Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Women) Share this | Hansard source

The minister and the Prime Minister know exactly what they are doing, for base political gain, because they have banded together with the Greens to take more water out of communities that I represent—out of Griffith, Leeton, Deniliquin, Finley, Barham, Moulamein, Balranald and Wentworth. Do those places mean anything? They're just places on a map. They mean nothing to you, Minister. Transitional funding is your code for: 'We don't care if we shut down your town.' It's just such a nail in the coffin to single-handedly trade off the lives and livelihoods of the farmers that we represent and to not even to have the courage to look them in the eye and tell them what you had planned: buybacks, the simplest, laziest form of water recovery, with the biggest impact on regional communities. The regional communities I represent will not forget this. We will not forget this betrayal. I don't think every Australian will agree with what you have done.

I think Australians in the cities will wonder why a government has used billions of taxpayers' dollars to try to take water away from farming with no positive result at all. Every single Australian will tune into this. Australians in Western Australia and Australians in Far North Queensland will wonder why you have done this and wonder what the point was. If it means what you say it means, tell us how much it will cost. But the minister couldn't say how much it would cost and how many billions of dollars would be allocated to this buyback.

I know why. I know that it is a sham that you will try to do socioeconomic measures, that you will try to do infrastructure and that you will try to work with communities. I know it's a sham, because I know this government too well. What you will do is get money out of your budget process and lazily go into the basin and buy water, just so you can say you've delivered on a political promise. That's the only reason that the minister cannot say how many billions of dollars taxpayers will pay for something that achieves nothing, that takes the country backwards, that takes every regional economy in the basin backwards and that adds to the cost of fresh food and groceries in our country. The government refuses to recognise that Australia is also the Murray-Darling Basin and that Australians care about food, about farming, about the people who live in these communities and about the people who love these communities. We love our communities. It's so sad that this Labor government does not.

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