legitimate use for it. I think you should have to nominate an extraction point for when you purchase temporary water. I think that, at the heart of the basin, we should have the Murray-Darling Basin Authority sitting in Wentworth, where the Murray and Darling join, so that irrigators stand next to river operators while they watch their children play sport.

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