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

If the senator is not aware, water restrictions are not a matter for the federal government. They are matters either for the state or, in some states, for local government to impose. They are certainly not matters that the federal government deals with.

I want to come back to this issue of rejecting the science. Rejecting the science is a proposition that pretends not to notice that we do not have enough water. That is what rejecting the science is. Responsibly acting on the science is ensuring we have policies to recognise that we have a significant reduction in water, to impose a limit based on science and to purchase water and invest in irrigation savings to return water to the river. That is the responsible course of action and an action absolutely predicated on the science rather than pretending that we can simply conjure up water that anybody who looks at the facts knows is simply not there.