Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Water Resources and Conservation) Share this | Hansard source

Potentially 40 million—thank you, Senator Boswell. And not a single jot of work has been done on the potential impact on the water system. So here we are, on the other side of the chamber, hearing from the government week after week their words of dedication to making sure we fix the Murray-Darling Basin system, and yet they are allowing legislation to come into being that is potentially going to have an enormous impact on that water system. It is not right. It is not on. I do not see how anybody in this place can agree that that is an appropriate way forward for the management of the water system in this country.

The other issue that is of course of enormous concern to us particularly, as Nationals, and the reason why we are standing here and are going to cross the floor, is that there has been absolutely no work done on the potential social and economic impact on rural and regional communities of these plantations being put in—absolutely none. What we are so concerned about is that those who understand rural and regional communities know what the flow-on effects from the productive capacity of land in our rural communities generate for the economic wealth of our rural and regional communities. You take that productive capacity away and it is not only that farmer who is affected; there are the flow-on effects on businesses in all those towns—the chemical distributors, the newsagents, the professionals who come to town, the local doctors—