Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Corporate Governance and Responsibility) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you. We had the government in December saying, ‘It is essentially business as usual’—the framework that has been in place for a number of years—and then on 25 January we had a completely different approach. The government want us to believe that this has been properly costed, properly considered and properly thought through, and they want us to believe that this is nothing to do with politics. It is a very difficult position for the government to take and, as I said, I did not see or hear Senator Heffernan defending the government’s response, which is usually what happens in the context of government responses to reports. Perhaps the parliamentary secretary will do so. Perhaps Senator Joyce will do so. We will wait and see. What we have is yet another indication that the 25 January Murray-Darling Basin plan was hastily prepared for political reasons. We on this side of the chamber have real concerns that it has not been properly planned and properly costed. We know, for example, that at the 7 November meeting the Prime Minister said:

We’ve agreed that we have to collaborate and have a basin wide approach to the problem. We’ve quite specifically asked a group of officials to be convened by my Department to report by the 15th of December to us on contingency planning to secure urban and other water supplies during the water year 2007-08 ... We’ve also agreed to accelerate the implementation of proposals under the National Water Initiative ...

What is extraordinary is that just over a month ago the formal response to a government report on rural water usage stated that the way forward on water was business as usual. In November last year—just a short time ago—we had the Prime Minister articulating the same view, saying that we are going to work through this collaboratively. Then we had a 25 January announcement. All this evidence suggests that until at least mid-December 2006 it was clear the Commonwealth was not planning to take over the Murray-Darling Basin. If the government did envisage the direction of the January statement then you would have to ask why the response to the Senate committee report was prepared and tabled in the terms that it was.

We do not want policy on the run on these important issues. Yet we have a Howard government that is very politically clever—very clever at making the announcement when it thinks that there is sufficient public pressure to do so and when the politics are right. What we do not have, with due respect, Senator Heffernan, is a government that thinks long term about the long-term sustainability challenges facing this country. The government is interested in short-term political solutions and that is why we have comments from climate change sceptics such as Minister Macfarlane last year when he dismissed the Al Gore film as entertainment. We now have a government that is trying to portray itself as being serious about issues such as water and climate change. I think people will become increasingly aware of the way in which the government seeks to respond with a political fix rather than with a long-term policy position in the long-term interests of the nation to address long-term challenges into the future.