Mary Fisher (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes; it has been used in the government’s legislation. Having talked in one paragraph about critical human water needs attracting the highest priority, in the next breath it then talks about conveyance water therefore attracting first priority. Is there a difference? If so, what is the difference? It talks about non-core human water being given the status of critical human water needs, where the failure to provide water for those purposes would cause prohibitively high social, economic and national security costs. Witnesses were overwhelming in their evidence about not knowing what this definition was intended to mean or what would be rolled out by the government or the new authority in implementing this definition.

The consequences of this are significant and profound and must not be underestimated. Indeed, yesterday the CSIRO released a report on water availability in the Murray-Darling Basin. It found that groundwater use, under existing state government plans, could double by the year 2030. This would effectively halve the flow of water through the mouth of the Murray. The CSIRO report warned that future levels of use of water were unsustainable and, in referring to that report, Minister Wong reportedly has urged state governments to enforce tighter controls on farmers’ and miners’ use of underground water. How has this come about? The minister has focused on one aspect of the use equation—farmers and miners—at the same time as presiding over a bill that spectacularly fails to set out what the human use component will be. It spectacularly fails to set out who gets access to water for critical human needs and for what purpose they get access to such water, whilst allowing those people and those users to have first crack. Yet the minister has used the CSIRO report as an opportunity to have a crack at farmers and miners.

‘Human critical water needs’ has been used, and is continuing to be used, by the government as an elastic term to allow them to give water where they find it expedient, in a political sense, to do so. I come now to the second opportunity for the government in this bill, the north-south pipeline. There is little better example of this than the north-south pipeline. We have heard technical arguments that the north-south pipeline is not critical human needs water under this bill because the north-south pipeline is coming from something that is not defined by the bill as being part of the Murray-Darling Basin. How offensive is that? It is simply not acceptable to attempt to carve Melbourne and its water needs out of the Murray-Darling Basin and at the same time allow Melbourne to go on the teat to take from the Murray-Darling. We are in the midst of a debate about the necessity to wean a city like Adelaide off the River Murray. We have state and federal Labor governments that refuse to commit to the wisdom of weaning Adelaide off the Murray—let alone setting a target date for the end point of a weaning process which, by definition, is gradual and which should have been started long ago. We are in the midst of a debate about weaning Adelaide—a capital city—off the Murray. It is a capital city that is not even on the Murray, yet from time to time it relies on the Murray for 80 per cent of its water use. We are in the midst of a debate about being more responsible with backyard Adelaide in its collection, storage, use and reuse of water, and at the same time we are going to put yet another city on the teat that is the Murray. And this is at a time when there is simply not sufficient water. So says the government.

The government seems to think that they can answer, ‘There is not enough water; what can you expect us to do?’ This bill must be amended in order to set out very clearly how you get to the front of the queue in terms of human critical water needs. Instead, we have an agreement extracted at the time of COAG to construct a pipeline, the north-south pipeline, to feed Melbourne, an agreement made during discussions that were supposed to be about putting water back in, not taking it out. The evidence from witnesses to the Senate committee was, again, overwhelming. No-one thinks construction of the north-south pipeline is common sense. It would appear that the only ones who agree with it and support it, aside from some probably well-intentioned but rather misinformed Melburnians, are Penny Wong, John Brumby and Mike Rann.