Steve Georganas (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

What a shambles, what a debacle and what a mess we witnessed today in this chamber and last night in the Senate! What we saw was disunity and distrust between the Nationals and the Liberals, where they want to wreak havoc on our Murray-Darling Basin Plan. Tomorrow, in his reshuffle, the Prime Minister should strip the Nationals of absolutely any water responsibility if he is serious about delivering the Murray-Darling plan. If he doesn't do that, he will show that he's not serious about it and he will also show that he doesn't care about South Australia, where we've worked so hard to make sure that we did all that we could through the state government and up here when we were in government to make sure that the Murray-Darling plan was to deliver 450 gigalitres to the river.

Deputy Speaker, as you know, the River Murray ends in South Australia. We cop the brunt of it. When there's a drought further up we see the water flows diminish. We're the ones that have had to walk across the lakes at Goolwa without any water in them, and we saw the dead fish that lay there a few years ago when we had the drought. This government has to be serious about delivering the Murray-Darling plan. We heard some outlandish amendments today saying that we don't need water flows because of rising sea levels that will fill up the lower lakes. How absolutely ridiculous! (Time expired)

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