Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The original question was that this bill be now read a second time. To this the honourable member for Grayndler has moved as an amendment that all words after ‘That’ be omitted with a view to substituting other words. The question now is that the words proposed to be omitted stand part of the question.

Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Trade and Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before question time, I had commenced my contribution to the second reading debate on the Water Bill 2007 and the Water (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2007 and was making the point that Labor has had not only a commitment to developing initiatives on water but also a strong objective. Mr Deputy Speaker Causley, you were a minister in attendance at some of the ministerial council meetings in which we had these discussions. Our commitment to bipartisanship, working with the states and securing agreement cannot be put in question. The contrast I was making was about the way in which this government has botched the negotiations on this water initiative.

Not only has the government failed to build on the framework that Labor put in place when it was in government, by way of both initiative and process, but it did not build on any of that legacy at all. In fact, if you look at the history of this government, you will see that until 2004—that is eight years of government—no new funding was made available, through this government or its budgets, for water. In fact, in the budget in 2003, the government cut funding to the water initiatives.

We heard in question time today the joke by the Treasurer, who claimed that this was the greatest environmental government in the history of the country. How out of touch and arrogant is it? If you simply look at the water initiatives, you see that we have a government presiding over the worst drought in recorded history and it actually cut funding in terms of water. The only time it made a commitment to new funding, short of this latest initiative that we are debating, was just before the introduction of the water fund. This was part of the Prime Minister’s ‘drunken sailor spree’—$60 billion spent in total by the government to get itself re-elected. The problem with the $2 billion Australian water fund is that it has not been spent.

So here we have a promise being made just before an election to get themselves into the frame of looking active, yet the funding has not been committed. Worse, not a single drop of environmental flow has gone back into the Murray, even though, at the same time as making that $2 billion commitment, they committed to putting 500 gigalitres back into the Murray. We say that the 500 gigalitres was deficient. We argued, and actually proposed, that it be 1,500 gigalitres. That was our policy. Not only did the government commit to merely going a third of the way; in the three years since, not one drop of water has gone into the Murray as a result of that commitment.

Here we are, three years down the track, with another election pending, and we have another commitment. But it is not $2 billion this time; it is $10 billion. It is five times as much—but, as we know, with all the wriggle room in the world by which the government, if it is re-elected, can get out of making that spend. We have seen the Premier of New South Wales complaining that they have been dudded on the infrastructure fund. We know of the problems in Victoria. We know of the difficulties that South Australia had in terms of whether there would be an independent body to make decisions about where the environmental flows were.

We have circumstances in which, for this great initiative that we all agree needs addressing—water—money is not the problem anymore. There was $2 billion three years ago that was not spent, and we now have $10 billion. Will it ever be spent, even if this government is re-elected? The problem is not the money. The problem is inaction followed by ineptitude in terms of implementing the strategy.

Let me go through the flawed process that leads us to this legislation that we are debating today. In November last year, the Prime Minister called a meeting of the premiers to get agreement around water. As we understand it, significant progress was made in that matter. Then, out of the blue, the day before Australia Day, the Prime Minister announced his $10 billion water initiative. No costings were released. There was a one-page document demonstrating that the cost was going to be $10 billion over 10 years. There was no time line as to when the money was going to be spent over those 10 years. We subsequently found out that Treasury had been excluded from the costings, and we now know the revelations from the departmental head, the Secretary of Treasury, and his concerns about this government’s fiscal profligacy. And there was no consultation with the stakeholders.

That is not the way to run a business of cooperation within a federation. Sure, it is important to have leadership and to show leadership—and the Commonwealth must show that leadership—but you also have to be able to take the states with you. It is not sufficient to take the lead. You have to take the states and the stakeholders with you. We did it. We showed it could be done. Even when we had to deal with Liberal governments, we showed it could be done. This government has demonstrated its inability to achieve that.

Then there is the process by which this legislation is being considered—one day’s debate. We had not seen the legislation until last week. There are 240 pages of legislation and 60 pages of explanatory memorandum. I said before that we support this bill as far as it goes, but there is still a long way to go. The issues that we say still need to be addressed are contained essentially in the second reading amendment moved by the member for Grayndler. Firstly, there has to be a truly cooperative approach with state governments, just as Labor was able to manage when it was in office. Secondly, there has to be full implementation of the government’s 2004 water initiatives. Where is that money? Why has it not been spent? Why aren’t the flows going into the Murray? That is a very important question when it comes to accountability. We have to fix the overallocation of water licences. We have to establish a coherent set of rules to ensure the problem of overallocation never recurs. Then we have to see the development of economic instruments to address the fact that water has been overallocated, undervalued and misdirected.

In addition, we need proper consultation with the key stakeholders. I know how important it is to involve the stakeholders and the local catchment management groups. When I was Minister for Primary Industries and Energy I saw this as the vital driving force by which we could implement initiatives that stacked up. Where the Commonwealth had to put the infrastructure spend in, but not the totality of it, it had to forge a partnership with state governments, local governments and the local stakeholders. It had to come to grips with issues of properly pricing water but doing it in consultation. We introduced a raft of initiatives. One initiative that comes to mind is the highlands irrigation project on the Murray in the Riverland area. We sat down with the stakeholders and implemented an important initiative for water-saving and proper pricing but with little cost to the stakeholder because of the efficiency of the infrastructure and the methods that we introduced. We did the same in Shepparton. In addition, we funded the significant covering and lining of open channels from which much evaporation happens—in fact, up to 90 per cent in certain parts of the country.

These important practical infrastructure initiatives will only happen if they are driven by the Commonwealth, but not where they are expected to be paid for by the Commonwealth alone. That is what true partnership is, and it has to involve the stakeholders. There has to be proper consultation and, quite frankly, it is only Labor which is truly committed to that approach. We are the ones who established Landcare and we are the ones who have constantly supported the catchment management groups. We do not see any of that involvement in the government’s latest initiative.

Sufficient water has to be returned to the rivers in the Murray-Darling Basin. We have talked about how inadequate this government’s actions have been in that regard. Finally, there have to be measures to ensure that industrial and urban water users adapt to maximise water efficiency. In this regard Labor have already put forward a significant policy whereby we would allocate money to the infrastructure to work with the stakeholders. There is also a $10,000 loan scheme to help households implement, in their own places, water-saving and efficiency measures.

This bill is supported. It does not go far enough. If we are to truly solve this problem we have to complete the unfinished business that Labor began. Labor is the only party committed to this. It should be given the opportunity to complete the job. (Time expired)

Patrick Secker (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As always, I found the speech by the member for Hotham quite interesting. His speeches are a bit like those big Texas longhorn bulls which you see in the westerns. They have a point here and a point there but there is always a lot of bull in between. I found it very interesting that the member for Hotham came back to Labor’s promise at the last election, in 2004, to return 1,500 gigalitres of water to the environment. Unfortunately, the problem with Labor’s policy is that they did not actually say how they were going to save that water. They did not have the commitment—the money commitment that we are making here—to ensure they could save it.

To put it into perspective, 1,500 gigalitres is twice the amount that South Australia uses out of the Murray River every year—twice as much as we use every year for all our irrigation in the Riverland, the lower Murray, the Lakes area, Barossa and Clare, and of course Adelaide’s water supply. We use about 750 gigalitres per year, a little bit less now because of the water restrictions that have been put in. Labor promised to commit twice that amount without telling us where the savings were coming from. If we had delivered 1,500 gigalitres every year for the last three years, I can tell you that the Murray River in South Australia would be awfully dry. It would be a creek bed of ponds here and there. There would not be the water that exists in the Murray River had we committed 1,500 gigalitres to the environment without being shown how it was going to be saved. It would have absolutely devastated the communities in my electorate.

I have the honour to represent all of the Murray River in South Australia. It is a great river. I have been travelling on it for a week virtually every year for the last 30 years. It is my pilgrimage that I really enjoy. Unfortunately, this year I have not been able to do so.

We committed 500 gigalitres three years ago. In fact, I was part of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry that looked into this very problem. When we got evidence from the head of the Murray-Darling commission, he told us that probably the best that they could physically manage would be 500 gigalitres to start off with. So we took the expert advice—all the things that Labor has been calling for and the states have been calling for. We took that expert advice because we believed that it was very sensible to start off with the 500 gigalitres. Now, my understanding is that the states have committed about half that through various savings. Unfortunately, the drought—which I have to say no government produces, welcomes or generates—has meant that that water has not been returned to the river yet. It will, when the flows come again, but it cannot be done when there is no water in the river to do so.

But I think it is worth pointing out that under the previous Hawke-Keating government not one drop of water was returned to the environment or to the Murray River. Not one drop. This is the record of the Labor Party in Australia. They talk big and do nothing. We have had Labor state governments all around Australia—and previous to that we had a few coalition governments of various persuasions—and it has certainly been a big issue in South Australia. We had bipartisan support, but unfortunately none of that was delivered under Labor. Not one drop was returned under Labor.

On the area that the member for Hotham was talking about—and I hope he has not got it wrong and thought about lowlands, because there is an area in the Riverland called lowlands—there was the Loxton rehabilitation scheme where under our government we changed those open channels into pipes in my electorate in the Riverland of South Australia. I think the saving there was something like 42 gigalitres, which every year used to either evaporate in the open channels or seep. The member for Hotham was right that up to 90 per cent savings can occur. I think the figure is right that we have 26,000 kilometres of open channels in New South Wales alone. Just imagine the savings we could grab there for the Murray River.

The $10 billion plan is made up of three areas. The first area is the $6 billion that we will put into better infrastructure, taking those open channels and putting in the pipes so we do not lose water from evaporation or seepage. If you look at a figure of $2,000 per gigalitre saved—and I have tried my best to find a benchmark figure—and you spend $6 billion, that means that we will save 3,000 gigalitres. That is four times what South Australia uses each year. We are saving 3,000 gigalitres. Half of that will be returned to farmers because of their input. This is the cooperative way that we are dealing with it—the cooperative way that the member for Hotham suggested was not happening.

I point out that it is pretty hard to cooperate with a rogue state like Victoria which has been time wasting for the last six months. Since the time that we announced the position, we have still not reached a cooperative position with Victoria—on the basis that they want to look after their own dungheap. I think that they are probably a bit more concerned about the income of the Victorian Labor government. So that has been a problem. This would have been happening much earlier if Victoria had cooperated like Queensland has, like New South Wales has, like the ACT has, and like my home state, South Australia, has. But Victoria has not been cooperating, and I am not sure how you are supposed to deal with that sort of rogue state in any other way than the way we have.

So, with the 3,000 gigalitres saved and with 1,500 returned to further production in agriculture, a total of 1,500 gigalitres is saved. Now let us come to the $3 billion that is being used to buy back where there have been overallocations—by state governments, I might add, not by the federal government—and I think that will be spent largely in New South Wales. At that price of $2,000 a gigalitre saved, that is a further 1,500 gigalitres saved. But guess what? Exactly the same amount will be used for production, so we are not affecting the producers of Australia. We are going to have in total the same amount of production from irrigation, but we are going to save 3,000 gigalitres every year forever and ever—four times what we use in South Australia each year alone. So that is a huge saving for the Murray River.

If you look at governments over the last 70 or 80 years, you will see that they have been reasonably successful in the way that they have managed the Murray River. I think it would be very hard to do the things that we did in the thirties, for example, when we put in the lock system. If we did not have the lock system, you could walk across a dry creek bed right now in Berri, South Australia. I have seen pre-lock pictures. If we had not put in lock No. 3, Lake Bonney would not be the great lake that it is.

As governments, over the years we have made some good decisions. Unfortunately, I think, they would be much harder to do now because of the environmental lobby we have got in Australia. But we have done some very good things. We have put the barrages down at the bottom of the lower lakes, which has ensured that the saltiness does not creep back up into the Murray River. It is with great pleasure that I am supporting the Water Bill 2007, because we are going to return 3,000 gigalitres extra into the river. It is going to be a long-term project—this is long-term thinking. This is 10 years of thought and it would not surprise me if we spend further into the future. Compare that with Labor; they did not commit a cent to restoring water to the Murray River when they were last in government. Let us get this into perspective. This government has acted. We are taking the responsibilities away from the states—they are the ones that have caused the problems. We are going to put money into fixing up this system because it is so important to the Murray-Darling Basin, which of course does not recognise state boundaries. I am very pleased to support what we are doing here.

My large electorate of Barker encompasses South Australia’s end of the Murray River. Wind your way from Swan Reach, halfway from the border, all the way down to the Coorong in the south, and along the way you will pass the Riverland—home to some of Australia’s best export oranges—and the Murraylands, where the trademark black and white holsteins dot the productive dairy lands. I am especially pleased that the South Australian end of the basin produces some of the best—if not the best—wine in the world. In a normal year, 25 per cent of Australia’s production comes from the Riverland, which the member for Hotham formerly spoke of. South Australia’s River Murray producers are hard workers. Dairy farmers along the lower swamps have spent thousands of dollars—money that was matched by this government and the South Australian government—to completely rehabilitate their swamps. They undertook extensive laser levelling works so that the efficiency of their irrigation was world standard. They upgraded the channels and the infrastructure that supplies water to the farms. This has been no mean feat. The sheer cost and expense of the project saw too many dairy farmers forced from the land. However, for the most part they have stuck through, all in the name of improving environmental and water efficiency on their farms.

Whether they are in the dairy, viticulture or horticulture industry, or any other for that matter, growers along the river in South Australia understand the vital importance of reducing water use in any way possible. This is a message that is being increasingly understood, accepted and acted upon. I am quite happy to say—and boast—that the irrigators in South Australia are leading the way with the world’s best technology in improving irrigation efficiencies. Given that South Australian farmers are at the end of the line, they could use and abuse the system and have no consideration for what is returned to the river from their farms, and they could take whatever they can. But they do not. The water that is piped from the River Murray in, say, New South Wales is the same water that is piped in South Australia and in Victoria. Just because the basin covers part of my great state does not mean that we pretend for a second that we have any more rights to it than any of the other states it passes through. Boundaries are insignificant. We are talking about one system. There is one basin and there is one River Murray regardless of how many state borders that system may cross. It seems obvious then that a holistic approach to managing the system is the best method. To do otherwise would be madness.

I wish to take this opportunity to publicly voice my utter disgust at the appallingly selfish attitude of the Victorian Labor government towards this issue. This government has spent tireless hours negotiating with the states and territories to achieve a referral of powers to better manage the Murray-Darling Basin as one single entity. Despite the support of water ministers from all other states, Victoria was too arrogant to look at the bigger picture beyond its state border for the greater good of Australia. Victoria’s argument for a special deal undermines the widely accepted idea that a basin-wide approach is the best method for managing Australia’s most precious resource. It underscores the very reason for the plan in the first place. We cannot have the states reserving their right to have the final say and impacting on everyone else at their whim.

Despite the stubborn attempts of the Victorian Labor government, the Water Bill 2007 now sits before us, making a historic step forward in the management of Australia’s water resources to ensure environmental health and certainty for irrigators. It implements the fundamental aspects of the $10 billion National Plan for Water Security that was introduced by the Prime Minister in January. This bill is the most significant water reform in over 100 years. This government will address the overallocation and overuse of water from the Murray-Darling Basin by state governments. It will improve water use efficiency and establish clear pathways to return all water sources to sustainable levels of extraction.

For years state governments have overdrawn and put their growers before those of other states. As the member for Barker, I know too well the effect that this has had at the end of the line in South Australia. Regular flushing of the Murray’s mouth has occurred at great expense. Wetlands dried out and many are now closed off in order to keep as much water in the Murray as possible. A weir has been planned for Wellington. I have spoken about that before in this House. I think it is the craziest idea I have ever come across in my nearly nine years in parliament. Something had to be done at a national level and I commend this government for taking action. The Water Bill 2007 enables water resources in the basin to be managed in the national interest optimising environmental, economic and social outcomes. It relies on the Commonwealth’s constitutional powers, with the original intention being that the bill would be reliant on referrals of power from all basin states so as to best address the broadest range of issues. However, agreement obviously could not be reached, so under this bill we will not have jurisdiction over river operations or flow interception activities as we do not have constitutional authority to legislate in this area. It is a shame we could not get Victoria’s cooperation.

Briefly, the Water Bill will: provide for a new cap on surface water and groundwater diversions; prohibit the compulsory acquisition of water entitlements; establish the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and a Basin Community Committee—the latter will include at least eight people who are or represent water users; set out how risks flowing from future reduced water allocations will be shared between the Commonwealth and the basin states; guarantee that the Commonwealth will honour state water plans for the life of those plans; establish a role for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to monitor and enforce water charge and market rules in the basin; and provide for the Bureau of Meteorology to collect up-to-date, accurate and comprehensive information on water use and availability that will be critical inputs to the basin plan.

The bill establishes an independent Murray-Darling Basin Authority. The authority will report to the Commonwealth Minister for the Environment and Water Resources and be made up of a full-time chair and four part-time members. Authority members will be required to have expertise in fields like water resource management, hydrology, freshwater ecology, resource economics, irrigated agriculture, public sector governance and financial management.

The bill requires the authority to prepare a basin plan for approval which will provide for a new, enforceable, sustainable and integrated cap on surface water and groundwater diversions to be developed as part of a basin-wide plan. This will be based on CSIRO modelling of future water availability, other social and economic studies and consultation with communities throughout the entire basin. The basin plan will also identify risks to water resources and strategies by which to manage them. Also, it will establish the requirements that the state water resource plan will have to comply with if it is to be accredited under the bill.

I stress that the basin plan will be prepared in full consultation with the states and their communities, unlike some other governments we heard about today and yesterday in the parliament. The basin plan will identify responsibilities for managing risks associated with reductions in water availability. This bill does not allow for favouritism or special deals, but it does provide for the future of the Murray River. (Time expired)

Bob McMullan (Fraser, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Federal/State Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support the second reading amendment moved by the shadow minister, the member for Grayndler. This is an issue with a very long history and the Water Bill 2007 represents yet another second-best step along a rather sad and very long road. After all, the colonial governments of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia met in Melbourne in 1863 to discuss a management plan for the Murray-Darling Basin—that was in 1863. There was no concrete agreement, just a conclusion that something should be done. After two major droughts, the River Murray Waters Agreement was signed in 1915. Then, as now, the catalyst for action was drought. The first meeting of the River Murray Commission was held in Melbourne in 1917. If you read the brief history of the Murray-Darling Basin Agreement on the Murray-Darling Basin Commission website, you will see that the Commonwealth and the states have been talking about the problem ever since. The states have been talking about it for nearly 150 years; the federal government and the states for at least 90 years.

In the 1980s it was recognised that, after more than 60 years, the River Murray Waters Agreement and the River Murray Commission were increasingly unable to meet the needs of the basin’s management and its growing resource and environmental problems. At that time important changes were taking place in water resources administration at both state and Commonwealth levels. Individual agencies within the separate states were finding themselves unable to tackle the developing problems of rising water salinity and land salinity, for example, for the very obvious reason that these issues, their management and any possible solution to them required actions which extended across state boundaries. Not surprisingly, we find that lots of reports were tabled during this period and many of them called for urgent action.

A new Murray-Darling Basin Agreement was signed in 1992 and the Murray-Darling Basin Act was passed in 1993. That was not an end to the matter; in fact, it was the catalyst for what was and should have been a serious beginning. No sooner had we begun than we stalled, because in 1994 another push for national water reform began. There are some very interesting contrasts between the way this water plan has been handled and that which was initiated in 1994. So long ago, it had the potential to achieve much, if not all, that this Water Bill is designed to do. In 1994 we had a historic, bipartisan, negotiated, agreed plan. It was led by the Keating Labor government and included the Fahey Liberal government in New South Wales, the Kennett government in Victoria, the Brown Liberal government in South Australia, the Goss Labor government in Queensland and the Follett Labor government here in the ACT. We found that governments across the political spectrum were able to cooperate, with nobody making unilateral announcements and demanding that everybody fell into line. There was leadership from the federal government, but it was leadership in pursuit of a cooperative agreement.

Contrast this cooperative approach with the current situation and the current rhetoric on federal-state relations, which from the Howard government’s perspective seems quite bizarrely to be predicated on the assumption that the Liberal Party will never win another state election. It is a bizarre set of circumstances—contrasting cooperative federalism and a centralising intention. For those who have a short-term view of history, it looks like a role reversal, with the Liberal coalition being the centralisers and the Labor opposition being for cooperative federalism. It is not about states’ rights. The only thing I heard the member for Barker say that I agreed with is that this is not about the rights of the states; it is about the outcomes for citizens of Australia. It is not about process; it is about results for people in Australia.

Look across the range of issues where federal-state relations are in conflict. It is not coincidental conflict; it is deliberate, planned confrontation for partisan political purposes by the Howard government—and I will come to that in a moment. We all know that the Howard government have been advised by Crosby Textor that one of the things they can do and hope to gain political benefit from is to pick fights with the states. That is what Crosby Textor has advised, and ever since that advice we have seen it being dutifully followed with initiative after initiative, confrontation after confrontation. We have, virtually, war declared on the states by the federal government—not about any grand alternative vision of the way the country should be governed but, rather, marginal seat by marginal seat, they go around the country trying to pick a fight with a state government here and a state government there in the hope that they might save a seat in this part of the country or that. It may be clever politics, but it is a hell of a way to run the country.

After all, there will be state and territory elections in 2008, 2009 and 2010. It is bizarre to believe that the strategy of the incumbent government is based on the assumption that they will not win any of them. I can say categorically that Labor’s strategy with regard to federal-state relations, as developed in opposition and as we intend to implement should we be successful at the election, does not rely upon the current coincidence of there being eight state and territory Labor governments. In personal terms that is a pleasure to me. I know those people and I enjoy working with them, but the whole structure is designed to be able to work irrespective of the political colour of the state governments.

The Council for the Australian Federation has been consciously set up by the states and territories to operate in a manner that will endure beyond the current coincidence of eight state and territory Labor governments, which is a temporary—from a Labor point of view very welcome—phenomenon. The Howard government’s position and their hostility to the states as a governing strategy can only operate on the assumption that they will never win another state election.

So we have a dramatic contrast. In 1994 we had a cooperative push for national water reform—Liberal and Labor state governments working with a federal Labor government. A report from the COAG working group on water resource policy had been commissioned in 1993, and this was presented to the 1994 meeting. That was 13 years ago. The report noted that, while progress was being made on reforming the water industry and minimising unsustainable natural resource use, there were other ongoing issues that needed to be addressed. The COAG communique from that meeting agreed that action needed to be taken to stop the widespread degradation of land and water systems and agreed that a package of measures was needed to address the economic, environmental and social implications of water reform. COAG endorsed a strategic framework that sounds remarkably like the framework that led to the Water Bill 2007: pricing reform based on the principles of consumption based pricing and full cost recovery; the reduction or elimination of cross-subsidies and at the very least the making of those subsidies transparent; a clarification of property rights; the allocation of water to the environment; the adoption of trading arrangements in water; and institutional reform and public consultation and participation.

That process across the political boundaries and across the federal and state boundaries was proceeding amicably until the Howard government came in and it stopped. For 13 years nothing has happened. The process was shut down until the eve of an election in which the Howard government’s advice from Crosby Textor is: ‘You need to be in conflict with the states. You cannot win the election on the merits of your propositions; you can only win by being seen to be battling the states.’ Crosby Textor’s advice makes that crystal clear. The advice says that the coalition needs to:

... emphasise that the Commonwealth is bailing out ineffective and inefficient states.

That is the political strategy. That is the advice from Crosby Textor and it is being followed to the letter.

So we had 13 years of no progress, and then suddenly there is a unilateral announcement demanding cooperation. Because of that unilateralism, because of that coercive federalism, because there was no prior discussion and because there was no attempt even to reach an agreement until after the announcement had been made, we have not got an agreement. We are falling back to another second-best solution. From the comments made by Ken Henry to Treasury staff in April this year, it is clear that this year’s decision with regard to the Murray-Darling Basin was purely a political exercise dreamt up by the Prime Minister in an attempt to restore his sagging political fortunes. The Prime Minister knew that global warming had become an issue and that, as Crosby Textor said, the environment issue was favouring the Labor opposition, so he decided on a diversionary tactic.

It is not that action was not needed; it is long overdue. The problem is that coercive and unilateral action is less likely to work than a cooperative model—and, once again, it is proving to be so. All history and the experience of other federations tell us that unilateral, coercive federalism is the least efficient way of getting good policy outcomes, and this is just another example. An announcement was made for maximum political effect, but it was made in a manner that virtually guarantees that agreement cannot be reached and will not be reached. There is no precedent by which agreement is reached after such unilateralism, and we will drift towards a second-best outcome. History will be the judge as to whether this is good politics. It is not for me to make a judgement about that. The voters will make a judgement about that soon enough. It may well be the case, but it is a hell of a way to run the country.

This is what Ken Henry said in a speech to his internal Treasury forum. He said:

The government, our ministers and other agencies are under no compulsion to rely on our advice. In respect of water, that point is all too obvious.

When talking about the coming election, he added:

At this time, there is a greater than usual risk of a development of policy proposals that are, frankly, bad.

The Labor opposition has consistently supported and supports now, and I support, the need for greater Commonwealth leadership in water policy—it has been needed for a long time, and better late than never—and the need for a water plan, which ensures healthy rivers and security for water users.

Unfortunately, this announcement in January was the first in a series of examples of world’s worst practice in the management of a federation. It undoubtedly flows from Crosby Textor’s advice—and they are very good pollsters; they may well be giving very good political advice—but, in effect, the advice has led to the Prime Minister giving up on governing and spending his time attacking the states. We found it reflected in question time when either the states or the opposition were responsible for every problem. We were responsible for inflation and they even found that we were responsible for the drought in south-east Queensland. We have a very powerful Leader of the Opposition! I think he is a very capable man, but to have done that was beyond my estimation of his capacities.

The PM is playing the blame game on a larger scale and with more mind-defying leaps of logic than we have seen hitherto. The government’s advice shows how cynical and short term it has become. We are looking at policy being made on the run, which is inevitably bad policy. We have the extraordinary situation where the Australian, not renowned as a great pro-Labor journal, in a recent editorial on these issues to do with federal-state relations and the character of the interventions of the federal government, stated:

But if we had to give Mr Howard a plain-English report card on his performance it would be A for politics and E for policy.

It further stated:

... there is nothing in the conservative pantheon ... that Mr Howard won’t ditch in his quest for electoral success.

It went on to state:

The need for the commonwealth and the states to reduce bureaucratic overlap is urgent.

I am not quoting it all. If anyone wants to go back and look at it, they will find that I am quoting it in a manner that is consistent with the intention of the editorial. I do not think I am twisting its meaning, but it is too long for me to read it all. The editorial further stated:

Year after year [Mr Howard] and the premiers have used the Council of Australian Governments as an occasion for backslapping and photo opportunities while everyone turned a blind eye to the need for far-reaching reform.

It stated:

Mr Howard has had 11 years to address these matters and has little if anything to show for it. His ad hoc interventions in the Murray-Darling ... are worthy of support but they bear all the hallmarks of policy made on the run and are not a framework for reform.

…       …            …

The Australian believes that streamlining the operations of state and federal governments is a critical economic imperative if Australia is to compete in a globalised economy.

‘A for politics, E for policy’—I think that sums up exactly what is going on in federal-state relations at the moment.

I am sure we could all dream up our favourite list of marginal seat pork barrels. I think, with the exception of the member for Herbert, all of us in the chamber at the moment need to apologise to our voters for not making our seats marginal enough so that they could have someone fly over, open the floodgates and allow the dollars to fall out. I do not really apologise; I am very pleased to have a big majority. I have worked very hard to get it. But I sort of feel guilty, otherwise they would be pork-barrelling my electorate.

They are putting one of the Australian technical colleges in my electorate, but they are pretending it is in Queanbeyan. It has a plaque in Queanbeyan; it has a college in my electorate. They have announced that it is in Eden-Monaro, but actually all the students and the buildings are in my electorate, which is not a marginal seat and so they announced it is going to be in Eden-Monaro. I am sure they will have a little office with a plaque on the door saying, ‘This is where the Australian technical college is,’ but if you want to study you have to get in your car and drive to my electorate. That is as close as I am going to get to any of this pork-barrelling. But, if you are in a marginal seat, you would be getting letters from the government asking you to send in requests. ‘Please get on the list. There is an airplane flying over with a hold full of money and the Prime Minister has his hand on the lever. He can open it and it will come out in an electorate near you.’ We will all be waiting with increasing interest for the next round of desperate announcements.

Last week the WA Premier, Alan Carpenter, said:

What is happening now is the complete destruction of the relationship between the federal government and state governments. He—

Mr Howard—

is addicted to the office and all that goes with it, and he’s demonstrating the classic failure of people who get into that position. He’s putting his own interest first, his own interest ahead of the national interest and he’s prepared to say and do anything to stay in government.

The problem, broadly, with regard to federal-state relations is that it is going to have long-term, adverse consequences for the governance of the country if it is allowed to continue. It is in the hands of the electors. We live in a democracy. They may choose for it to continue. If they do, we will all have to accept that decision. That is what happens in a democracy, but it will be a cause for great regret, long term, for the governance of the country.

With regard to this particular matter and the water, the problem here is that we are heading for a second-best solution on water. With $10 billion on the table, we should have been able to obtain a much better result. A cooperative approach could have led to an agreement, but a unilateral announcement demanding compliance was always headed for disaster. I suspect that the Prime Minister wanted confrontation, because agreement would not have got him the conflict he needed. Irrespective of that, we are, sadly, heading for a second-best solution in an area where the best solution was possible. I support the second reading amendment moved by my colleague the member for Grayndler.

Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will not be supporting the Water Bill 2007 or the Water (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2007 and I would like to spend the next 20 minutes outlining why. On 7 February 2007, I put out a press release saying that I endorsed the proposed water plan that the Prime Minister put out. I was hopeful at the time that it was more about legitimate policy than politics. In the last few months, in terms of the outcome—or the ‘nonoutcome’—of the original proposal and now the referral-of-powers outcome that has produced this piece of legislation, I think we are seeing quite clearly that this is not about policy at all; it is about politics.

We just listened for 20 minutes to the member for Gwydir and I think we can understand why the Prime Minister removed water arrangements from the National Party and gave them to the Liberal Party to try and see through this process. But I do not think the current Minister for the Environment and Water Resources has seen it through at all. In fact, I think he has fallen prey to the Prime Minister’s pathway of trying to create some sort of wedge in relation to the Labor Party.

I do not think the Labor Party comes out of this looking good at all either. I have constantly heard today that this is the second-best option and I would agree with that. But if it is the second-best option, why are they supporting it? The Labor Party knows full well that this particular bill bears no resemblance at all to the original water security concept that the Prime Minister had. I do not think any of us in this place would agree that the way in which water policy was put in place over the years and the state boundary issues et cetera did not need to be addressed.

However, if any member whose electorate has water interests were to support this piece of legislation, with its motivation, with the good motherhood statement it contains that can be backed up by very little policy substance, with an associated intergovernmental agreement arrangement with the states that no-one has even sighted and with the way it addresses the issues at present—something like 26 amendments were introduced by the government today—I think they would be negligent to their electorate. For that reason, I will not support this bill and quite possibly I will be the only person in this place who will not support it.

There is the intergovernmental agreement. Victoria has not agreed to it and debate is occurring at the New South Wales level—I know that discussions are happening at the moment in Sydney—about whether it will come in, due to the rules being changed regarding who will meet the compensation arrangements. The bill’s clause 255, which applies to compulsory acquisition, can be removed at the stroke of a pen. The National Farmers Federation are of the opinion that clause 255 will suddenly remove some of the obstacles that they believe are within the general concept; but, particularly if there is no IGA in place, how will those things be driven?

This is a great piece of Labor Party legislation. This is the sort of thing that water users would have thought the Labor Party, with a centralist attitude, would have delivered in trying to gain control of a resource. In my view, the way in which this has been perpetrated—the lack of consultation there has been with stakeholders; the lack of consultation there was at the start with Treasury officials and others, such as members of cabinet; the way it was put together on a piece of paper; and the documents that were transferred from the Prime Minister to the premiers for consultation purposes—has been atrocious. I have seen those documents. The way they were presented was an absolute disgrace. It was as though it all happened within half an hour and someone scribbled something that said: ‘We’ve got to do something about the Murray-Darling because Rudd just did something about climate change. We’ve got to divert this argument to where we can gain something. So let’s have a water bill. Let’s do something with the Murray-Darling. Let’s blame the states.’

Let us blame the states. In 1994, a COAG process was put in place. The member for Gwydir spoke about this earlier; the minister and many others have spoken about it also. That process allowed for reform, one part of which was water reform. That process was through the Council of Australian Governments, with the states coming together and agreeing on reform for major areas, water being one of them. So we had that process to start with. What was the binding process with that? Why did they come together? The member for Gwydir talked about property rights being recognised. In 1994, it was put in place that two things essentially would happen—other things would also happen—so that competition payments would not flow to the states unless the states recognised a number of conditions. The two major conditions were: firstly, a market would be established; and, secondly, property rights would be recognised. Because of the nation’s constitutional problems, the property rights would have to be recognised at a state level. The Commonwealth, through its control of the competition policy payments, had the whip hand. The deal that was done was that the money would not flow unless the states recognised their responsibilities under the deal or the arrangement; so the Prime Minister turned around a few months ago and said, ‘The states have been incompetent; we need to move in and take this thing over and get it right.’

Let us look at what the Commonwealth actually did over that period. I do not know how many intergovernmental agreements, bilateral arrangements and catchment management blueprints there have been—almost one a year. There is the National Water Initiative; the member for Gwydir was upset that the minister had forgotten that it had even happened. Myriad arrangements were put in place under the auspices of those guarantees. Hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, have been transferred from the Commonwealth to the states, when the states have not complied with the original arrangement. The Member for Parkes knows about all this.

John Cobb (Parkes, National Party, Assistant Minister for the Environment and Water Resources ) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wasn’t here.

Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You weren’t here, so that absolves you. Good, I am pleased about that. The arrangements that were put in place were that the Commonwealth would not transfer money unless property rights were recognised. Clause 77, removal and entitlements, and clause 255 in this piece of legislation—references back to the NWI and a whole range of other things—still relate to all that nonsense. A water quality and salinity intergovernmental agreement and numerous bilaterals were put in place. Our estimate is that the Commonwealth government has had at its disposal—or disposed of—up to $8 billion since 1996 in the name of reform, of which water has been one part. Through the Natural Heritage Trust and the whole gamut, go back and add up the money that essentially they have transferred to the states for noncompliance with the original arrangements. Now we have the circumstance where the Commonwealth has turned around and said, ‘The states have been incompetent; we’re going to have to take it off them—and here’s another 10 to bring in some of the bigger irrigators to drink from the cake tin.’ That is the major reason that I am not supporting this particular piece of legislation.

The National Farmers Federation once again, as they did on Telstra, signed off on something in the belief that there was a document that suggested that there were guarantees of broadband and telephone services for country people. Barnaby Joyce and Peter Corish were delighted with the letter that the minister had written. The letter has never been sighted. It was to be enshrined in legislation, but it has never been seen. Now we have this nonsense that the minister might regulate against Telstra for the provision of services to country people. The horse bolted; the gate was left open. I listened to Laurie Arthur giving evidence the other day to the Senate Standing Committee on the Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. I stayed back for part of that Senate inquiry. He was pushed by some of the senators. Essentially the NFF agrees with the bill.

Then there is a debate about what is in the IGA. What puts the teeth in this legislation? How do you drive it? ‘Oh, that will be worked out with the states.’ What is different? Is the $10 billion going to be used this time to induce the states to concur with a whole range of other things? Is the commission—because it becomes an authority—going have any real authority for this? Why would the National Farmers Federation sign off on something when they have only seen half the paperwork? Why would you trust the Labor Party with something like this, open-ended as it is? Clause 255 on compulsory acquisition is gone with just one amendment. We heard the member for Parkes, the Assistant Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, say, ‘That won’t happen; we would never do that.’ But you are putting in place legislation that will allow it. You might not do it. You might tell people that you will not do it, but you told people you would not sell Telstra and you told people that there were guarantees of equity of access to broadband and telephone services. But those things are forgotten. And he said, ‘I wasn’t here.’

What happens in five years time? A lot of this does not come into play until 2015. There is a gap between September 2014 and January 2015 when anything can happen. That has not been closed up. None of us will probably be here then, but we are putting in place some sort of overarching arrangement that is based on motherhood that says state boundaries are nasty things in terms of natural resource management. Of course they are, but this is not the way to achieve the outcome. The way to achieve the outcome is to stop, review your motivation, bring the people into the tent and get the thing organised. It was a failure from the start. Treasury, the Murray-Darling Basin Commission and the former member for New England, who is the chair of it, had no idea what the Prime Minister said. Surely, something as important as this major water course through four states would have compelled someone with legitimate motives to ask the commission—the people who have been overseeing these things and who know where the savings are—‘What do you think we should do?’ But we have had none of that. I think it is an appalling process, and we have seen variations of the same theme with hospitals, Aboriginal children and a whole range of other things in recent weeks. I do not think that is good policy. It might be funny politics and it might look good. The bill says ‘water’ and ‘Murray-Darling’, and that is important, but there is no stomach to this legislation at all in the way in which it will work other than there will be another layer of bureaucracy called the authority. There are a number of issues there that are terribly important.

The minister said that the basin plan will essentially establish new plans over time. He talked about establishing a cap that relates to surface water and groundwater. That was as recently as yesterday. I received a letter from the minister today about the interconnectivity of groundwater systems with surface water systems and the scientific knowledge of what is going on in the ground. Bear in mind that this legislation is going to bring them both together so that there is essentially a cap of water sources, irrespective of where they come from. I have looked, and I know the member for Gwydir has looked—and I congratulate him for doing so—and I ask the minister to look, at a major coalmine cutting through the artery of a whole range of interlinked groundwater systems on the Liverpool Plains. It is some of the best land in the world. The minister says, ‘That is a state planning issue,’ completely bypassing what is being talked about. If we are serious about the Murray-Darling system, why is the Commonwealth not looking at the first major coal development in that essential drainage system that has a major groundwater aquifer in it and the impact that could have? ‘No, we will leave that to a state based planning process. We will just look around a half dozen backyards to see if it affects outside. We can buy the little backyards.’ We can buy 20,000 or 50,000 acres and destroy it if we want, but what happens to the land 100 kilometres away? What happens at Walgett 200 kilometres away, if there are interrelationships? Surely a government that was very concerned about South Australia getting water would do something about that.

Has anybody in this place been to Lake Alexandrina? It is a major lake, 20 times the size of the seat of Wentworth, and it is a disgrace. What the barrages, as they call them, have done to the salinity around the lake is an absolute disgrace. The government is partly funding drainage schemes. It has been created by an artificial system. The dam’s water is back 100 kilometres. The evaporation rate on Lake Alexandrina is half what the cotton industry in New South Wales uses. I agree with the member for Gwydir in his comments about people not understanding a lot of this issue. Of course, everybody goes straight to the cotton industry and blames it for everything. What about the end of the system where there is an artificial dam? No wonder there is no water going out the Murray mouth. We have massive barrages that dam the water back to Murray Bridge. I do not have a lot of sympathy for the South Australian arguments that are put up.

I would suggest that this bill should not go through the House. I think the issue is far more important. Leaving the bill open-ended may be good politically for Malcolm Turnbull and others in the cities. As the member for Gwydir mentioned, there are a lot of misconceptions within our cities. I think this bill is aimed at those people rather than at the better management of water within the Murray-Darling system. This bill should be let to sit until after the election and then a real process of consultation should be engaged in, where people within the various states can play a real role, not a plastic role. Why should Morris Iemma and Peter Beattie speak for the rest of the people within their states and walk up to the Prime Minister and say, ‘We’ll sign off on this’? They represent all the people within their states. The Prime Minister is dancing around at the moment, saying, ‘Beattie has removed democracy from Queensland.’ Why not put up a proposal with the concurrence of state premiers and water users et cetera and put it to a vote within the Murray-Darling system? Oh, no, they could not do that!

It is a major change that we are proposing—for good reasons; the motherhood stuff is good—but, surely, if the Prime Minister wanted to achieve a positive outcome, he would have had a consultative process rather than the rather obscene, hidden process from which various premiers, for all sorts of political motivations, want to remove themselves. It is quite obvious that Morris Iemma, who has had great difficulty—and Bob Carr before him—with the various overallocation issues in New South Wales, would want to get rid of this. He would see the Prime Minister as the greatest thing in 2,000 years; he has suddenly arrived with money and wants to take a problem away from him. The Premier is not particularly interested in what is happening in country New South Wales anyway, so whoopee! But that does not necessarily mean that the people within those catchments are happy with this. I think that, if it were spelt out to them, what you have here is a broadbrush piece of water legislation which has no stomach to it. That stomach, after this bill passes, will presumably be negotiated with the states through intergovernmental agreements. There is still no real security in the acquisitions issues. (Time expired)

Kay Hull (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today, unlike the member for New England, to congratulate the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources for the consultation that he has personally undertaken throughout the formulation of the Water Bill 2007. It goes to show that there are members in this House who will engage themselves on behalf of their constituency and there are some members in this House who do not want to engage. They have no idea what is going on; they do not want to know what is going on. But then they enter the House and make wide-sweeping accusations against the way in which policy has been formulated. The member for New England has again demonstrated that his personal vitriol gets in the way of supporting decent policy every time. I really believe that the New England electorate need to look through the Hansard and seriously look at how their member has contributed, and ask him how he has contributed to policymaking and the decisions that have come into this House today with this legislation. I would say that it would be to have sat at the sidelines sniping and firing shots but not engaging, and I believe that is the downfall and the reason there is such inability within that electorate to get their voices heard. Some members do not want to engage.

I genuinely and honestly believe that even my irrigators—companies that have been involved in intense negotiation and discussion on the draft bill for so long—would have to agree with my comments here. They have said that they have had unprecedented access to the minister, the department, the decision makers, the policymaking and the minister’s staffers. I again say to the minister: congratulations, Minister Turnbull. You have personally undertaken this with great gusto, with great understanding and with a desire to know, to learn and to understand the way in which water works. It is a very complicated issue. I also take the time to congratulate the Assistant Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, the member for Parkes, because he too has played a very valuable role in formulating this legislation and in ensuring he has had a very sure and guiding hand on the way in which it was going to play out, particularly for his electorate and electorates right across Australia—not just in New South Wales, where I am. It is the responsibility of the minister and the assistant minister to have a guiding hand for all of Australia and the Murray-Darling associates, not just for New South Wales.

I also congratulate the minister’s staff and the department, who, when prompted with countless phone calls, interaction and exchanges—through teleconferences et cetera—met with my electorate and the leaders of irrigation industries in my electorate, which has a combined membership of irrigation organisations representing perhaps two-thirds of the water. The minister has seriously consulted with representatives on a day-to-day basis, even to the point of ringing them in the evening, in his personal hours, and walking through the processes in order to ensure that he had captured the concerns that many of my companies had.

We have seen many changes along the way, from the draft legislation to this final piece of legislation before the House. I think Minister Turnbull has been one of the most hands-on and active leaders on the issue of water that we have had for some time. I include the member for Gwydir in that remark as well; he was the catalyst for ensuring that there had to be some management of water. I have been the member for Riverina since 1998. I have been in a situation of great difficulty because, for six of the nine years since then, we have been in a catastrophic drought. For six of those years we have been juggling and managing water to the best of our ability. We have had carry-forwards from the snowy system. We have purchased water from the system. We have done all that we can to try to continue to contribute to the GDP in the way in which we have done in the past—and we hope to in the future. We have significant industries right across the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area that underpin our national economy in an enormous way. If anyone knows water, it is the people whom I represent. I do not come to this House professing that I know the ins and outs of water, but let me say that, on a daily basis, I do engage with my stakeholders. I do ensure that my stakeholders have access to decision makers in order that they can get their point across. I think that is an important point.

We have had continual buck-passing between state and Commonwealth for so long. I want to talk about the ASGE program—the Achieving Sustainable Groundwater Entitlements program. That program has caused the most excruciating pain—it has been the most pain that I have seen in my electorate for a long time. I have talked about that in this House before. We have seen father against son; neighbour against neighbour; cousin against cousin. It has been extraordinarily damaging to the social fabric of my electorate to see the way in which water management has taken place under a two-tiered structure—and in particular the ASGE. That is why I decided that one government had to manage this system. There has to be one management process because the buck-passing between the state and the Commonwealth was becoming almost intolerable. The people out there get hurt big time. We had this issue of changing direction during the ASGE. It changed from a scenario of an absolutely documented, across-the-board cut to a history of extraction. Whether that be wrong or whether that be right, it was changed. People made major financial decisions believing that they had a clear understanding of what their future was going to be. But the buck-passing went on. Whether we get it right, whether we get it wrong or whether we need to tweak it in the future, the Commonwealth needs to manage water, health, education and communications. That has always been my view.

I think what needs to be recognised is that my irrigators—both surface water and groundwater irrigators—have taken enormous cuts. They have taken significant hits over the last four years and are at a point now where the drought has created an enormous concern. This has prompted the need to address it. Whether it is climate change, climate variability or whatever it is, we have to have some action. There has to be some appropriate action taken. In the meantime the story keeps getting lost that the irrigators in the Riverina have taken the most significant hits in terms of cuts to water allocation. Some of them have lost all of their water. I know some people who have had cuts of 5,000 megalitres. They get not a cent and not a megalitre of water because they had no history of extraction of the groundwater. We also need to note that our surface water irrigators have had progressive cuts over the years. The one thing we need to remember is that they currently get no water all. They get absolutely zero water allocation.

There is so much misinformation out there—and it seems to be very city focused and city driven—that we have this abundant supply of water; that we are letting it run down our drains, down our gutters and out into our fields; that there are ducks swimming on it. But that is just not the way it is. That is simply not reality. When I hear people defame industries in my electorate, particularly the rice industry, for their use of water, rather than getting angry my reaction is to invite them to come down and have a look. It is a case of the ‘from paddock to plate’ philosophy. When they come and have a look, they are so surprised—because what we have in Australia is world’s best practice in rice growing. I am very proud of it. I recently visited Cambodia and saw the way in which the environment is degraded for the low yields that they are getting. I came back even more vocal in my support for the Australian rice industry—if that is possible. If you purchase rice which is not from Australia, you are purchasing rice from countries that are using unsavoury and environmentally destructive practices to grow their rice. It would be of great benefit for people to actually understand how this industry works and the people in this industry. They have done nothing wrong, but they are constantly having to defend themselves.

The other day I was in the car and had the ABC Riverina radio program on. I heard the ACT Chief Minister, Jon Stanhope, talking about the possibility of taking water from the Murrumbidgee. He spoke about how entitled the ACT was to take water from the Murrumbidgee because just as much water fell into its catchments and the ACT was entitled to take it. That was fine—I quite agree with that; I did not have any problem with that—until he went on to make, for a Chief Minister, a mischievous and uninformed comment. I could not believe it. The ACT takes only 30 gigalitres out of the system, and he said, ‘That’s only what some rice farmers take in the Riverina to grow one crop.’ I thought, ‘Thirty gigalitres to grow one crop? One rice farmer, two rice farmers—50 or 60 rice farmers might use that.’ I do not even know whether 50 or 60 rice farmers would use it. I was angry that I could not get on the radio to explain to him that that was a very sad indictment of his understanding.

A lot of questions will be asked about this legislation. I could go through and discuss many of the issues. Will the new arrangements cause uncertainty for water users? No, they will not, because the nature of existing water entitlements is not affected by this bill, nor are existing state water shares. There is a lot of concern out there, so information is needed, because we are honouring the water-sharing plans that have been put in place with a lot hard work and a lot of effort. There are issues about what the arrangements are for the new bill to come into play. It will be in about early 2008. There are questions like: does the Water Bill replace the National Water Initiative? No, the NWI, as the member for Gwydir clearly and articulately outlined, remains the blueprint for water reform in Australia, as it clearly should.

There are many issues about which we need to ably go out there. Whilst we have been consulting very intensely with representative groups—and there was a need to do that—we now need to equally as intently educate and inform the general stakeholders. I urge the minister to now go out and get a roadshow. We have the drought bus out there and it has been very effective. It has been sensational in the way it has been able to deliver perfect outcomes and good information to people suffering because of the drought. In fact, the other day I was having difficulty with it and suggested to Centrelink that maybe we could have the drought bus on a farm because people may feel more comfortable in coming to somebody’s farm. We trialled that about two weeks ago in my electorate—in Coleambally, actually. Centrelink agreed to trial an on-farm drought bus visit. I got a fabulous email back from Centrelink saying, ‘As you predicted, 30 farmers turned up for the drought bus; it was terrific and we got the message through.’ I would urge the minister to take advantage of where the drought bus is, because it is primarily in the Murray-Darling Basin area, and put people there with a wide grasp of how the national water plan is to be delivered. There should be simple facts and a clear understanding outside of the major stakeholders and the representative bodies that have been consulted intently and widely so that the general stakeholders can get the same information. I think we could certainly benefit from having a drought bus attitude and utilising it for water, particularly as we have a drought unit now set up to service the Murray-Darling Basin through Centrelink, under Senator Ellison’s Human Services portfolio. I would really urge the minister to consider doing that.

There are some concerns about who will now be managing rivers, storages and water deliveries. The state water agencies will continue to manage the storages, the river flows and the water deliveries and, generally, the people I represent and have dealt with for a long time will probably still very much be in the picture. There is a process that we will go through that will see many people engaged in achieving an outcome on this plan. I think there is a different way in which the Commonwealth have always looked at how they would achieve some of the requirements they need for the Murray. When the New South Wales government issued their tender document, they just issued a tender document. They did not say whether or not the water would come from tender—or from anywhere—whereas, when the Commonwealth issued their tender document, they said it had to come from savings. So there was less likelihood of community dislocation and the breakdown of the social fabric of the communities that have been heavily reliant on water. I think that is what we have to recognise: that as we go down this pathway and as the Commonwealth and the ministers take responsibility for outcomes in this, what is never to be forgotten is the way in which our fabrics glue together, the way in which our communities are that fabric and the way in which water is the beating heart of those entire communities, delivering to them businesses, business opportunities, schools, churches—a whole host of different things that come from a community that has been designed around water. I have many of those communities. They are designed entirely around the way in which water is allocated, delivered and utilised to support the nation’s economy.

I reiterate: the people I represent have taken an enormous amount of pain. Mr Turnbull recognises that. He has seen them on a constant basis. As I said, never has his door been shut to these people. There needs to be clear, concise understanding of that. When we engage with the states, communities and willing sellers in the future—no forced acquisitions, just willing sellers—we need to understand how our communities work together and how they need to survive during this whole process. The fear has to be taken out of it. I would urge the minister to move forward now with direct community consultation to take away the fears of the people who have not been party to these discussions during the lead-up to this legislation. I commend the minister and I commend the bill to the House.

Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Debate over the Murray River has been around for a long time. It goes back to the 1880s. In 1889 the Melbourne Argus said:

The River in fact belongs to the three colonies ... Broad principles and not narrow jealousies or pettifogging quibbles should rule in this matter. The Murray ought to be a great agent of Federation.

At the 1897-98 Federal Convention, the issue of the control of the Murray sparked a whole lot of debate. Section 31 of the draft Australian Constitution, which came from that convention, gave to the Commonwealth:

... control and regulation of the navigation of the River Murray, and the use of the waters thereof from where it first becomes the boundary between Victoria and New South Wales and the sea.

But the South Australian delegates were unhappy with this. While New South Wales argued for irrigation, South Australia wanted the stress on navigation. Eventually a compromise was reached and the draft section disappeared. The Commonwealth’s powers were quite clearly scaled back by section 100, which reads:

The Commonwealth shall not, by any law or regulation of trade or commerce, abridge the right of a State or of the residents therein to the reasonable use of the waters of rivers for conservation or irrigation.

So this issue has a long history. Every election year the Howard government rediscover the issue of water. The reason they are able to rediscover it each time an election is coming is that they forget about it once the election year has passed. In the election year of 2004, we had the National Water Initiative in June, which the government followed up with the National Water Commission Bill in December. But when I look back on the debate we had then, everything I said at the time about water and the Murray-Darling Basin remains accurate, because 2004 was all about appearing to do something while actually doing as little as possible. Frankly, there is no reason to believe that 2007 will turn out to be any different. On the issue of water management, I said the following in 2004, and I invite members to identify anything at all which has changed since I made these remarks:

The problem is that they say the water issue is important but they have totally and utterly failed to back up their words with actions. The Prime Minister has notional carriage of this bill and this issue, but in the last parliament—and apparently in this one, too—he subcontracted out the issue of water to the National Party leader ... and the rest of the National Party. The National Party have been absolutely unwilling to do anything which might put Australia’s management of its water resources on a sustainable basis, for fear that their constituency will rise up against them. The National Party have not acted in the national interest; they have acted on the basis of sectional interest.

When the Liberal Party have been confronted with the consequences of this inaction—for example, in the shape of the declining Murray River—rather than take on the National Party, they have taken the politically convenient path of blaming the state governments. For years their refrain has been: yes, the Murray River is in a bad way; the states must fix it. This has been for them a political solution to the problem; it has not been an actual solution to the problem. For years, they have sat on their hands while the scientific evidence rolled in about the need to restore environmental flows to save the Murray. They did nothing. They did not restore a single litre in environmental flows. From Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council meetings to COAG meetings, they prevaricated and obfuscated, refusing to act.

They dropped the ball with regard to Labor’s pioneering work back in 1994. The minister’s second reading speech correctly acknowledges:

Truly national water reform commenced ... with the original COAG Water Reform Framework agreed by Commonwealth and state governments in 1994.

Then the second reading speech jumps to the signing of the National Water Initiative in June this year—

2004—

10 years later. Back in February 1994, the Council of Australian Governments agreed upon a strategic framework for necessary water reforms, covering water pricing, institutional arrangements and sustainable water resource management and community consultation. However, after the Howard government was elected in 1996, that work was left to gather dust on the shelf while the National Party took over and scuttled Australia’s path towards water sustainability. I have no doubt that had it not been for Labor’s energetic pursuit of water issues in the last parliament ... and ... commitment to finding 1,500 gigalitres in environment flows to save the Murray River ... we would not be having this debate today. Under duress, the government is accepting that there does need to be national leadership on water issues and that it is not good enough to say that it is up to the states to fix it.

Back in 2004 I said:

We have before us the National Water Commission Bill, which establishes a new National Water Commission as an independent statutory body. Labor, having called many times for national leadership on this issue, will support this bill and assist its passage through the parliament. However, we are under no illusions about the government’s real views on water: they want to do as little as possible, and they want to draw it out for as long as possible. So we will need to continue to put the pressure on for action. The moment that we stop watching them is the moment that they drop the ball again.

I said all that back in 2004 and it is still absolutely true. Sadly, they did drop the ball again. That is why we are back here now. In December 2004, I also attacked the government’s inaction on climate change and I made the link between climate change and Australia’s water situation in the following terms:

I grow increasingly astonished at this government’s failure to take climate change seriously. This is a government—The Nationals in particular—which claims to represent farmers, and yet it sits on its hands while climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions condemns them to a dry, waterless future.

There is little point in having a debate about whether water should be allocated to irrigators or kept in the rivers for environmental flows if we do not have any water to argue about in the first place. Yet this is precisely what the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and other scientific experts are telling us is on the cards for Australia. I mentioned earlier in my remarks how Perth has dried out in the last 25 years. Its climate has literally changed. In my home city of Melbourne, its reputation for constant drizzle is a memory … Brisbane’s water storages were at 50 per cent capacity in late October, Sydney’s at 44 per cent and Perth’s down to 37 per cent.

CSIRO research commissioned by the New South Wales government shows that annual average rainfall in New South Wales has fallen by 14.3 millimetres a decade since 1950. Victoria’s Department of Sustainability and Environment produced regional estimates of climate change impacts in Victoria by the years 2030 and 2070. They showed rainfall decreases of up to 15 per cent by 2030 and 40 per cent by 2070 for the Mallee, Wimmera, North Central and Goulburn Broken regions. Gippsland and Western Victoria are facing up to 10 per cent rainfall loss by 2030 and 25 per cent loss by 2070. And that problem will be made worse by temperature increases—in the Victorian regions, typically up to 1.6 degrees by 2030 and five degrees by 2070. So in other words you get less rain and higher temperatures causing more evaporation and moisture loss.

These are very serious figures. Unless we get serious about climate change, in the years ahead Australia will become one big desert. I am astonished that the Howard government appear to be relaxed and comfortable with this prospect. The minister’s second reading speech admits that climate change is one of the factors putting, in his words, ‘enormous pressure’ on our water resources. Yet the government steadfastly set their faces against any of the things that we need to do to tackle climate change. They will not ratify the international climate change treaty, the Kyoto protocol. They will not set up a system of emissions trading. They will not increase the mandatory renewable energy target.

The Nationals MPs scoff at the mention of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, yet in doing so they condemn those who they claim to represent to the bleakest of futures. What an appalling abdication of responsibility. What an appalling dereliction of duty. I am pleased that at least one organisation is doing its job in representing farmers’ interests in this matter. The Western Australian Farmers Federation has called on the Howard government to ratify the Kyoto protocol on climate change. I hope that it is not too long before the National Farmers’ Federation and The Nationals get the message and do likewise.

I said all of that in 2004, and it is all just as true today. Just yesterday, we saw members of the Liberal Party continue to be in denial about climate change. No fewer than four out of the six members of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Science and Innovation signed a dissenting report challenging the science which says that greenhouse gas emissions are causing the planet to heat up and, most relevant for the purpose of this debate, causing southern Australia to dry out. The Liberal members for Tangney, Solomon, Hughes and Lindsay—the ‘Flat Earth Four’—remind me of the black knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, lying there on the ground with no arms and no legs, blood pouring from every limb, and still wanting to fight on.

The dissenting report produced a graph showing aggregate rainfall in Australia, which suggested little change over time. But the problem for Australia’s rainfall is that it is drying out in the south. Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and the Murray-Darling Basin have experienced declining rainfall in the past decade, and the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology are predicting even less in the years ahead. Do the members for Tangney, Solomon, Hughes and Lindsay think that the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology have this wrong? Or do they think that it does not matter if Perth, Melbourne and the Murray-Darling Basin dry out provided that there is higher rainfall in the tropics? What a shocking abdication of their responsibility to their constituents. The member for Tangney represents voters in Perth, and the members for Lindsay and Hughes represent voters in Sydney. They should be urging action to prevent rainfall loss for their electorates, not hiding behind aggregate data to pretend that climate change is not a problem for Australia. The member for Tangney would do himself and his constituents a favour were he to study the graphs of Perth’s rainfall over the past 30 years which reveal a striking decrease.

Yesterday, when he was confronted in the House with the member for Tangney’s eccentric views on climate change, the Prime Minister disowned them, but it should be remembered that the same Prime Minister personally intervened to restore the member for Tangney’s preselection after he had been defeated by another Liberal Party member in Western Australia. As it happens, the Liberal who won the democratic ballot in Tangney, Matt Brown, is known to have a modern and forward-looking position on renewable energy. It shows where the Prime Minister’s true colours lie on environmental issues. He prefers to support an MP who gets his instructions from think tanks of climate change sceptics who are being bankrolled in the same shameful way that tobacco companies used to bankroll anyone they could call an expert who would stand up and say that the link between smoking and lung cancer was unproven.

What is the state of health of our river systems? I described them in the following terms in 2004 and I invite anyone to suggest that the picture has changed—that anything done as a result of the National Water Initiative or the National Water Commission has led to any improvements:

Our rivers are suffering and stressed as a result of the amount of water that we have been taking out of them for our domestic, industrial and agricultural needs. The most striking example of this is the poor state of the Murray River. This river, and the Murray-Darling Basin which feeds it, has been a mighty source of prosperity and life for this country since European settlement. It is at the heart of our agricultural prosperity. It sustains many regional communities. It is essential for the drinking water of Adelaide … But it is in a state of decline. Levels of salinity have been on the rise … if we do not take steps to address it then over time there is no doubt that it will threaten the river system, including its capacity for agricultural production. In other words, we will kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

As well as an increasing salinity, the river has shown increased susceptibility to blue-green algal blooms, and its ecological richness is taking a hammering. River red gums are dying and native fish species are in decline—during the last parliament the government was forced to place the Murray cod and the trout cod on the endangered species list. Waterbirds are also in decline. Dr David Paton, an Adelaide academic who conducts regular surveys of migratory wading birds in the Coorong, a famous coastal wetland area in South Australia, has found an alarming decrease in the numbers of these birds over the past decade.

The Murray River, sad and unsatisfactory and all that its state is, is far from the only example of a river in poor and unsustainable health. Rivers feeding Sydney, like the Hawkesbury and the Nepean, have been infested with weeds. The rivers feeding Victoria’s Gippsland Lakes bring with them the nutrients which feed algal blooms. Many other lakes and waterways around Australia have been in a state of declining water quality.

This is just as true in 2007 as it was in 2004. Why should Australians believe that the Prime Minister’s announcement this year and the Water Bill 2007 are anything more than election year posturing?

The Prime Minister’s announcement in January had ‘stunt’ written all over it. The states were not consulted. Environment groups were not consulted. Farmers were not consulted. Cabinet was not consulted. Most tellingly, Treasury was not consulted. Ten billion dollars of taxpayers’ money and Treasury was not even asked for a view. One can only assume the government did not want a group of people with a bias in favour of getting value for money, and a bias against pork-barrelling, to be involved.

In March the Secretary of the Treasury, Ken Henry, gave a speech to his colleagues in which he noted that the department had worked hard on water reform and climate change policy, and he went on to lament:

All of us would wish that we had been listened to more attentively over the past several years in both of these areas. There is no doubt that policy outcomes would have been far superior had our views been more influential. ... Water has got away from us a bit in recent times, but it will come back for some quality Treasury input at some stage–it will have to.

The National Plan for Water Salinity has all the hallmarks of a cobbled-together, election year stunt. Notwithstanding that, we will support it because there most certainly is a problem; the government is not making that up. Given that there is a problem, we will support anything that has the potential to address it.

The size of the problem is indicated by the Inland Rivers Network’s 2007 wetlands report card, which concludes that almost all iconic wetlands in inland New South Wales, such as the Macquarie Marshes and the Gwydir wetlands, are endangered. Its coordinator, Amy Hankinson, says that 90 per cent of the wetlands in the Murray-Darling Basin have been lost to overextraction of water upstream, that New South Wales floodplain wetlands are in ecological free fall and that some are on the brink of collapse.

Both the Inland Rivers Network and the Australian Conservation Foundation have said that national leadership and a national water plan are needed, and they have pointed out the need for clear timetables and targets to tackle overallocation and to return water to the river system. They have expressed concern that there is no explicit requirement for the environmental watering plan to include targets and timetables for environmental water recovery or benchmarks or annual milestones for environmental watering. They say that introducing firm targets and timelines for water recovery would improve planning and accountability and increase the likelihood of the Water Bill achieving its objectives as they relate to addressing overallocation and overuse. They also express concern that the first basin plan needs to be prepared ‘as soon as practicable’. In the absence of a deadline, this is of course a recipe for us to be back here in 2010, should the government be re-elected, debating yet another bill setting up yet another plan to tackle the problem.

In the last parliament, the Labor Party committed to the science based target of returning 1,500 gigalitres to the Murray in environmental flows. Under pressure from Labor, the Howard government said in 2004 that it would return 500 gigalitres annually by 2009 as part of the Living Murray Initiative’s first step. The expression ‘first step’ implied that there was more to come; in fact, there was less to come. By September 2005 a communique from the Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council said that the plan would fail to deliver the agreed 500 gigalitres by 2009. Indeed, the return of water to the Murray under the Living Murray Initiative has been negligible.

Everywhere you look you see the federal government trying to pick fights with the states and territories. Whether it is on water, education, housing, Indigenous issues, hospitals or council amalgamations, the Howard government are trying to pick a fight. The more they do this and the more I see of the blame game, the more I am convinced that a federal Labor government could take great strides, with the states and territories, towards actually solving problems. If the Commonwealth and the states stop trying to score off each other, as has been happening incessantly, and start working together, there is so much more we could achieve—not just in water but in tackling so many other national problems as well.

Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to be speaking on this historic legislation. The Water Bill 2007 and the Water (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2007 implement a number of important elements of the government’s $10 billion National Plan for Water Security, which was announced by the Prime Minister prior to Australia Day this year. We have in front of us a historic opportunity to rectify many of the problems that we face in water management in Australia. I would like to thank the Prime Minister and the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources for steering this revolutionary plan.

The member for Wills had the Labor Party claiming credit for this water reform, just in the same way that they are claiming credit for our robust and successful economy. They will stop at nothing and are totally shameless, when it suits them, in claiming credit for things that they have nothing whatsoever to do with. If he is so concerned about water, then perhaps he should speak to some of his Labor mates in the Victorian parliament—but perhaps he does not have too many of those left. He spent a significant time quoting himself from previous speeches he has given but it was rather selective quoting. I suppose that he will not rush to quote himself from other sources, such as references he has written for notorious figures of the underworld, like Mokbel.

Leaving aside the member for Wills, speaking from the comfort of his electorate in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, I return to the Prime Minister and the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, who have both come to my electorate of Indi, which is in warmer climates. They have seen the Hume Dam running at four per cent capacity. The minister saw for himself the need for better management of our water system when he visited my electorate in April. He explained the benefits of the National Plan for Water Security to many hundreds of interested observers at a public meeting.

Important elements of this bill, which give effect to the National Plan for Water Security, include an independent Murray-Darling Basin Authority with enforcement powers; a basin plan which sets a cap on water systems; an environmental watering plan to coordinate management of the available water in the basin; a Commonwealth environmental water holder to manage environmental water in and out of the basin; a role for the ACCC in enforcing water market rules, as set out in the National Water Initiative; and a role for the Bureau of Meteorology in collecting and publishing information on our water systems.

As one of the Victorians speaking on this bill, it would be remiss of me not to mention the role played by the Victorian government in the development of this legislation we are debating here today. One would have to delve long and hard into the political history books to find a greater example of political bastardry than that which has occurred with Victoria’s decision to play party politics with this national plan. The plan we debate today is massively in Victoria’s best interests, and it is no secret that Victoria has some of the oldest and leakiest irrigation systems in Australia.

This is not a question of politics. This legislation is way beyond party politics. It is about the future of Australia, the sustainability of our agricultural sector, the protection of our environment and securing our water supplies now and into the future. The Minister for the Environment and Water Resources spoke today in question time about the need for long-term thinking in relation to water. That is precisely what is required, and that is precisely what this legislation is about. It is obvious that the Leader of the Opposition is incapable of this long-term thinking and is only concerned with short-term politicking. He was the bloke, let us remember, who stopped the Wolffdene Dam in 1989 when he was the de facto premier of Queensland.

I will not be letting that fact go unnoticed in my electorate, which has had enough of state government intransigence on water policy. If you want more water storage and reservoirs, do not think that this would ever occur under a federal Labor government with the current Leader of the Opposition in charge. The Victorian government, under former Premier Steve Bracks and now under John Brumby, have neglected to invest in urban and rural water infrastructure. They have simply crossed their fingers and hoped that it might rain. But that is not good enough.

Only recently, the Victorian government announced a pipeline project and a desalination plant. Both of these projects were opposed by the Labor Party in the state election campaign last year. We have had the arrogance of the recently retired Premier Bracks in saying on the announcement of the pipeline that the decision has been made and now is the time to consult. Obviously, after their victory at last year’s state election, they think they can get away with everything. We have had Premier Brumby, in his previous life as Treasurer of Victoria, go on local ABC radio in my electorate and refuse to even discuss issues as important as water and alternative plans for the water storage at Lake Mokoan.

We now see a mad scramble to invest in these types of projects to give the impression that the state government is doing something, but it may well be too late. We have discovered this week that a cashed-up water authority like Melbourne Water is using thousands of dollars of taxpayers’ money to block the release of cabinet briefings on the water woes of Victoria—that is on top of today’s news that water prices in Melbourne will rise by 15 per cent from next July to fund these half-baked projects. As the Prime Minister said in his speech on 25 January this year:

Rather than investing in new infrastructure, state and local government have elected instead to constrain demand by imposing water restrictions.

This approach, where Melbourne sits on a 3a-level restriction and water is flowing to some of Melbourne’s decorative water fountains whilst rural areas have a level 4 water restriction, clearly demonstrates the need for a new approach. The old system does not work. Each of the states is in fierce competition with the others, and they are simply not able to manage their water in an effective and coordinated way.

We need to manage our water in the national interest through the Commonwealth and, in doing so, provide security for entitlements. We heard previously from the member for Gwydir. It is a privilege to have followed him in this chamber, as the member was the driving force behind the National Water Initiative, which was signed in 2004 and is one of the great visionary achievements of this government. He has also visited my electorate to speak at public meetings and to other interested groups on water. His initiative remains the blueprint for water reform in Australia, and the Water Bill 2007 and the more recently announced National Plan for Water Security will greatly enhance the policy ideals of water management and build upon those contained in the National Water Initiative. These include water access entitlements, water markets and trading schemes, water pricing and more integrated management of water for environmental and other beneficial outcomes.

As I mentioned earlier, the Victorian government want to construct a pipeline to take water from north of the Divide to Melbourne, something they explicitly promised not to do a few weeks before the last election. Now they are saying, ‘We have broken that promise so soon after the election, but trust us because we will give you water security.’ I do not think that country Victorians will be fooled by this incompetent state Labor government. The rushed announcement was made without any economic, social or environmental analysis of the cost and benefits to regional Australia or of what the long-term impact would be on the Murray-Darling Basin. Draining our water supply for Melbourne is a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It is ill-conceived and is a poorly considered decision. Unfortunately, through this decision, the Victorian government have decreed that urban water consumption in Melbourne is more important than securing our water future and our economy in north-east and country Victoria.

Like many people in the north-east, I am deeply concerned about this proposal and its long-term consequences for our local communities and the whole Murray-Darling Basin. We have seen a state government that has not even done the hard yakka to investigate alternatives for the long-term security of Melbourne’s water. Many people who have contacted me on this matter are deeply disturbed about the effects this project will have on our towns, our tourist industries, the food bowl region, our communities and the security of our rural irrigation and water supply systems into the future.

Those of us in rural and regional areas of Victoria know from experience that the Victorian government cannot be trusted one inch on water policy. Their decisions to take water from the high-catchment farmers without compensation and to drain Lake Mokoan and the Honeysuckle Creek reservoir are cases in point. The community are galvanising into action on this matter, and we need to make a strong stand against the most recent proposal to strip us of our water security. The new Premier, John Brumby, has an obligation to listen to the people of Victoria, reverse the decision and do some of the hard work to properly investigate alternatives for Melbourne’s water.

In my closing remarks on this bill, I welcome the significant investment in water infrastructure contained in this legislation. At a recent public meeting on the Victorian government’s pipeline proposal, one motion unanimously read: ‘Stop the pipeline now. Just fix up our irrigation system.’ I am pleased to inform them that the Water Bill 2007 will indeed fix up our irrigation systems and lead to increased efficiencies and water savings. Funding of $3 billion will address overallocation in the basin, and there will be $3.55 billion available for improving off-farm distribution efficiencies to the various states, $450 million for water information, $617 million for on-farm irrigation efficiency and $70 million for a hot spots assessment, which will identify where water losses in irrigation infrastructure are occurring.

As I said in my opening remarks, this is a historic piece of legislation we are debating today. It is a pity that so much political pointscoring, particularly from Victoria, has gone on in the lead-up to today. But we have a duty to act in the national interest, and it is in the national interest that this bill is passed and its provisions start to be realised on the ground.

I am often stopped by people in the street who say: ‘If we had our time over again in the 1890s and 1900s, we would do things differently. We would start over and we wouldn’t have the states.’ Personally, I do not believe the problem is the actual existence of the states but the fact that poor visionless individuals occupy the benches of state governments. Our current state governments, particularly in Victoria, are littered with mediocrities that are ill equipped and not competent enough to deliver the basic services, policies, management and vision to take their constituencies into the future. Wise heads in the 1890s recognised that our water system should have been under federal control, but they did not win the argument on the day. But now we are presented with a historic chance to right this historical and environmental wrong. In the 21st century we should not botch our opportunity, and I commend this bill to the House.

Gavan O'Connor (Corio, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In my opening remarks in this debate, could I say to the member for Indi that the criticisms she has levelled against the Victorian government relating to visionless ministers and governments and the lack of action in these matters could equally be directed at her own government.

The Water Bill 2007 is one of the most important pieces of legislation to come before the 41st Parliament. It gives effect to major measures announced in the Commonwealth government’s $10.5 billion National Plan for Water Security announced by the Prime Minister on 25 January 2007. According to the government’s explanatory memorandum accompanying the bill, the overall funding of the national plan will be directed to modernising Australia’s irrigation infrastructure, addressing overallocation in the Murray-Darling Basin, reforming management of the Murray-Darling Basin and also new investments in water information. There would not be a member of this House who would be in disagreement with those major initiatives and measures in the bill. We on this side of the House pose the question: why has it taken the Howard government so long to implement these very important reforms?

As a Victorian member of this House, I am appalled at the way this important matter has been handled by the Howard government. I support wholeheartedly the second reading amendment moved by the member for Grayndler which reads:

“whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House:

(1)

notes that modern national water reform began with Murray Darling Basin Act in 1992 and the historic COAG Agreement on water reform in 1994 led by the Keating Labor Government;

(2)

regrets that, despite clear warning signals about the health of the river system, it has taken 13 more years to see the next stage of Commonwealth action to address the problems of the Murray Darling Basin,

(3)

is concerned that the legislation before the House represents a second best solution on national water reform;

(4)

deplores the Government’s failure to consult in good faith with State Governments and other stakeholders over the Water Bill 2007 and the related Intergovernmental Agreement;

(5)

believes the water reform process must continue so we properly fix the over-allocation of water licences in the Murray Darling Basin, ensure harmony between the environment and consumptive use, and help address the impact of drought and climate change on water supply;

(6)

notes that climate change will have a significant impact on water supply generally and the health of the Murray Darling Basin in particular;

(7)

notes that the CSIRO will provide an important report in late 2007 on the hydrology of the Basin and what the sustainable extraction levels are for the Basin; and

(8)

notes that the following is needed for national water reform:

(a)

a cooperative and constructive approach with State Governments to assist water reform and investment in urban and rural water infrastructure;

(b)

full implementation of the National Water Initiative principles agreed to in 2004;

(c)

fixing of the over-allocation of water licences once and for all, and the establishment of coherent, streamlined rules which ensure the problem of over-allocation never recurs;

(d)

recognition that economic instruments including water trading are necessary to address the fact that water has been over-allocated, undervalued and misdirected;

(e)

proper consultation with key stakeholders in the Murray Darling Basin, including all water users, farmers, water scientists, environment groups and the broader community to ensure the adoption and consistent use of efficient agricultural practices;

(f)

returning sufficient water to the rivers in the Murray Darling Basin to ensure the long term health of all rivers, wetlands and all connected groundwater systems in the Basin and, as a result, ensure the health of the communities and businesses that rely on the health of those rivers; and

(g)

measures to ensure industrial and urban water users adapt to maximise water efficiency”.

I read out that second reading amendment because it encapsulates the key elements of Labor policy that have been there for decades—elements that were articulated historically by the Hawke and Keating governments and continue to be proposed in various statements that have been made on water reform by shadow ministers. I observe with some dismay the attempts by the Howard government and my predecessor in this debate, the honourable member for Indi, to blame the state of Victoria and the Brumby Labor government for compromising the Commonwealth’s legislative intent to assume total control over the Murray-Darling Basin.

Remember that this is the most centralist Prime Minister that this country has ever seen—not that we on this side of the House would argue with some of the intent as far as the Commonwealth’s control over matters of national water reform are concerned. But I think that in the bowels of the Liberal Party, especially among some of the dries that we know are on the other side, the actions of this Prime Minister in this legislation must send a shiver through their spines—if they have any left because they have caved in to this very conservative Prime Minister on most of these sorts of issues up to this point.

The Victorian government has done no less than it was elected to do—that is, to defend the interests of Victorian farmers, irrigators and communities and to protect the wider commercial and constitutional interests of the state in this important matter. After all, we are a federation of states and the Prime Minister above anyone else, given the political stable that he comes from, ought to appreciate the determination of any state to protect its overall interests in any proposal involving the ceding of such powers to the Commonwealth as the Prime Minister proposed in January this year. The real issue in this debate is not the alleged intransigence of the Victorian government as it seeks to defend its interests; it is the breathtaking incompetence of this government, firstly, in neglecting the problem for the past 14 years and, secondly, in perverting the political process to engineer a hastily constructed fix for a national problem in an election year.

The people of Australia see through this Prime Minister as easily as they see through Glad Wrap. No amount of huffing and puffing by the member for Wentworth—who has been surfing the dry river beds of the Murray-Darling Basin to further his prime ministerial ambitions—can alter the political fact that this issue has only come on the government’s radar in an election year. What a scathing indictment it is of a government that has been in power for well over a decade that, in an election year, the Prime Minister, facing political oblivion, has reached into his political hat to pull out another dead rabbit. To fully grasp the depths of the contamination of good governance and proper political process by this hopeless government, one first has to comprehend the issue and the magnitude of the problem Australia faces. In the speech of the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources the dimensions and complexities of the issue are outlined. We are dealing here with a river basin serviced by three river systems that are acknowledged to be in an extremely stressed state. The Murray-Darling Basin is acknowledged by us all to be of national economic, social and environmental significance. It spans the states of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory. It covers one million square kilometres—some 14 per cent of Australia’s land mass—and is home to some two million people. It generates $10 billion worth of agricultural production annually.

Drought has brought the issue of the sustainability of the basin into sharper focus, but we have known for decades that it was under enormous pressure and stress and had the potential to collapse. It is against this background that in January 2007—some 11 years after being elected—the Prime Minister announced his National Plan for Water Security. One would have thought it would have been one of the first policy initiatives of any government that had come to power when this government did. Here we have it: over a decade later this government is lining up to the gate with a national plan for our water security. We now know that this great plan was hastily cobbled together to suit the Prime Minister’s needs—not the urgent water needs of the nation. This great plan—some $10 billion over 10 years—was cobbled together in the Prime Minister’s office over the Christmas break without the Treasury or the Department of Finance and Administration being involved in its construction.

Members here need to understand the length and breadth of the incompetence of this government in the matter. Some $10 billion worth of expenditure—a major policy initiative—was cobbled together in the Prime Minister’s office without proper consultation with Treasury or Finance. It did not end there. Furthermore, this important national initiative did not even go to cabinet for approval. Can you believe it—this very important national policy initiative never even went to other cabinet ministers for approval. It is extraordinary. But that is not all. Given the constitutional and administrative complexities associated with the issue, the Prime Minister did not even formally consult with affected states about the proposed Commonwealth takeover of power over water in the basin, nor did the government consult extensively with key stakeholders, including farmers and irrigators.

This plan was announced on the political run. It contained very little of the policy detail needed to carry the states with the Commonwealth in this debate. However worthy this objective is, the initiative from the outset has lacked the careful, political, technical and administrative planning that would ensure its ultimate success. At the end of the day, the government’s failure to do this has let all the stakeholders and this great nation down. It is little wonder that the government has been caught out. It was a political stunt from the outset and it should never have been pulled. Given the importance and complexity of this issue, this proposal should have been negotiated outside of the current electoral cycle, but that would have been too much to ask of a visionless PM simply out to save his political skin.

With regard to the major elements of the bill, its key structural reform is the creation of a Murray-Darling Basin Authority with the express power to ensure that the basin’s water resources are managed in a sustainable way. The authority’s key function will be the preparation of a strategic plan for the sustainable use of water resources in the basin. According to the minister, the authority’s basin plan will set long-term, average sustainable diversion limits for the basin; identify risks, such as climate change, to water resources in the basin; provide an environmental watering plan to optimise environmental outcomes; prepare a water quality and salinity management plan, which may include targets; and introduce rules about trading of water rights in the basin’s water resources.

The bill relies solely on the Commonwealth’s constitutional powers. The basin plan will be complemented by state water resource plans which must receive accreditation from the authority for any access to funding to be secured. The Commonwealth will become a water holder by virtue of its share in water savings made under the National Plan for Water Security. Its environmental water share will be managed by a Commonwealth environmental water holder with the express charter to use the Commonwealth’s environmental water to protect and restore environmental assets of the Murray-Darling Basin and assets outside of the basin where the Commonwealth owns water. I am pleased that the Bureau of Meteorology has been given additional functions to collect and publish high-quality water information for use by stakeholders, planners, politicians and the community. I am also pleased that an expanded role will be given to the ACCC in developing and enforcing water charge and water market rules consistent with the National Water Initiative.

As occurs rather frequently with important legislation that is rushed into this House by the government, the support of the opposition is given somewhat reluctantly, and this is another such occasion for me in considering this legislation. This legislation could have been a model for cooperative federalism. Instead, we have a second-best and, I would say, flawed bill that only takes all stakeholders a little way down the important road of water reform that we need to traverse with increasing urgency.

Let me take this opportunity to commend the senators who have laboured under quite unreasonable time constraints to give key stakeholders an opportunity to air their legitimate concerns about the shortcomings of this legislation. It is clear from that process of scrutiny that there are areas of real concern in this bill and that flow from it. For example, all stakeholders are unclear at this point about the yet to be released intergovernmental agreement, the IGA, which will lay the basis for the necessary operational arrangements between the Commonwealth and the states and will be necessary for the water plans to operate effectively. It is reasonable to ask why such an important document has not been made available to this parliament, state governments or stakeholders in the basin who may be directly affected by its contents.

Another substantial criticism is the new level of bureaucracy that will be introduced by the bill. Under this legislation we now have the Murray-Darling Basin Commission and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority; we have two ministerial councils and a National Water Commission. We have more bureaucracy here than they had in the old Soviet Union. Legitimate concerns have also been expressed about the lack of consultation with stakeholders and the inherent risks associated with some institutional arrangements in the bill, which might mean inordinate delays in implementing reform. And, of course, given that no-one is yet privy to the government’s position on the IGA, it itself could constitute an obstacle to action, when immediate and concerted action is required to address the problem.

Let me conclude by stating again my disappointment that the great modern water reform agenda, commenced by the Hawke and Keating governments in 1992 and enshrined in the Murray-Darling Basin Act 1992 and the great COAG national water reform agreement struck in 1994, faltered so badly under the Howard government over the past 10 years. There are some salient lessons to be learnt from our recent history. One is this: never let the National Party near any reform agenda. The reason we have such a problem in New South Wales is due to the influence of the National Party and the overallocations that have occurred in that state and in that part of the basin.

We know the National Party’s commitment to what is really required to get this basin on a sustainable footing. One can recall National Party members of this House, one after the other, getting up to say that we ought to zap the cap. Remember that—‘We ought to zap the cap’? I think we know, in a political sense, who we ought to zap and keep right out of the reform process: the National Party. They are an impediment to progress and the national water reform agenda. I counsel the government, and Liberal members particularly: brook no input from them, because they will pollute everything they touch as far as this reform agenda is concerned. I reluctantly support the measures in this bill so that the great national water reform agenda, commenced by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments, can progress even a little.

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have been strenuously trying to hear some cogent argument coming from the opposition about the Water Bill 2007, which is a very important bill for the future of Australia. The contribution from the member for Corio just a while ago was empty, I have to say. There was nothing in there to even hang your hat on. He did not talk about the real issues in the Murray-Darling Basin. No-one has had more hands-on experience in managing the water resources in the Murray-Darling Basin than I have. I spent five years as the Minister for Water Resources in New South Wales, and five years on the Murray-Darling Basin Council. So I think I know a little bit about what is going on in this particular area. I listened with interest this afternoon to a number of members of the opposition speaking on this bill. I would like to make some clear comments about some of the issues that have been raised.

The member for Grayndler, who is completely out of his depth in this area—and we all know he is a political ideologue—made some very astounding statements. The member for Grayndler, instead of talking about the water resources of the Murray-Darling Basin, talked more about the environment and his position on the environment. That was followed by the member for Kingsford Smith, and we had a similar rhetoric coming through. It seems to me that these people were never taught history at school. They are trying to tie the present drought to climate change. As far as I understand it—and I stand to be corrected, but I have not seen it from any scientist—there is no absolute connection between the two. While many scientists are saying that they think there is something happening with global warming, I have not yet seen any definitive statement that has linked climate change to drought in Australia. Yes, there are some suggestions and suppositions saying that this might happen, and that is coming from some scientists. But anyone who has read the history of Australia will have found that Australia is a land of drought. We have had many droughts in the past. I recall research from James Cook University in North Queensland on core samples from the Barrier Reef which show that back in the 1800s there was possibly a 20-year drought. That is a long way longer than what we have had at the present time.

So we have some political hyperbole here, and it is being used for political purposes to try to link these things so that people will assume that unless we do something about climate change we are going to have this problem with water supply in Australia. The term ‘hyperbole’ is absolutely correct, because, unfortunately, we see members of the media jumping in on this. I have seen virtual images of flooding on the Central Coast and in Queensland, and that is just outrageous because even the most extreme predictions of scientists talk about 100 years. So the hyperbole is not just with the Labor Party; it is with the media as well. Some of these predictions cannot be justified and cannot be backed up. I have always concluded that a very strong part of a strong democracy is an inquisitorial and free press. But I am very disappointed at the present time about the questions that are being asked about certain political statements that are being made in Australia at the present time.

The member for Grayndler went on to talk about The Nationals, as the member for Corio did more recently. We happen to represent an area; we happen to represent irrigators; I happen to know irrigators; and I happen to know the management of the system. So at least we do have some knowledge of what goes on in that particular area. We had the member for Hotham getting up and saying that the Labor Party would guarantee 1,500 gigalitres a year to the Murray-Darling system. How could you guarantee 1,500 gigalitres this year? We are in drought. That is just a very stupid statement, and we have had many of those coming from the Labor Party at the present time.

The Labor Party are posturing here, and we have seen it for the last few weeks. They stand up here saying that they support this bill, but let us look at the detail. They are not supporting it. If you look at the detail of what people from the opposition have said you will see it very clearly. The management of the Murray-Darling system is a very delicate operation. They stand up and say, ‘We will go back and work with the states on managing the system.’ Well, I spent five years doing that, and I can tell you that you could not get agreement from amongst the states. The Hon. John Kerin was the chair of the council when I was on it. He and I used to get together because we could not get agreement from Victoria and South Australia—Labor states in those days. We would try to find some middle ground to get some agreement. In those days, Queensland did not belong to the Murray-Darling Basin Council. I first went on the council in 1988 and went through until about 1992. Queensland did not belong. If you think you can just simply sit down with the states and get agreement, I have news for you: that is not easy. We have seen that particular exercise recently with Victoria, who I believe are just using their position to push the federal Labor Party view. The federal Labor Party say, ‘We agree,’ but Victoria is standing up and saying, ‘No, we are going to stop this because we do not agree.’

Let us look at some other issues. The member for Wills made a ridiculous speech. I have heard these statements before. The member for Wills got up and started to talk about the increase in salinity in the Murray-Darling. Anyone with a semblance of knowledge at all who has read the Murray-Darling Basin Commission reports will know that salinity has reduced. We have even had the statement from Professor Cullen—who should know better—that salinity has increased in the basin. It has not. If you look at the annual reports of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, you will see that salinity has been reduced. Why? Because there have been policies put in place by the Murray-Darling Basin Commission over a number of years to reduce salinity. The Salt Interception Scheme, for example, was part of the process that has been going on for a long time.

There was a revolution in irrigation. I deregulated irrigation in New South Wales. We went away from the flood system in horticulture. We went to microjet; we went to drip. We laser-levelled. We got farmers to laser-level rice-growing areas. We bred rice varieties that were shorter to try to reduce the amount of water that was used. This has been going on for a long time. Governments have been trying to alleviate the problems.

I want to talk a little about Victoria, because I just do not understand where they are coming from. When I was Minister for Water Resources in New South Wales, I was very aware of the problems of leakage in the system. In fact, we estimated that we were losing 30 per cent of the water we were sending down the system. You have to understand that these canals and channels were built in an era when they used a horse and scoop. They went right across the land. They went across gravel beds; they went across sand. These people just built the channels. The great Mulwala canal, which takes the water down to the lower Murray, is a very big canal. But we know that there was leakage in the system. So I say to the states: $10 billion? Grab it with both hands! Because if you can stop the leakage in the system you can save 30 per cent of the water that is being taken down the rivers. That is a very important point.

I know we do not want to continue to debate too long and there are others who want to speak on this, but I have to say a few more things. The member for Wills talked about blue-green algal blooms as if this were something new. I have news for him: the first blue-green algal bloom ever recorded in Australia was in 1874, in Lake Alexandrina. They were around long before any dams were built in Australia. You have to understand that before there were dams built in Australia these rivers ran dry at times. Again, in the 1870s it was recorded that the Murray was dry. If you look at history you will find that the great Darling River was affected. There was an export port at Bourke and paddle-wheelers plied the river, taking the wool down to Adelaide. For a period of three or four years the paddle-wheelers were all tied up at the riverbank because there was no water in the Darling. It is nothing new in Australia. That is the history of Australia.

I want to go to some parts of the second reading amendment moved by the member for Grayndler. I heard the member for Corio spend six minutes in his speech just reading out the amendment. There are some things here that I think are important. First of all, the member for Grayndler was trying to rewrite history by saying that the Labor Party are the only ones who have ever initiated legislation to help the Murray-Darling. We are sick of hearing that sort of rhetoric from the Labor Party. A number of people have contributed to what has been going on in the Murray-Darling.

There is one part of the amendment in particular that I want to talk about, which I think is very important because it really goes to the core of this, and that is 8(d). At the end of 8(d) it says:

... address the fact that water has been over-allocated, undervalued and misdirected;

I say to anyone who has any interest in this particular debate: have a very close look at those words. Those words are code. They say to me that the Labor Party does not support agriculture in the basin. The member for Grayndler went to great lengths to tell us, and the member for Corio also told us, about the value of agriculture in the Murray-Darling Basin. It is very important. It is a very important part of Australia’s economic future. There are large exports. Depending on the year, anywhere between 40 and 60 per cent of Australia’s agriculture exports come from the Murray-Darling Basin. It is a huge catchment area—the same size as the Mississippi-Missouri catchment. It is a pity we did not get some rain. But it is the same size catchment as the Mississippi-Missouri.

What this amendment is saying is: ‘We are supporting this. We understand the importance of agriculture.’ But I have been through all this before, and I have to say that if you are an irrigator or someone who lives in rural Australia you should look very closely at the amendment that has been put forward by the Labor Party. What it is saying to me, and what the member for Hotham was saying when he talked about 1,500 gigalitres a year to the river, is that there will be no water for irrigation, no water for farming.

I have to also say that if you did not have control of these rivers you would not have water for the towns either, because at certain times they would dry up. It is a very important balance you have to get here. It is important that you work with the people who are the users of the water. They are very decent, cooperative people. I have worked with them for years. If you sit down with a problem, I can guarantee you that they will work through that problem. But, if you allow the bureaucrats or scientists from the CSIRO to start to dictate this program, I can assure you that you are in for trouble. One of the problems I have at the present time with some of the scientists is that they are not working on scientific facts; they are part of the hyperbole. They are out there exaggerating statements. It is about time that our scientists got back to giving us the facts of the issue and not being part of the debate—because I think that is a very real risk we run.

Let me say this: do not believe what the Labor Party are saying here. They are not supporting rural Australia. They may be supporting what they think is their view of the environment. I tell you that the environment, over the centuries, has come to terms with the fact that the rivers at times do not run. I think that is where the whole debate is getting off course and where the exaggeration is coming in from the Labor Party. Let rural Australia beware.

Kate Ellis (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Water Bill 2007 and to support the amendment which was moved earlier today by the member for Grayndler. Despite the contribution just given by the member for Page, most of us would agree that the need for action on our nation’s dwindling water supplies has been evident for years. This government in particular have dragged their heels for the last 11 years and now they are here seeking our congratulations and claiming that this is the first national reform of the Murray for a century.

In fact, the national water reform began with the historic COAG agreement in 1992, which was led by the Keating government, and the Murray-Darling Basin Act of 1993. It is pretty disappointing that it has taken another 15 years to bring us to this debate tonight. It has been disappointing as well as hugely damaging to our magnificent river. In my short time in this parliament, I have witnessed Labor calling on the government to take national leadership over Australia’s river system and of our water policy. In fact, in my very first speech in this place I urged the federal government to have the will and the courage to sensibly address this pressing issue and to leave politicking and buck-passing outside the chamber doors. Since that time, I have grasped each and every opportunity to stress the importance of ensuring a sustainable Murray and a long-term focus on this, and it is a relief to see that water and our great rivers have finally reached the policy agenda and that we can have this discussion tonight.

Soon after the government made their 25 January announcement, Labor offered in-principle bipartisan support for the policy. We have long called for Commonwealth leadership on water policy, particularly in the policy areas involving water resources that cross state boundaries. However, I do still hold reservations that this legislation will not deliver the objectives set out in the 2004 National Water Initiative, such as tackling overallocated water systems and ensuring greater water security. We on this side are willing to work constructively with the government towards this end, but we recognise that the choice being offered before this parliament tonight is, sadly, between second-rate reform or no reform at all. I must stress that this legislation is not the solution to the River Murray’s woes. It is at best a first step towards addressing the poor state that we have left our proudest river in. We as a parliament must continue to focus on ever improving the health of the River Murray as well as on better water policy outcomes generally. This is what we on this side of the House again pledge to work towards.

As a South Australian MP, I am particularly passionate about the River Murray and feel a particular responsibility to fight in this place for it. I have previously indulged myself in sharing my childhood recollections of growing up on the banks of the River Murray and I will not subject the parliament to that again tonight. I will say that the health of the River Murray is vital to South Australia and critical for a secure domestic water policy for Adelaide, which I represent in this parliament. The river and the Murray-Darling Basin are of special social, economic and environmental importance to all South Australians.

As the federal member for Adelaide, I am acutely aware of how necessary it is for everyone, particularly the upstream states, to be vigilant in their use of the river’s water—not just for the sake of South Australia, the downstream state, but for the river’s very survival. The Murray-Darling Basin has received record low inflows for 11 consecutive months, affecting allocations to South Australia. As a result, a number of water-saving measures have had to be implemented, including reduced allocations, introducing carryover and closing wetlands to manage impact equitably. As a result of this, salinity levels are steadily increasing along the river because of significantly reduced flows across the border.

While decent rainfall over the past few months has improved the state of the river system, a lot more rain is needed to return the waterway to anywhere near where it needs to be. As the South Australian government has gone to great lengths to highlight, the health problems facing the Murray could cause a huge array of problems, including loss of agricultural productivity, loss of recreation and tourism, a negative impact on our drinking water, risk to human health caused by high levels of toxic blue-green algae and a cultural impact due to losing the River Murray. We need a policy before us that will promote sustainable irrigation, restore Australia’s wetlands and provide both quality and quantity for Australia’s water supplies as well as assure the environmental flows which are necessary to ensure the health of this mighty river.

The Premier of South Australia, Mike Rann, has done a fantastic job in fighting for the Murray’s protection and the protection of South Australia’s water supplies, particularly through his insistence and negotiation with the Commonwealth for an independent commission to oversee the River Murray. I believe that there are merits to having a strong independent authority overseeing the river. As Premier Rann stated:

It is only through a politically independent authority that the parochial interests acknowledged to exist by the Prime Minister can be removed from the management of the basin.

I absolutely and entirely agree on this one. It is essential to ensure that those making the tough decisions about the state of the river system are independent experts. The River Murray is far too important for political game playing, which, sadly, we have again seen here today. As Premier Rann stated, this needs to be a politics-free zone.

There has been some criticism of moves to give power to independent bodies, scientists and experts and, whilst in this bill the independent body’s role will be largely strategic, I would like to address some of these criticisms, particularly those in the South Australian media and within local politics. Opponents have argued against having an independent body overseeing the river by saying, ‘Isn’t this just conceding that politicians aren’t up to the job?’ I think that we need to recognise that our very job is advocating the interests of our local communities. This means that, just as the lobby groups and stakeholders have vested interests, so actually do we—whether it be my vested interest in securing Adelaide’s water supplies now and into the future or another MP’s interest in protecting the water allocation of the irrigators that they represent in their electorate, no matter how overallocated that water may be or how unsustainable the practice is. We have amongst us a series of competing interests and the question needs to be: whose job is it here to represent the Murray’s future viability? Whose job is it to ensure that the generations that follow us also enjoy access to a strong and once again mighty Murray? Because this is the role that past and present parliaments have failed us in.

We need to ensure that the long-term wellbeing of the river is given a voice, and I believe it is helpful to have independent experts and scientists without any other interests to assist in this role. If we do not have independence in this process, we run the risk of this important issue becoming bogged down by politics and vested interests. Anyone listening to the debate on the river in this place would hear many different viewpoints and opinions in contrast to their own. I certainly have passionately disagreed with many things I have heard in this chamber about the River Murray. I have nearly fallen off my seat disagreeing with comments made by other MPs in this place. On 18 October 2006, the member for Page criticised Professor Peter Cullen, of the Wentworth Group, who I would have thought is undeniably one of Australia’s leading water experts. On that occasion, the member for Page stated that Professor Cullen ‘parades as a scientist’. But the comment I remember most clearly was in relation to the opinion of the Wentworth Group that the Murray-Darling was dying. The member for Page said:

In fact, the quality of the Murray River downstream is now better than it was 10 or 15 years ago.

The member for Kennedy also got in on the act and made some comments which I have found similarly disturbing. He claimed that the salinity levels on the middle Murray and the lower Murray are the lowest they have ever been in recorded history. He went on to question what all the fuss was about with South Australians. He said:

I have been to Murray Bridge and it is water from bank to bank.

If I were a little less polite and prone to interjecting, I might have shouted out to him that there may have been water from bank to bank but it probably was not moving anywhere at the time.

The loss of native plants, animals, fish and wetlands; declining water quality; an increase of pests in the Murray, including carp; increasing salinity; and water shortages all indicate a river in crisis. Today we have again heard some differing views about the Murray—and I might just mention a couple of them. The member for New England, seemingly speaking in defence of the cotton industry, said he thought it was South Australia’s own fault that we had a blockage and water was not flowing through to the Murray mouth. Another South Australian, the member for Barker, said the environmental lobby groups were part of the reason why we were not getting more results—whereas I would argue that these groups have been amongst the very few who are arguing for the long-term environmental viability of this river.

The problems plaguing the River Murray are intricate and complex, and any decision to alleviate these complexities must not be made for political reasons. A solution to the water crisis must transcend politics, and it must be a national solution to a national problem. It requires input from all state governments and leadership from the Commonwealth. However, independence is the key to ensuring that the interests of the Murray are not overlooked in this process.

The Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, in his second reading speech, highlighted the government’s decision to rule out compulsory acquisitions even as a last resort. I think this is worthy of some discussion. The minister said:

Let me reiterate the Commonwealth’s commitment—clearly stated in the bill—that we will not compulsorily acquire water entitlements. Entitlements will only be purchased from willing sellers.

But I would ask the minister: isn’t the most significant problem facing the Murray the overallocation of water permits in the Murray-Darling Basin? What is the government going to do if it is unable to secure enough willing sales of overallocated water entitlements? What is the backup plan if people do not voluntarily choose to sell back their water? What do we do then? I am yet to hear a response from the government on that question.

Another problem with this process is the extraordinary lack of consultation with the community and government stakeholders. Many of the groups I have spoken to feel completely left out and are outraged that such monumental legislation can be pushed through the parliament so hastily without giving people adequate opportunity to input their views and expertise in this area. This has again been demonstrated by the government allowing just a one-day Senate committee hearing for such a monumental piece of legislation.

The environmental groups, including the Australian Conservation Foundation—whom I have found have done an absolutely fantastic job in lobbying for a strong and healthy River Murray—have been vocal in their response to this bill, rightfully nervous that the government is rushing through another piece of legislation in the lead-up to the election that could have a devastating effect on our future if it is not handled with care. We can only wish that the government had treated this matter with some urgency 11 years ago instead of ignoring it until their polling indicated that they could ignore it no longer. The government’s repeated failure to consult in good faith with the other stakeholders has seriously undermined the intentions of this bill and, quite clearly, is not the path to finding the best public policy outcomes.

In its submission to the Senate inquiry, the South Australian government raised serious concerns that environmental returns could not be guaranteed by this bill. As the submission indicated, the Water Bill 2007, by its nature, will not ensure environmental returns to the River Murray without including an end-of-system flow target. An end-of-system flow target, building on existing flow guarantees, should be included in the basin plan. As South Australia has indicated, this would ensure that measurable benefits are actually delivered. When I have met with various lobby groups, they have expressed a similar concern that environmental returns could not be guaranteed by the bill. An end-of-system flow target is essential to ensure that environmental returns are delivered and to ensure that we can measure this and provide adequate scrutiny.

It is impossible to separate the issue of water from the broader crisis of climate change. Climate change will bring with it less rainfall and increased evaporation, which will directly affect our water supply. For 11 long years the federal government has ignored the looming threat of climate change and turned its back on the state of the Murray-Darling Basin. The Australian public will no longer tolerate such complacency. While the government may finally have switched its rhetoric on the problems of climate change and the water crisis, its inaction over the past 11 years has had a devastating effect on our capacity to deal with this problem. The reason for the complete and utter neglect of the problems facing the Murray—and, indeed, the planet, through climate change—is that the federal government is full of climate change sceptics.

We have once again seen this illustrated this week with the four government members’ dissenting report to the report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Science and Innovation geosequestration inquiry. They indicated that those who argue that humans are responsible for climate change are ‘fanatics’. How absolutely absurd. This does indicate that the Howard government remains divided on climate change, and for this reason we will have to deal with the consequences of 11 years of complacency on this urgent issue. As a parliament we must recognise that water and climate change go hand in hand. We cannot address one without addressing the other and receive the long-term results that we all hope for. It must be kept in mind that this initiative must be carried out with a number of other policy initiatives if it is going to make the much-needed impact on Australia’s water crisis that it sets out to. We need a holistic approach to Australia’s water shortages, and only a Rudd Labor government will be able to deliver this.

Labor has committed to ensuring the security of water supplies to all Australians, regardless of their location, through our national water security plan for towns and cities. Australians based in rural and regional communities, as well as those in our towns and cities, are already facing the brunt of the national water crisis. Labor has a plan to target domestic and industrial water use in urban areas by fixing the leaky pipes across the nation in order to stop the wastage of water as it makes its way to our taps. The National Water Commission has indicated that, across the 175,000 kilometres of water mains in Australia, up to 30 per cent of water can be lost through leaks and burst pipes. In Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and my electorate of Adelaide, 155,000 megalitres of water is lost from urban water systems each year. This is the equivalent of 77,000 Olympic sized swimming pools. Just a small leak could cost this country 500,000 litres of water in a year. Urgent action is needed to deal with these leaks and losses, which is why Labor has committed to an investment of more than $250 million to work with state and local water authorities to minimise water loss, construct modern and efficient water infrastructure, and refurbish older pipes and water systems, as well as provide funding to practical projects to save water. This is a nation-building policy to help protect Australia’s future by minimising water wastage. I am currently working with a number of local councils within my own community of Adelaide on programs to better use our water supplies in our local Adelaide region.

In conclusion, anyone who thinks that the passage of this bill through the parliament will put an end to my constant advocacy for our great River Murray is sorely mistaken. This is a step forward, but there remains a great marathon before us. The relationship between the River Murray and the state of South Australia is symbiotic: the survival and sustainability of one is essential to the survival and sustainability of the other. South Australians have got a lot to lose if the River Murray is not managed and controlled effectively. The future prosperity and sustainability of our state absolutely depends upon it. We must make the most of this historic opportunity and ensure that we sensibly tackle the many obstacles to the river’s health, improve water security and urgently address the overallocation of the Murray’s precious water. It is fantastic that we have the opportunity to have this debate within the parliament, but let us ensure that we do not forget about this issue once this debate is complete and that we keep on working on this issue until we can save this mighty river.

Steve Gibbons (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I appreciate the opportunity to participate in the debate on the Water Bill 2007 and the Water (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2007. Twelve days ago NASA launched the latest unmanned spacecraft in its Mars exploration program. If all goes according to plan, Phoenix will land on the Red Planet’s surface in May next year to continue the search for extraterrestrial life. Of course, NASA is not expecting to find any little green men—with or without high-speed colour printers to deceive the on-board cameras. What it is looking for is water. The search for water is a proxy for the search for life, because without water there can be no life as we know it. As we debate this bill, this is surely a timely reminder of what is at stake. Water is not just another optional resource we obtain from nature, like oil, gas, coal and minerals; it is the foundation of life for every plant and creature on this planet. Our ability to effectively manage the water resources of the driest continent on Earth is, quite literally, a matter of life and death.

Since European settlement we have, in many ways, been ingenious with water. Through imaginative engineering schemes we have harvested water for use in climates and ecosystems that are quite unsuitable for the agricultural methods imported from the Old World. We have used water to generate large amounts of electrical power. We have supported urban settlement in wholly unsuitable locations. In my own electorate of Bendigo, for example, there is no natural waterway sufficient to sustain a city of 100,000 people. The city is only where it is due to the discovery of gold in the local creek beds in the 1850s. And it has been battling for a secure supply of water ever since. Hopefully, water security will at last become a reality when the first phase of the Goldfields pipeline comes on stream next month—a project, I might note, that saw lengthy prevarication by the Howard government as Liberal members of this House joined Liberal senators and state opposition MPs to offer highly ambiguous support for or outright opposition to the Victorian government’s initiative.

Despite—or perhaps because of—our engineering achievements, we have long passed the point when our current exploitation of the water resources is sustainable. The need for considered Commonwealth intervention in the Murray-Darling Basin has been obvious for years, yet the Howard government has presided over a confused and perplexing approach to water management. There are several overlapping Commonwealth bodies responsible for water, each administering a range of different programs. Different structures, different departments, different ministers, different accountability mechanisms and different time lines all add to the confusion. Although there is a national plan in the National Water Initiative, and funding through the Australian government water fund, you would be forgiven for thinking the opposite because so little is being achieved—while most of the allocated funds remain unspent.

What we have before us today can only be described as an election year knee-jerk from the Howard government—an ill-thought-out, knee-jerk response announced just days after the Leader of the Opposition offered bipartisan support for a national water summit and proposed the establishment of a single federal water agency. Labor offered a political truce on water so real progress could be made on addressing the critical issues. What was the Prime Minister’s response? A politically driven, election year knee-jerk.

One of the big challenges in rescuing the Murray-Darling system was always going to be the leadership and coordination of the states and other stakeholders. Unfortunately, the Howard government’s record on this has been woeful. After the Keating government led the way on national water reform in the historic bipartisan COAG agreement in 1994, we have had 11 years of Nero-like fiddling from the Prime Minister—11 years in which the government has failed to respond to the clear and repeated warning signs of the problems in the Murray-Darling Basin, 11 long years which have seen the worst drought in eastern Australia in living memory and 11 years during which millions of taxpayers’ dollars have failed to produce any noticeable progress—and yet, and I find this particularly hard to believe, we still do not know something as basic as how much water can be sustainably extracted from the Murray-Darling system. We will not know this until the CSIRO report later this year, some 120 years after the first irrigation schemes began in the Kerang-Pyramid Hill-Swan Hill area of Victoria.

Of course, we now know that climate change, with rising temperatures and falling rainfall patterns across eastern Australia, is steadily exacerbating the Murray’s problems. But what have we seen from the Howard government on this issue? Yes, the same 11 years of delay, denial and inaction. Whether the topic is water management or climate change, the Howard government has become incapable of working with the states to achieve outcomes that are in the national interest. The Prime Minister’s only answer is to spit the dummy and take his bat and ball home because he has to share the crease with the premiers. He has abdicated the responsibility conferred on him by voters at the last election, and I have every confidence that next time around the electorate will note that he no longer wants the job of governing the country.

There is no single silver bullet to address the problems of the Murray-Darling Basin. Rather, the answers will be a series of initiatives in a whole-of-basin approach led by the federal government in collaboration with the basin state governments. These initiatives have to include some innovative and visionary thinking outside the traditional solutions. We can no longer just build more or bigger dams.

I would like to outline some potential solutions. The first is not new. It is called desalination. We may live on the driest continent, but we are surrounded by an abundance of seawater. ‘Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink,’ as Coleridge’s ancient mariner lamented. Desalination must have a part to play in our national water security. There are many examples of desalination plants providing a constant supply of fresh water to some of the driest parts of the world, notably in the Middle East.

Of course, no desalination option is an easy one and there are usually major challenges to overcome. Appropriate disposal or reuse of the saline waste material and the substantial energy cost to power the plant are just two. No-one would argue that these are trivial issues, but surely we are talented enough to solve them. If we can build the Snowy Mountains scheme and the Murrumbidgee and Goulburn irrigation systems, efficient and environmentally responsible desalination plants are surely not beyond our capabilities. And, in addition to local desalination plants servicing coastal cities and urban communities, why shouldn’t we consider something more ambitious?

I have raised this particular idea before in this place, and I make no apology for doing so again, because I believe it warrants serious investigation. I am referring to the potential for a desalination plant on the east coast of Australia to feed fresh water into the headwaters of the Snowy and Murray River systems. The output from the plant—located at a suitable place on the South Coast of New South Wales—would be pumped up into the Snowy Mountains in carefully regulated amounts. Desalination plants consume significant amounts of electricity, but the use of solar, wave or tidal power would reduce both the cost and the greenhouse impact of such a plant. The fresh water would enhance the natural flows in the Snowy and Murray systems, perhaps even generating hydroelectricity on the way at a new power station. If no other use could be found for it, the prevailing ocean currents along the South Coast would help disperse the saline waste in the Tasman Sea.

This concept could provide significant water security to large areas of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia, including the vital food bowl of the Goulburn Valley. Using our natural river systems as distribution channels would not only limit the overall cost of the scheme but also enrich the ecosystems of some of our major rivers. Existing irrigation systems would get a new supply of water, securing the future of the numerous townships that depend on agriculture for their survival. The overall benefits to communities in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia would be substantial, but a project on this scale would have to be a national responsibility. I commend the idea to the federal government for further evaluation.

Desalination plants need not be located in or near our coastal regions. I believe it is worth considering the construction of a desalination plant in north-central or north-western Victoria, some hundreds of kilometres from the coast. Before anyone summons the attendants to have me carried out of the chamber for treatment, let me explain it a little more. Land clearing and the use of European agricultural practices in the Mallee and north-central regions have exacerbated the natural salinity of the soils. The saline groundwater responsible for a lot of the devastation normally has much lower levels of salts than the seawater processed by coastal desalination plants. The desalination effort at an inland plant should, therefore, be less and may require smaller plants consuming less power than a typical coastal one.

The north-west of Victoria is, of course, well placed to utilise alternative energy sources such as solar energy to power such a plant, which would help to reduce any greenhouse impacts. While disposal of the saline waste products may prove a challenge, pipelines can be built quickly and relatively cheaply these days, or more innovative uses of the waste could be researched. If detailed studies show there is potential in desalinating the Mallee’s groundwater then this could slowly return currently contaminated land to either productive agricultural use or to its native state. I do not pretend for one minute that this idea is simple and there are not significant challenges in providing power and disposing of the waste materials, but with long-term climate forecasts predicting higher temperatures and lower rainfall in this part of the continent we surely have to consider all options—even the radical ones I am outlining today.

Another idea for a potential solution is for a scheme closer to my own electorate of Bendigo. Bendigo has an annual growth rate of 1.8 per cent and is the fastest-growing region in central Victoria. Towns along the Calder Highway between Melbourne and Bendigo, including Kyneton and Castlemaine, have also experienced substantial growth in recent years, and even more is planned. This growth, together with the drought conditions over the past decade, has severely stressed our water supplies and led to some of the harshest water restrictions in Australia. Of course, an adequate water supply is critical for the region’s significant agriculture and viticulture industries. But the drought has also had a negative impact on other parts of the regional economy. Business and community leaders say that the lack of water security has adversely affected investment decisions to establish or grow local businesses. Bendigo is also an important regional centre that provides services such as health, education, aged care and banking to the surrounding areas. There is evidence that the skilled and professional staff necessary to fulfil this role are being discouraged from moving to the city because of the drought.

Despite some good recent rains, our water reserves remain far below normal capacity. The reservoirs in the Coliban system are currently about 15 per cent full, while Bendigo’s other main source of supply, Lake Eppalock, is at under five per cent of capacity. As I mentioned earlier, the goldfields pipeline will help secure Bendigo’s water supply, but only if there is sufficient run-off into the dams of the Goulburn-Murray irrigation system. And it will not directly provide any additional security for the other fast-growing towns in my electorate.

A ‘water bank’ may be a solution for them. The Coliban water authority has been investigating the feasibility of accessing groundwater from the vast underground aquifers in the Kyneton and Castlemaine districts. According to the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment, these could be a huge source of good-quality water with salinity levels below 1,000 milligrams of dissolved salt per litre. This opens up the possibility of pumping groundwater into the Coliban reservoir system, benefiting Kyneton, Castlemaine and Malmsbury as well as adding to Bendigo’s total water resources.

But, with the appropriate infrastructure in place, there is an opportunity to go a step further. When the drought conditions ease, surplus surface water could be used to put water back into these natural underground water storages for future use. In other words, we would be establishing a water bank into which water is deposited in wet years and withdrawn as required in drought years. Groundwater is the main water source for many towns and community centres all over Australia and it is also extensively used for irrigation. The Centre for Groundwater Studies has said that artificially recharging aquifers using a technique called ‘aquifer storage and recovery’ can actually lower the salinity of the groundwater. The centre’s research has shown that even saline aquifers can be used to store temporary surpluses of surface water to create new water resources for urban or agricultural use. Recharging can also extend the life of previously overexploited aquifers.

The combined use of groundwater and surface water provides a far more flexible approach to water management in regional areas. With increased environmental concerns about new dams and surface reservoirs, banking surplus surface water in aquifers could assume greater importance. Of course, any artificial recharging will need to be carefully considered so it does not disrupt the natural recharging process during wetter years. Equally, it is surely unacceptable to plunder groundwater resources in drought years without giving any thought to recharging the aquifers in good years.

We hold our water resources in trust for our children and we must be responsible and accountable to the generations that may experience even more severe drought conditions in the future. This brings me back to the need for further water reform. It is unacceptable that the National Water Initiative, agreed to by the federal, state and territory governments in 2004, has yet to be implemented in full. Returning sufficient water to the rivers of the Murray-Darling Basin must be a priority. We must take the necessary steps to ensure the long-term health of all rivers, wetlands and connected groundwater systems in the basin and the health of the communities and businesses that rely on their flows.

An efficient system for water trading is needed to address the fact that water has been overallocated, undervalued and misdirected, but the federal government has been incapable of consulting with and coordinating the key stakeholders in the basin in good faith. All water users, farmers, water scientists, state governments and the broader community need to be involved to ensure the adoption of efficient agricultural practices and to ensure that industrial and urban water users adapt their behaviour to minimise their water use. Yet the Prime Minister unilaterally abandoned complex negotiations between his Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, the member for Wentworth, and the Victorian government just to suit his timetable and Mark Textor’s advice to blame the states for everything in the run-up to the next election.

What we are presented with here today is a less than ideal solution to the problems of our greatest inland river system. It is a tragedy for the nation that this is yet another issue which has required the prospect of an election to stimulate some action from the Howard government. We are still in the most severe drought in our history, but we are a resilient nation and a resilient people. We are able to withstand major disasters like famine, droughts, floods and bushfires—and coalition governments. I will be supporting the amendment moved by my colleague the member for Grayndler.

Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Water Bill 2007. Water is widely regarded as one of Australia’s most precious resources, as we have all heard during this debate. Labor supports the great need for Commonwealth leadership in water policy, especially when waterways cross state boundaries. Unfortunately, it has taken 11 years for this government to take the next step in addressing the problems of the Murray-Darling Basin. In addition to this delayed response by the Commonwealth, the government, now that it has decided to take some action, has not taken it upon itself to consult enough with the state governments and other stakeholders over the contents of the bill.

Another issue that is not addressed in the legislation is the allocation of water licences in the Murray-Darling Basin. There needs to be a full implementation of the National Water Initiative, agreed on in 2004, to help us manage our national water supply. Water is our life source and it is vital to the survival of our country. I feel that there is a consensus among Australians that the Murray is one of the country’s most vital water channels, providing water to thousands of households every day.

The Murray is in dire need of attention. The Murray-Darling Basin experiences some of the most variable rainfall in the world and it is subject to times of great floods, while at other times the basin suffers from drought. However, the basin has not been subject to the conditions it is currently experiencing as a result of, for example, South Australia’s once-in-100-years drought. Within South Australia we have the collective asset of the Lower Lakes, the Murray Mouth and the Coorong, South Australia’s highly valued coastal waterway that is supposed to be an essential migratory bird habitat and has been central to the reproductive cycle of fish life for an aeon. Despite the push by the South Australian government to manage existing water resources and ensure that current water resources are used wisely, we cannot make it rain and we cannot dictate where the rainfall should land. This is why the management of water even at a local level is so important to saving water within my state of South Australia and monitoring the water that is drawn from the River Murray.

In Adelaide, the metropolitan Adelaide stormwater reuse project, which has been funded by the Commonwealth, the state and the private sector in South Australia, reuses water in the western suburbs. Man-made wetlands are designed to act as filters for urban and polluted stormwater that would normally run off into the Gulf St Vincent, polluting the gulf and killing off seagrass, which is one of the breeding grounds for many fish in the Gulf St Vincent. This initiative is a great way for the western suburbs in Adelaide to save water and to assist the environment. This project alone is set to save 1,000 megalitres of water a year by using stormwater to replace water previously drawn from underground water supplies. This pre-treated water will also be pumped back into the underground water supplies beneath Adelaide.

Many schools within my electorate of Hindmarsh are also becoming very water conscious. Schools are administering waterless urinals, water-saving toilets, water-saving taps, installing constant flow valves in bathrooms, fixing leaking taps and making other water dispensers more efficient. Schools are developing water friendly gardens and playing an active role in monitoring the use of water around school grounds. Rainwater tanks are also used by schools throughout the electorate to supply water to school facilities. We should applaud these schools and their efforts to try and save water. Every drop of water that is saved by these schools is less water coming out of the Murray, and that plays a huge role in saving our most precious resource, especially in a time when water is as scarce as we have seen over the last few years.

Some schools and community organisations who have introduced various water-saving measures are, for example in my electorate, the Star of the Sea, Lady Gowrie Child Centre Inc., Plympton Primary School, Sacred Heart College Senior, St Peter’s Woodlands Grammar School, Lockleys Primary School, Edwardstown Primary School, St Michael’s College, St George College and Thebarton Senior College. Every facility is taking steps towards or has already introduced water-saving projects on their premises.

Local councils also play a big role within the electorate of Hindmarsh. They are also doing their part in trying to conserve water. The City of West Torrens and the City of Holdfast Bay both have water-saving projects in place. In the City of West Torrens their project will save mains, bore and reclaimed water through a strategic improvement in irrigation control and efficiency at various locations. These water-saving initiatives will benefit 22 ovals and reserves through irrigation controls, saving water that otherwise would be drawn from the River Murray.

These improved water controls will also utilise data from weather stations, which will analyse variances in rainfall and evapotranspiration rates, and adjust watering times to prevent wastage. In addition to this, systems experiencing leaks will be automatically shut down to prevent further wastage. These improvements will be complemented at 11 sites through the replacement of three hectares of irrigated turf with biodiversity plantings to minimise watering requirements. This project will save 47,199,000 litres of water each year.

The City of Holdfast Bay has also employed several water-saving initiatives that include the installation of rainwater tanks to store rainwater that is collected from the roof of the City of Holdfast Bay Civic Centre. The collected water will be used to flush the toilets. These changes will save 132,600 litres of water each year which, as I said earlier, would otherwise be water drawn from the River Murray. Another project that is currently being looked at by various different groups in my electorate involves extending the reuse of treated wastewater from the Glenelg Wastewater Treatment Plant and harvesting stormwater from within the area bounded approximately by the Glenelg Wastewater Treatment Plant catchment. The reused water from the Glenelg Wastewater Treatment Plant and the stormwater would then be available for irrigation at an alternative location.

Glenelg and the Adelaide parklands were found to be the most concentrated regions for significant reuse potential. The project is set to reuse approximately five gigalitres of water annually. This project has great potential and it attacks the issue of water management directly, by saving water that would otherwise be pumped out into the sea and the Gulf St Vincent. Currently large amounts of the treated effluent from the Glenelg Wastewater Treatment Plant are discharged into the Gulf St Vincent, killing off the seagrass and destroying marine life in our gulf. The gulf is adversely impacted on by the 174,000 megalitres annually of nutrient rich stormwater surging down from the Adelaide Hills and over the Adelaide flats into the gulf, carrying all the pollutants that destroy the environment within the gulf.

The prevention of run-off from the Adelaide Plains is probably the greatest South Australian environmental challenge facing our coast, the residents of metropolitan Adelaide and our governments in this and the next decade. The ongoing construction of wetlands in Adelaide’s northern suburbs—adjacent to the Parafield Airport and beyond—and associated aquifer storage and replenishment initiatives, of which there are now about two dozen in the greater Adelaide area, have been encouraging for quite a few years. We should take a closer look at this as a substantial element of our future supply of water. In areas other than the northern suburbs there has been substantial energy applied to similar projects, such as within the Patawalonga catchment at Morphettville, which I have mentioned previously.

We must support these initiatives. We must support initiatives within all of metropolitan Adelaide and within all of Australia because, sourcing investment from wherever they can get it, community groups do their best. As I said earlier, in the southern suburbs—including northern Adelaide, the Barossa catchment and the Onkaparinga catchment respectively—aquifer storage capacities, in places, are expected to exceed the supply of available stormwater. A tremendous amount of highly positive work can be done in these catchments to improve the health of the environment of the Gulf St Vincent and to secure a substantial supply of water for many years to come, at least for industrial, horticultural and recreational use and even for human consumption. I also support the use of the aquifer storage and replenishment schemes being pursued throughout the Adelaide Plains wherever stormwater and land with access to the suitable aquifer are available. In addition, there is also a substantial capacity within my own electorate of Hindmarsh, whether it be through utilising the first or second tertiary sedimentary aquifers.

The strategy of minimising unnatural stormwater flow into the gulf is advancing steadily in terms of outcomes in some areas and continued research in others. This strategy will require additional investment from all players: local industry, local government, state government and, of course, the federal government. I am sure that for this investment the rewards will be—maybe now and certainly in the not too distant future—well worth the time, energy and opportunity costs that they require. Labor certainly believes so, and it is concerned and determined to make Australia as a nation more water savvy, more water wise and more water secure because, without water, we cannot sustain our future. We need to work collectively with the states to ensure good outcomes and a good supply of water to ensure that our nation continues.

Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Labor Party has a proud history of leadership in the matters of water policy specifically and environmental issues more broadly. It is a travesty that it has taken this government over 10 years to show an interest in and to take action on a matter that is so critical to our nation. From statements made by the government, it is apparent that the government still does not understand the link between climate change and our dwindling water supply. There can be no doubt that climate change will directly impact on water supply, temperature and the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.

For Australia, the key climate change impact will be on our water supply. There will be less rainfall and increased evaporation. Water problems will intensify in southern and eastern Australia over the next 20 to 30 years. There can be no argument, even from the sceptics, that climate change has created worsening climate conditions in Australia. We are still experiencing the effects of the worst drought in the last 100 years. Our water supplies are being depleted, and there are drastic water restrictions in most cities and towns in southern and eastern Australia. Temperatures are rising, with 11 of the 12 warmest years on record occurring between 1995 and 2006. The melting of the Arctic icecaps and retreating mountain glaciers are contributing to rising sea levels.

For Labor, water supply issues and climate change are, in reality, two sides of the same coin. Without a strategy for climate change you are not in a position to have a strategy for resolving the water crisis, and without a strategy for water you cannot really deal with climate change—and neither is able to be tackled without a long-term strategy. The Murray-Darling Basin is not coping now. We are informed by scientists that Australia as a continent will just have to get used to having less water and maximising what we do have.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release its latest assessment of the impact of climate change on Australia later this year. The contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change on Australia and New Zealand, Climate change 2007: impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, stated:

Since 1950, there has been a 0.3ºC - 0.7ºC centigrade warming, with more heat waves, fewer frosts, more rain in north-west Australia and ... less rain in southern and eastern Australia and ... an increase in the intensity of Australian droughts, and a rise in sea level of about 70mm.

The same report, on page 515, tells us that Australia will have up to 20 per cent more droughts over most of Australia by 2030 and up to 80 per cent more droughts by 2070 in south-western Australia. Table 11.6, on page 518, predicts that, by 2020, 60 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef, our great national and international treasure, could be regularly bleached and, by 2050, 97 per cent could be bleached.

On page 510 of the IPCC’s third assessment report, the report which precedes this one, the following impacts were assessed as important for Australia:

• Water resources are likely to become increasingly stressed ... with rising competition for water supply;
• Warming is likely to threaten the survival of species in some natural ecosystems, notably in alpine regions, south-western Australia, coral reefs and freshwater wetlands;
• Regional reductions in rainfall ... are likely to make agricultural activities particularly vulnerable;
• Increasing coastal vulnerability to tropical cyclones, storm surges and sea-level rise;
• Increased frequency of high intensity rainfall …

The third assessment report concluded that a significant vulnerability in climate change is to be expected in Australia over the next 100 years. The report from Working Group II for the fourth assessment report commented specifically on the Murray-Darling Basin, on page 516. The report indicated that the Murray-Darling Basin currently accounts for about 70 per cent of irrigated crops and pastures. It predicts that:

Annual streamflow in the Basin is likely to fall 10-25% by 2050 and 16-48% per cent by 2100.

Labor governments over the past 60 years have taken the initiative to resolve national challenges to our water supply, as well as increasing awareness of broader environmental issues, including climate change. It was the Whitlam government which took the active role in urban and water infrastructure in the mid-1970s. The government ensured that the outer suburbs of Sydney and other growth areas of our cities had sewerage and other basic water services. One of the first actions of the new Whitlam government was the establishment of the River Murray Working Party in 1973. This was the first time a government had begun to take serious action in relation to water quality and salinity. The Hawke government, under the leadership of Brian Howe, ensured urban renewal and revitalised our cities. It was Labor which delivered regular water supply and services to many urban areas. The Keating government initiated further water reform using the COAG process. So, on this side of the House, our credentials in relation to water reform are well established.

The government, however, has sat back for 10 years and watched while the Murray and Darling rivers have been dramatically reduced. ‘Climate change’ is now a phrase that is part of the vernacular. Urban water supplies are rationed through water restrictions. I acknowledge the Commonwealth’s Australian water fund, but I am appalled that in the 2006-07 budget only $77 million out of a budget of $337 million had been allocated. In January this year, the Prime Minister introduced his National Plan for Water Security. This was the announcement promising a radical and permanent change in Australia’s water management practices. The Prime Minister proposed a $10 billion package and a 10-point plan to improve water efficiency and to address overallocation of water in rural Australia. Labor supported the plan. The Water Bill 2007 deals with matters relating to the Murray-Darling Basin which arise from that announcement. While Labor supports the bill, we do, however, remain concerned that the government still has not taken any action on urban water infrastructure. A national water plan that leaves out 17 million water users must be considered to be lacking in foresight.

The Leader of the Opposition and the shadow minister for infrastructure and water announced Labor’s Water Security Plan for Towns and Cities earlier this year. Labor has taken a pragmatic approach to addressing the impact of the water crisis in our towns and cities. I recall when I was shadow minister for urban development I spoke with some of the local mayors in my electorate. I asked what were the challenges facing their local councils. Without exception they commented on the need for renewal of infrastructure, particularly the replacement of water and sewage pipes. Canterbury, Hurstville and Bankstown are all long-established communities with infrastructure to support populations living on quarter acre blocks. Today, decades later, that infrastructure is called on to support hugely increasing populations, with sometimes hundreds of people living in units and villas. These take up the space of three to four traditional quarter acre blocks supporting 12 to 15 people. The original pipe work, stormwater systems and drains are old and decaying, yet the cost of replacement infrastructure is well beyond any local council budget.

Australia has around 175,000 kilometres of water mains. Each year, 10 per cent of water is lost from urban water systems in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth alone. The National Water Commission has said that up to 30 per cent of water in water mains can be lost through leaks and burst pipes. Labor has proposed that in government it would invest in urban and rural water projects to secure our future water supply, fix leaky pipes and ensure that 30 per cent of water is recycled nationally by 2015. We would do this by working in partnership with government and local water authorities to minimise water loss; investing in modern, more efficient water infrastructure and, where appropriate, refurbishing older pipes and water systems; and providing funding for practical projects to save water.

Labor has proposed a Major Cities program that envisages a renewed role for the Commonwealth in our cities in the provision of transport, energy and communications as well as water infrastructure. This is just one aspect of the many proposals Labor has put for tackling climate change and its related manifestations. More broadly, Labor has been disappointed in the government’s lack of action in implementing the National Water Initiative, which we supported. Labor has called for Commonwealth leadership on water, the appointment of a Commonwealth minister for water, the creation of a single Commonwealth water authority, the commitment of more funds for water management and efficiency programs across Australia, the development of water trading and economic instruments to drive reform and the existing $2 billion Australian water fund to be used on practical projects. The government has to date articulated broad principles around allocating water for the environment, restoring flows to stressed rivers and water quality objectives; yet these remain general and unspecific, the current bill excepted. We must have clearer national goals, targets and benchmarks in river health, water recycling and water quality.

In 1991, the year after I entered this parliament, I spoke in a grievance debate about the quality of Labor’s vision for the future. I stated that I joined the Labor Party because it was the party of social justice and equity and of vision. I reiterate my words because they still ring true and have pertinence to this debate:

A close look at the history books will reveal that the Labor Party, at Federal and State levels, has been the party which has had the courage to make visionary decisions. The Snowy Mountains River scheme, World Heritage listing of the Franklin River and Kakadu National Park, Medicare, the provision of legal aid, the Opera House, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, greater access to higher education and the better incomes and retirement policy are but some of Labor’s initiatives. They are now recognised as great achievements yet were, and in some instances still are, bitterly opposed by our conservative opponents.

Only Labor has the vision and the commitment to establish the necessary projects, benchmarks and goals to ensure that this country deals with the reality of climate change. What we have proposed deals with the issue at an international level, a national level and down to the local level. It is disappointing that the National Water Initiative that was agreed to and signed at the 25 June meeting of COAG was not implemented. Australia needs a national initiative to deal with the water crisis we are facing, not just a reaction to the Murray-Darling Basin. This agreement included objectives, outcomes and agreed actions to be undertaken by governments across eight interrelated elements of water management: water access entitlements and planning framework; water markets and trading; best practice water pricing; integrated management of water for environmental and other public benefit outcomes; water resource accounting; urban water reform; knowledge and capacity building; and community partnerships and adjustment.

I commend the second reading amendment proposed by the member for Grayndler to the House which importantly notes the need to ensure the full implementation of the National Water Initiative principles agreed to in 2004. Finally, it is important to point out that, if a federal Labor government were elected, I think it would be better placed in relation to projects such as this to work cooperatively with the state and territory Labor governments. We would have a genuine partnership rather than a hectoring and lecturing federal government that tries to ride over the states.

Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Revenue and Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Lap dogs.

Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The minister at the table continues to interject. I think the electors of Dickson will fix him up at the next federal election. He has already had one career change. There was a change in technology in his former profession. You have videorecording of interviews with suspects, which I think get away from some of those—

Harry Quick (Franklin, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! I remind the member for Banks to come back to the topic, please.

Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

more awful practices that members of his former profession practised, using telephone books. I just say this—

Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Revenue and Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You hate police. You’ve said it before in this place. You hate police.

Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The minister uses a verbal. I challenge the minister. He has made the interjection, which I will not repeat and which I find offensive. Mr Deputy Speaker, through you, I challenge the minister to produce one word of what he uttered—the filthy verbal that he just uttered—in relation to me and my attitude to police, because it is not on the public record. I am entitled to correct the record. He cannot produce it. He should shut up and let me get on with my speech.

The matter before the House is supported by the opposition, but I say that Labor is better placed to do a better job. The government have run out of steam. The way they have conducted themselves in relation to these matters shows that they are only interested in bullyboy tactics. They are playing the man in each instance. It is all with an eye to politics. I suggest that the Australian people and the community will be better placed with a federal Labor government implementing plans such as this.

Bob Sercombe (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker Quick, like your good self and our mate sitting next to me, the member for Port Adelaide, I am not intending to recontest the rapidly forthcoming election, so I want to take the opportunity of the Water Bill 2007 to make a few valedictory remarks as we approach the date of the federal election. There were some people unkind enough to suggest that, given that there is a water debate, I might take the opportunity to pass a bit of water, but I assured them that my liver is in fairly good form; so, by and large, I intend to be fairly generous in my remarks.

I think all members understand that it is an honour to serve the Australian people and constituents in the national parliament. That is certainly how I have felt since 1996 when I arrived in this parliament to take over from my friend a former minister, Alan Griffiths, in the electorate of Maribyrnong. Prior to that, as you know, I served in the Victorian state parliament. 1996 was not a great year for members of the Australian Labor Party to arrive in this federal parliament; nonetheless, I have thoroughly enjoyed it and hope I have made some modest contribution to the life of this parliament, albeit as a member of the opposition.

I particularly found valuable the work that members, including me, do on a variety of committees—certainly in this parliament, the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade; with the minister at the table in earlier parliaments, the Joint Committee on the Australian Crime Commission; the Joint Committee on Corporations and Securities; the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation; the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Communications, Information Technology and the Arts; and the Privileges Committee—and, for one particular term in the parliament, I was also an Opposition Whip. For the bulk of the life of this particular parliament, I have had the honour and privilege to have been the opposition spokesperson in areas of policy that I regard as extremely important, which include our relationship with our Pacific neighbours and overseas aid issues. I will say a little bit more about that if time permits during this contribution.

All members of parliament, including me, rely very heavily on other people. I thought it was appropriate on this occasion to acknowledge a number of people, particularly the significant number of electorate staff members whose services have been provided to me: Jan Chantry, Peter Zabrdac, Ange Kenos, Leonie Nardo, Dave Peebles, Sue Cant and, in earlier manifestations, Carol Sewart and the ever-colourful Robert Mammarella. Of course, there are many volunteers, many fine people, who have made a substantial contribution to my time in parliament—Rod Holesgrove in particular, whom I want to single out in acknowledgement of his excellent services.

As members, I think we all significantly appreciate the support we get from the staff of this parliament. There is a multitude of staff: committee staff, clerks, drivers and attendants. There are two that I want to make particular reference to: one is my friend up there in the box, Lupco Jonceski, who has tried over time to improve my capacity in the Macedonian language. I think Lupco was mistaken about my talents in that respect, because I am probably the only person in this parliament who has ever spoken the Macedonian language in the chamber, and that was on the occasion of the tragic death, by plane accident, of the former President of that country. I probably misled Lupco in that process. I also want to particularly acknowledge Ian Harris, the Clerk of the House of Representatives. Ian and I go back a long way. Ian and I joined the Commonwealth Public Service on the same day in 1971 and, needless to say, he has had a significantly more distinguished career than I. He does an excellent job indeed.

Of course it would be absolutely inappropriate to not mention others who provide fantastic support—my immediate family: my wife, Carmen; my children, Nadine and Rory; my daughter-in-law, Melissa; and two wonderfully time-consuming but delightful grandchildren that we have now acquired, Harper and Milla. They make political life and some of the contingencies and difficulties of political life somewhat more bearable.

It has been a very great honour to serve the electorate of Maribyrnong. I am very grateful for the extensive support I have had within that electorate. Maribyrnong is an interesting electorate. I am continually impressed by the significant number of people who want to make a difference to the life of the community by contributing. It is also an extraordinarily culturally and socially diverse electorate. There are probably in excess of 100 different cultural groups in the electorate. It is rich and diverse.

I particularly enjoyed working in that part of Melbourne with organisations that are interested in building bridges. I want to single out a few—which is always difficult but there are a few—that I think ought to be mentioned. One particular organisation, the Vojvodina Club, is a club of people from the former Yugoslavia led by Rada and her husband, John Ovuka. Given the tragedies of the former Yugoslavia, particularly in the 1990s, it is great to be able to work with an organisation that is not interested in dividing people; it is interested in uniting them. This is an organisation that is particularly impressive in involving people from almost all the nationalities of the old Yugoslavia. There are the Maltese soccer clubs George Cross and Green Gully—fine organisations. Whilst they have a Maltese heart they bring together people from that rich mosaic of cultures that are the western suburbs of Melbourne. The Italian Community of Keilor Association is another fine organisation.

My interest in interethnic and interfaith communication and dialogue was reflected in some modest way in this place when I was able, a few years ago, to co-sponsor, along with the member for Farrer from the other side of the chamber, the first Ramadan event held in the federal parliament, as an exercise in promoting interfaith connections between Australians of different backgrounds.

I have enjoyed working with organisations like the Keilor East RSL in my electorate. That is a particularly fine organisation that just last weekend hosted a fantastic function to honour Australian peacekeepers—a growing and important component of our veteran community and one that perhaps sometimes does not get the attention and acknowledgement it deserves. I also take this opportunity to refer to another organisation in the electorate with which I have a particularly strong emotional bond, and that is the Holloway Aged Care Services. I have a particular emotional bond with that organisation because it is named after my maternal grandmother. It is therefore an organisation that I have a particularly strong feeling for.

The debate on the Water Bill really reflects the increasing importance in Australia of a sustainable environmental and economic future. In this election year, those issues are clearly going to become much more important in the debate. I am very confident that, under the superb leadership of Kevin Rudd, Australia will have presented to it real and vibrant alternatives to achieve those outcomes for the benefit of all Australians.

My main interest, however, over recent times in this parliament has been our own immediate region—the Pacific and particularly Melanesia. It is a region of substantial challenges—challenges of achieving sustainable development, challenges of integrating the region into global development and challenges in relation to social and health indicators. Just last week I had the opportunity to spend the best part of a fortnight in the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. I took the opportunity in the Solomon Islands to meet a very wide range of people associated with the Solomon Islands government—in particular Prime Minister Sogavare—and RAMSI. I took that opportunity to reinforce to the Prime Minister and a number of his officials the important elements of the bipartisanship that has characterised the broad thrust of the Australian approach to the RAMSI operation. In fact, I reminded him that the principal criticism to date that this side of parliament has made of the present government in relation to RAMSI is that it took them three years too long to get off their backsides and respond to the pressing needs of the Solomon Islands and to provide support. I emphasised to the Prime Minister the importance of a prompt resolution of outstanding issues in relation to Julian Moti.

I did reinforce that, if there is a change of government in Australia as we hope, whilst the substance of those issues is likely to be still vigorously taken up by an incoming Australian Labor government, they can expect the style to move away from the megaphone diplomacy, the overhyped reaction and the failure to engage on a genuine basis with regional leaders, which has really underpinned more than anything else the failings of this government’s policies in the Pacific and has really made Australia’s strategic position in the region increasingly difficult. In my view, substantial issues of style, a failure to engage and a perception of arrogance underpin these sorts of problems, but there are ways forward. A fresh start in dealings with the region, particularly with Melanesia, presents an outstanding opportunity and a movement away from the sorts of counterproductive actions that are regularly taken by the Australian government. We do have poisonous relationships in the region. That is not in Australia’s interests, and it is certainly not in the interests of our neighbourhood.

I came across a particularly silly example of how this poison is in fact exacerbated. I had some discussions about what is called the ‘fifth freedom rights’ for Solomon Airlines. Solomon Airlines wants to fly to Brisbane via Vanuatu. There is no reason on earth that affects any Australian interest why that ought not to occur, but for some reason the Australian government—presumably to tighten the noose—has decided to decline that permission. In the process, the Australian government is dramatically undermining the commercial viability of the airline at a time when Australia has an interest in viable civil aviation in the region. More to the point, it is actually significantly damaging Australian commercial interests that have a stake in the successful operations of that airline. We have a case here of politics by hissy fit by the Minister for Foreign Affairs in the way he conducts his relationships in the region and contributes to the poison in the relationships.

I also had the opportunity to go to Papua New Guinea. It is a particularly fascinating time for that country, given the immense majority that the Grand Chief, Sir Michael Somare, amassed in the PNG parliament in his election yesterday as Prime Minister. Once again, there are real challenges in this crucial relationship, which is so important to Australia and its strategic interests. We had a case study just the other day of our foreign minister’s diplomatic success, when he provoked the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea to tell him to ‘go to hell’. That shows the high regard in which our foreign minister’s diplomacy is held in Port Moresby. It is indicative, once again, of a fairly poisonous relationship. We need a circuit-breaker in that relationship. We need a new administration in Australia to tackle the issues productively, not counterproductively as the present Australian government insists on doing.

There are crucial issues in the Pacific that require the vigour and vision that a Rudd Labor government will bring to them. In this context, I want to pay particular tribute to the absolutely seminal work carried out by the late Senator Peter Cook, who, in 2003, chaired a Senate committee that set the strategic framework for the development over time of a Pacific economic and political community. This community would enable some of the core challenges of the region to be undertaken in a spirit of genuine partnership and genuine engagement. Those challenges include the extraordinary environmental challenges of the region: the rising sea levels, and the impacts on whole countries, such as Tuvalu and Kiribati, of those rising sea levels; the effects of coral bleaching; and other things that are impacted by climate change.

There is an opportunity to deal with the key challenges of the youth bulge, particularly in Melanesia, where substantially increased numbers of alienated young people are very much at the heart of so much of the social tension. There is an opportunity for Australia to consider some serious programs designed to provide opportunities on a cooperative basis for those young people, such as those that New Zealand has just implemented. There are challenges of sustainable development, including taking forward Labor’s concept of establishing a Pacific Development Trust. The vision that a Rudd government will bring to bear on this gives me great inspiration for the future. I look forward to that event occurring later this year, in Australia’s interests as well as the region’s interests.

Australian foreign policy is not just about the Pacific; it is about a range of other issues as well. One of the great benefits I have had as a member of parliament has been a limited engagement with some aspects of that from opposition. However, I think we need as a parliament—across the board but particularly in the context of a new government, hopefully—to re-engage much more effectively at the multilateral level. We need to take the United Nations much more seriously. We need to look at a range of other multilateral institutions, including in our own region—the Pacific Islands Forum, for example. We also need to look more seriously at the opportunities that the Commonwealth presents.

We need to be cognisant of the opportunities that arise from the growth of China as an increasingly important power in the region and indeed the world. It is now Australia’s major trading partner. As a humble backbencher, I have had some opportunities for very limited connections there. I was invited in May this year to deliver a lecture at Beijing university, for example. I have had a longstanding association with China, particularly through Wu Bangguo, Chairman of the National People’s Congress and No. 2 in the hierarchy. As a somewhat younger man, I escorted him when he visited Australia as a party official from Shanghai.

I have also had opportunities to have some limited engagement in Middle East issues. Once again, these are crucial issues for Australia to take an active interest in. One of the spin-offs of having been a member of the Australian National University Council is that I have served for a number of years on the board of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the ANU, which is the premier body in Australia for teaching and research in Middle Eastern studies. Through that process it has some opportunity to make a contribution, particularly in the development of Australia’s relationship to the Gulf States and, perhaps on a more difficult basis, to promote some limited second-track diplomatic efforts in relation to Iran. Australia is one of the Western countries that continues to have reasonably normal diplomatic relations with Iran. On a second-track basis, there are some opportunities for us to play a useful role.

I referred earlier to former Yugoslavs in my electorate. I must say that I have been quite impressed with the limited niche opportunities that come up from time to time for Australia to play an honest broker role in south-eastern Europe. One place where that has occurred—and it happened in part under a former Liberal Party member of the national parliament, Jim Short—is Cyprus. It seems to me that, in relation to south-eastern Europe, there may well be interesting opportunities for Australian diplomacy to supply good officers to provide some capacity to assist in the resolution of issues there. That would enhance our international prestige in the process. But, on the basis that this country has significant populations whose cultural roots go back to those areas—as is the case with Cyprus—and that people in Australia have a capacity to live in peace amongst themselves, Australia, with no axe to grind, can play a very useful role.

I come back to the point that it is in our dealings with our own region that we need to make dramatic improvements. I believe that, ultimately, the circuit-breaker that can be provided to enhance Australia’s strategic dealings in that region will come about from the election of a Rudd government. I look forward to that day with great anticipation.

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Water Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Water Bill 2007, before the House, is a quantum leap into the future compared to the current lowest common denominator approach to decision making on water management in the Murray-Darling Basin. The Water Bill and the National Plan for Water Security will accelerate the 2004 National Water Initiative, which was signed by all Australian governments. The bill implements reform of governance in the Murray-Darling Basin through the establishment of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. This is an enormous step forward from the current governance model, which has remained largely unchanged since 1915 and requires the agreement of all basin jurisdictions before anything can be done. Through this bill, for the first time in the basin’s history, one basin-wide institution accountable to the government will be responsible for planning the basin’s water resources. It will be expert and it will be independent. For the first time, the governance of the basin will reflect the hydrology of the basin—one interconnected system managed for the first time in our history in the national interest.

The reforms in the bill will establish consistent rules for water charging and an efficient operation of the water market. There will be a Commonwealth environmental water holder established to be the custodian of water access entitlements and, under the bill, the Bureau of Meteorology will collect up-to-date, accurate and comprehensive information on water use and availability across Australia. Investment in metering and monitoring has been overlooked for far too long. You cannot manage what you do not measure, and we will set that right with this bill.

I want to address a number of the issues that were raised in the course of the debate. I thank all honourable members for their contributions, but I have to correct a number of the misconceptions that apparently the members of the opposition are labouring under. The first is the criticism that the bill has been developed without adequate consultation. You only have to read the testimony given in the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts inquiry last Friday to see how much consultation was had. We have had countless meetings with the states, with water ministers and their officials, with stakeholders, with irrigators and with farming organisations. Their comments, suggestions and input have been introduced into the bill. It is a genuinely collaborative work, and I want to thank all of the stakeholders, the three states that have played such a constructive role—Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia—and of course the farming organisations, in particular through their peak body, the NFF. If I may invidiously single out one person from the NFF who has made an enormous contribution to that, it is Laurie Arthur.

The member for Grayndler made a number of observations which I say without any rancour reflect a misunderstanding of the legislation. He suggested that clause 77, which talks about risk sharing in the bill reflecting the obligations or the commitments under the NWI, amounted to compulsory acquisition. The fact is that compulsory acquisition is ruled out in this bill. It is not part of the government’s policy, and we have made it express in the legislation that there is no power for compulsory acquisition. However, a central plank of the reforms under the National Water Initiative was to move from the old system of volumetric licences to water access entitlements that are a perpetual or ongoing share of the available resource.

If the amount of water available in the future is reduced—and this is canvassed and contemplated in the NWI as a possibility—a risk-sharing formula applies to spread those risks between water users, the states and the Commonwealth. The bill achieves the codification of the Commonwealth’s NWI responsibilities for risk sharing. That is not acquisition. The legal status of water entitlements is not affected. Importantly, through these arrangements, the government is meeting its NWI commitments. These arrangements have been agreed to by all governments and are supported by farming organisations and farmers around Australia and have been ever since 2004. So, with respect to the member for Grayndler, he misunderstands the nature of the legislation and indeed the National Water Initiative itself.

The other criticism, which was made by the member for Kingsford Smith, was that the bill does not address climate change. That is one of the most absurd comments that has been made on this legislation. This bill is all about meeting the prospect of greater water scarcity in the future. This bill is an exercise in adaptation to climate change. What is one of the most significant likely impacts of climate change in Australia? A drier and hotter future. What will that mean? Less rainfall and less run-off, so less water. What does this bill do; what does the National Plan for Water Security do? They enable us to make every drop count. They enable us to use water efficiently and ensure that we can adapt to climate change. This is the largest national-scale program of adaptation to water scarcity that I am aware of anywhere in the world, and to describe it as not responding to climate change is absurd. That is the exact reverse of what the bill seeks to do. This is all about recognising the prospect of hotter and drier times and being able to meet them.

This bill is the first of its kind in 106 years. This is the first time the Commonwealth parliament has sought to take charge of the management of our largest connected system of surface water and groundwater in the national interest. I quoted Alfred Deakin in my second reading speech, saying that it is a necessary consequence of reforms that have gone before—and of course it is. It is a necessary consequence of the times we live in. No matter how much the Labor Party grind their teeth and how much they object to recognising it, the simple truth is that it was John Howard and the Howard government that had the courage to take this challenge of managing the waters of the Murray-Darling Basin out of the too-hard basket where it had languished for more than a century and have sought to deal with it in a way that will ensure this great system of waters above the ground and below the ground—which are all connected—will be managed for the first time in the national interest. The reforms in the bill are needed to meet the future challenges facing water management in the Murray-Darling Basin. We need these reforms to ensure the viability of our water dependent industries, to ensure healthy and vibrant communities and to ensure the sustainability of the basin’s natural environment.

I again want to thank and repeat my thanks to everybody who has contributed to this debate, for the efforts of the states which have supported this exercise and to the irrigators, environmentalists and many stakeholders who have helped to deliver a bill that will deliver great benefits to the basin. Officials from the Commonwealth have worked tirelessly and been supported by officials from the states. They have made an enormous contribution to this legislation and, in many respects, it is as much their work as it is the work of those of us who are legislating here tonight. Finally, I would like to thank the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts for their important contribution through their report, which was delivered today. I commend the bill to the House.

Debate adjourned.