Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This week in the debate on the Water Amendment Bill 2008, Minister Penny Wong raised the issue of Labor’s disastrous water buyback scheme for the Murray-Darling Basin. Minister Wong said, ‘Dr Stone does not mind water purchase as long as it is only in New South Wales.’ As the member for Murray I have, of course, long condemned and totally opposed the Rudd government’s $3.1 billion water buyback scheme, where they claim they only buy water from so-called ‘willing sellers’. Labor’s water purchasing policy, where they first committed $50 million and then have multiplied that by many times to $3.1 billion since they entered the farmers’ water market, has completely distorted traded water prices. Drought-stressed farmers trying to buy water to keep their orchards and vineyards alive or dairy farmers trying to save their pastures or finish a crop have been totally priced out of the market. By whom? The government, who have raided the market by having such deep pockets—$3.1 billion. Can you imagine the impact on prices?

I have condemned Labor’s water buyback policy since it was introduced. It is a stupid, naive policy which is doing nothing to add environmental flows to the Murray but is doing a great deal to ensure that rural communities can never recover from the drought. They simply no longer have affordable water access. Of course, Labor is refusing to put on-farm water-saving investment into the system. Certainly, Labor has said it will put investment into state owned infrastructure, but, when it comes to helping farmers do such things as invest in subsurface irrigation or centre pivot-type sprays, the Labor government has walked away.

Even worse than the buyback scheme, of course, is the north-south pipeline. Here is a project funded by the Victorian government which is to take up to a third of the Goulburn system water available in a dry year and pipe that water to Melbourne for their potable and non-potable use—for example, for car washing and toilet flushing. I can tell you that there is no environmentally, economically or socially responsible rationale that can be used to justify this project. It amounts to criminal damage to the Murray-Darling Basin, whose main Murray tributary is the Goulburn River. It also devastates the water dependent food-growing economy of northern Victoria. This is a serious problem that should be addressed, and I ask that Labor does that.