Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

Firstly, in relation to the IGA, as the Senate would be aware, first ministers signed an intergovernmental agreement on 3 July at the COAG meeting in relation to the Murray-Darling Basin to implement the reforms necessary to meet the current needs of the basin and to protect and enhance its social, environmental and economic values in the long term. I think it is worth reminding the Senate of some of the important things that the IGA puts in place. For the first time it brings together under one body the management of the Murray-Darling Basin through the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, and I have already appointed a South Australian, Mr Rob Freeman, to head that up. Of course, the authority will, for the first time, create a basin-wide plan and a basin-wide cap, with the Commonwealth minister having sign-off.

This is a complex reform. It is a reform that, senators will recall, the former government and the former minister promised and were never able to deliver. We are working through the detail of the implementation of the IGA with the states. In the intergovernmental agreement, it was agreed that the states, the territory and the Commonwealth would use their best endeavours to enable new legislative arrangements to commence on 1 November. We continue to work through the detail of that with the state governments. Senator, I know your party and other senators in the chamber have made some comments in relation to the legislative arrangements governing the Murray-Darling Basin, and they have asked what the constitutional powers and so forth are.

I want to make this point: I invite the Greens and the crossbenches to consider the advice that was provided to the Senate committee and the clearly difficult situation that exists in the basin. I remind the Senate that the primary issue we are confronting in the Murray-Darling Basin, particularly in the southern Murray, is record low inflows. The head of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, Wendy Craik, said that we continue to set records we do not wish we were setting. None of the issues around constitutional power and legislative authority deal with or address the primary problem, which is this: we simply do not have enough water at the moment to do everything we need to.