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

I move:

That the amendments be agreed to.

In doing so, I want to say to this place that, as of today, the Murray-Darling Basin Plan is officially back on track. At the election, Labor made a promise to deliver the Murray-Darling Basin Plan in full. We promised to rescue the plan after a decade of sabotage, and today we are writing that promise into law. This is an historic day for Australia's largest river system, and it's a bright day for the future of our basin communities. It's a massive day for the environment of Australia and one of the biggest things that any Australian government has done for nature—certainly this decade.

The Murray-Darling basin produces 40 per cent of Australia's agricultural output, it supplies three million people with their drinking water and it sustains over a million square kilometres of our inland environment. By passing this legislation today, we are voting to keep these rivers healthy. We're making sure that our water is shared sensibly between very different and vital uses: between farmers, industry, communities and the environment.

Like so much else they touched, the Liberals and Nationals left this plan in a hopeless mess. We made good progress in the early years of this plan and achieved a lot, but that progress, under those opposite, just stopped. The Basin Plan was meant to be delivered next year, but, at the pace the Liberals and Nationals were going, the plan would have been delivered sometime around the year 4000. Of the 450 gigalitres of additional environmental water in the plan, they delivered just two in nine years. Of the 10 reports they received telling them that the plan was off track, they ignored those warnings every single time.

The truth is that they never intended to deliver the plan, and they misled Australian communities about that.

This bill gets the plan back on track, so we can finally deliver on our water recovery targets and protect our rivers. This bill offers more time to deliver the remaining water; more options to deliver that water—including on-farm and off-farm efficiency projects and, of course, voluntary water purchase; more funding to deliver the water and to support communities where voluntary water buybacks might have flow-on impacts; and more accountability for Murray-Darling Basin governance, including our own government, on delivering the remaining water on time.

I thank members of parliament who worked constructively to pass this legislation. To my colleagues in the Labor Party, particular my colleagues from South Australia: I acknowledge your passion and your advocacy. I thank crossbench members both in this place and in the other place for the way they approached the negotiations on this bill in such good faith. I was very happy to work with you to address your concerns and to strengthen the bill where we could agree.

We know that water will always involve difficult conversations in Australia but we can't forget why we designed the Murray-Darling Basin Plan in the first place. If we didn't act now to revive this plan, if we continued with the Liberals' and the Nationals' policy of sabotaging the plan, we would have seen our basin towns unprepared for drought. We would have seen our food and fibre production become increasingly insecure, our native animals facing the threat of extinction and our river systems, our ecosystems, risking environmental collapse. With the next drought just around the corner, we have to make sure there's enough water to go around. We don't want communities to wake up one day to dry riverbeds and dead animals and realise that their parliament could have done something to stop it and chose not to. That's why this plan is so important, that's why this legislation is so vital and that's why Labor refused to back down—because we know how critical this is.

I thank everyone who worked on this bill, I thank those who voted for it and I commend— (Time expired)

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