Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak to the Murray-Darling Basin Commission—Report for 2005-06 and to my motion of 8 February to take note of the document. The report sets out the work the commission has done over the period 2005-06. The commission has done a good job over many years—since Federation, I think. It has been constrained many times because each of the relevant states and the Commonwealth has always had an interest in this, and anything that was done had to be done in conjunction with all of the states. Trying to get all of the states to agree when they had very differing interests has always been a great difficulty. I attended a number of Murray-Darling Basin ministerial meetings when I was the relevant minister and they always struck me as a group of people who were more interested in their own outcomes than in the outcomes of the nation and in the outcomes for the Murray-Darling Basin itself.

Because of that, I am delighted with the Prime Minister’s initiative to try and get the Commonwealth to have some form of control over the whole of the Murray-Darling Basin system. I have not been closely enough involved in that and have not followed it closely enough to understand exactly what this means in practice and how it is going to be implemented. If the states do not agree to allow the Commonwealth to do what is right for Australia—and, as I understand it, one of the states is still being a bit reticent—then I hope that a referendum might be held to constitutionally provide that, where rivers cross state boundaries, they become the responsibility of the national government rather than of individual state governments. If all the states agree to the Prime Minister’s proposal, that will not be necessary and we will have a national government making decisions that are in the national interest.

I can well understand why New South Wales were so keen to come on board, because New South Wales particularly had grossly overallocated water in that state from the Murray-Darling Basin system for many years. They were almost criminal in the way they allocated water without any real care for where the water was going to come from when it had been allocated. That is fine in wet times but, when it does not rain, when there is no water flowing, what do you do? Quite clearly, the New South Wales government would have been left with a huge bill to buy back water that they had overallocated. I always thought, in many of the meetings I attended, that it was a bit rich of New South Wales—having given out all that water, having been paid for it, in many instances, and having got a lot of political kudos from allocating water licences to landowners—to turn around and say, ‘We’ve done the wrong thing in the past but we want everyone else to pay for it.’ Under the Prime Minister’s proposal, as I understand it, the Commonwealth taxpayer will end up buying back water as a result of New South Wales’s folly over many years. As I say, for that reason I can understand why Mr Iemma was the first one out of the blocks to say, ‘Great idea!’

I hope that by the Commonwealth taking ‘control’ of the Murray they will have a much closer interest in what happens in that very special part of Australia. If it turns out that, for domestic political reasons, the Victorian government decides not to come along with this proposal, then I hope that the Commonwealth government will seriously consider some sort of referendum to constitutionally allow the government to do what I think should have been done at the time of Federation. As I understand it, in a lot of the discussions that were held leading up to Federation there was consideration of whether the Murray-Darling Basin system should be a national responsibility. As it turned out, it was not made one, but perhaps, 100 years on, it is time to look at that. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.