Marion Scrymgour (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to stand here and speak on the Nature Repair Market (Consequential Amendment) Bill 2023, and I applaud the Minister for the Environment and Water. This has been a major win for the Australian Labor Party. Whilst we hear the Greens and others take credit for the water trigger, a water trigger for non-conventional gas can be delivered only by a Labor government. I thank the minister for the environment and the cabinet. I was just thinking back to my maiden speech, where I talked about how mining is a big contributor in the Northern Territory. We had the large mines in the seventies. Anyone who knows the landscape of the Northern Territory knows it's not about saying that we don't need mining. But it is about saying we need strong environmental laws. That is what is important here. I know that firsthand from talking to Aboriginal people and to other communities in the Northern Territory, because it's not just Aboriginal people; there are pastoralists, there are people living on small outstations, and everyone as a collective needed to be spoken to in relation to the non-conventional gas or fracking that was being proposed in the Northern Territory.

There were a number of concerns coming from a lot of the Aboriginal groups, but there was one thing that was uniting all of the Aboriginal groups, and that was water. The minister has listened. The government has certainly listened. I, too, have spoken to many of the groups in my electorate, and they said very clearly that they wanted the delivery of a water trigger.

This has been a Labor government that has delivered on this—not the Greens, not the crossbench. We've needed that support, and I thank the Greens for their support. I also thank the member for Mackellar, because I know that there were conversations, and I did have some conversations with the member for Mackellar when various groups came down to talk to members of the crossbench and our government about these issues, particularly in relation to water. It would pay for some of those members not just to stand in this place but also to come out and have a look at what needs to be done in these communities.

One thing we can't do is lock up our communities. If anyone has read the Pepper review in the Northern Territory, they'll know it isn't about locking up the Territory. There were two critical recommendations that were in the purview of the Commonwealth government. The former government ignored those two recommendations. The former Chief Minister of the Northern Territory put a moratorium on that report until such time as we could work through and understand fully what the Pepper review entailed. It is pleasing to be part of a government who has been strong enough, courageous enough, to take the water trigger and put it in the Nature Repair Bill. I want to thank the minister's staff, who have worked very closely with me and with my office to have a look at how we can proceed with this. This is important for the Northern Territory. This is important for water resources into the future. But it's not about locking the Northern Territory up away from projects. There's a lot of mining activity, like critical minerals, that needs to happen and that we still need to proceed with, but this will go a long way.

I was sitting here before I stood up thinking in particular about a lot of my constituents in Elliott—many of them on renal dialysis—who have been waiting for this to happen. I'm hoping that, when I go back up there, I'll do a trip to Tennant Creek, Elliott, Katherine, Mataranka, Jilkminggan and all of those communities, not just those feeding into the Roper River but all of the other parts. The artesian basin, which people might talk about in Queensland, does come through Central Australia. (Time expired)

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