Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Makin for his question and for his support for the restoring our rivers bill, which is such an important opportunity for this parliament to finally deliver on the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. Of course, those opposite say that they also support the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, but, in their close to a decade in government, they did everything they could to stymie and undermine the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. In fact, more than 80 per cent of all water that has been recovered towards the plan has been recovered when Labor has been in government—just 16 per cent under those opposite. Of the target of 450 gigalitres of additional environmental water, those opposite achieved just two. In fact, what they did was ignore more than 10 warnings from the Murray-Darling Basin Authority—

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