Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the documents.

This is an interesting time that we live in. It is a time of complete and utter confusion—a confusion which personifies a government which seems to have gone through more contortions on water than one would deem possible. I am fascinated to go back and read some of the statements that were given by the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. On 10 August 2010 she said she was determined to implement the plan. Again on 10 August she said, ‘I am determined we will do what is necessary to implement the Murray-Darling Basin Authority plan.’ She was going to implement the plan—until such time as they released it. Unfortunately, after they released it, what we had in our nation was a virtual riot. Throughout the Murray-Darling Basin there was evidence of complete social disharmony and a sense that the government had become completely disconnected from reality. People were terrified that a government that had brought us the ceiling insulation debacle and the Building the Education Revolution program, a government that had got us into $164 billion of gross debt and had managed to deliver to our nation the biggest deficit since Federation, was now going to start turning its particular talents to our nation’s food bowl and capacity to feed itself. The government was like a seven-year old who had decided to fix the vacuum cleaner: there it was with a sledgehammer, a couple of forks and a fire hydrant and it was going to end in absolute disaster.

And we have now seen Mr Burke completely jettison Minister Wong and the Prime Minister. Minister Burke has said, ‘It is not my plan.’ It was their plan only a matter of days before, but it is not their plan now. If it is not their plan now, it must be somebody else’s plan. They have now gone out and got legal advice to say the bleeding obvious: that they should have been looking at the triple bottom line. If they are getting that legal advice now, what were they doing when they were delivering to us this guide to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan? If the minister’s statement is correct, we now have a guide that is completely without form. It is completely inconsequential. It only answers 33 per cent of the question. It talks about the environment but does not talk about the social and economic impacts. Even the chairman of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, Mike Taylor, says it does not talk about the social and economic impacts.

I have had the privilege—and the misfortune—to go to some of the seminars that have been held and see some of the poor old bureaucrats there trying to defend the indefensible. I am dealing with a government that is completely and utterly incompetent, but the bureaucrats have been put up as bunnies to try and explain this government process. It is just like the way the Labor government is dealing with the issue of illegal entrants and the new shelter they are building for them in the Adelaide Hills: they just put up the bureaucrats out there. This is a sign of a government that just does not know what it is doing, and it has become quite dangerous. There is nothing this government can put its hand to that it is actually able to deliver—except this perverse claim that they somehow saved us from a recession. I do not quite know how they did that. I thought it might have been the minerals boom that did that. That is Mr Swan’s fig leaf, and even that is without substance. However, the reality is that this is the granddaddy of all stuff-ups—and it just gets more complicated, nefarious and nebulous by the day. Every day seems to contradict the day before it. Every day seems to bring a whole new chapter into the rolling Greek tragedy of the government’s desire to somehow reconfigure Australia’s capacity to feed itself.

What is their solution? Where are we now? Where on earth have they left us? As we speak, people are out there spending money to defend themselves against a plan which the Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities has said is without meaning. Why does the minister not go out and tell those people that they can stop spending the money to do the hydrological surveys and the surveys into the habitats which they are now doing to defend themselves against some of the ridiculous propositions that have been put up in this guide?

This guide was perverse in the extent it went in some areas. We had a situation where, a year before, people had received letters saying that even though they wanted to sell water there were no environmental assets around them—there was nothing of consequence for which the government needed to purchase water. A year later, we find the government wanting to collect back in excess of 20 per cent of the water in some of these areas—and I refer to the Macintyre Valley. Where did these environmental assets pop out of? How is it that in one year there are none and the next year you have to give up in excess of 20 per cent of the water?

Then we have the Gwydir Valley, where they say they are contributing approximately the same amount of water to the system as the Macintyre Valley. The problem with that is that the Gwydir River ends in a wetland and it is only in high rainfall years that it actually spills into the Darling. But, if you believe their report, it is a flowing river—it flows into the Darling. Then you have the position with the Moonie, where there are only about three irrigators. All of a sudden, it is one of the hardest hit rivers in the system. They are thousands of kilometres away from South Australia. You have the same situation on the Warrego. Everything about it is confusing, and this confusion has led to such resentment being built up in the Australian people.

The coalition put the plan forward, but we did not pick the players. The players are over there opposite, as picked by Minister Wong. I do not know what she is now. She must be bad cop and Minister Burke must be good cop—or is Minister Burke the patron saint of confusion? How does it all work? How do we have two people on the same side who, only a matter of months apart, have completely different views and different positions on the same subject? How can this be seen as a government that can manage our nation responsibly?

For the two million Australians who live in the Murray-Darling Basin this has really been a shock, and that shock has been conveyed through to the polls. The polls have turned against the government, because people are really scared about what the Labor government is up to. The fact that this government could have put at threat our capacity to feed ourselves as a nation is really something startling. Even the good, honest supporters of the Labor Party could not believe that this government could be that naive. Paul Howes is even out there slamming the Labor Party and slamming the plan. Your own people have turned against you.

Then there is the ridiculous proposition that 800 people are going to lose their jobs. Up to 3,000 people left Moree during the drought. There were 3,000 people who left one town. Judith Stubbs’s analysis is that between 20,000 and 30,000 people could lose their jobs because of this plan. And you said that you were going to look after working families! Is that how you do it? What did you think you were going to do to the price of groceries when this went through? What was going to happen to the capacity of our nation to feed itself? I might remind you that tomorrow the Food and Grocery Council will announce that Australia is now a net food importer. That is right: we are importing more food than we export. This would lock that situation in. This would have locked the drought in for the basin. It would have locked the drought in in a flood.

That is the sort of remarkable social engineering exercise that the Labor Party participate in—and for what purpose? What was the desire? Who drove this agenda? It could only have been the Labor Party. The Labor Party picked the committee. The Labor Party were so diligent that it took 18 months to pick the committee that delivered this to us—18 months to pick six people. That is incredible. That is a record.

So this is what we have been delivered, and this is why the Australian people have taken the Labor Party to their lowest polling figures since 1903. Since 1903 they have not been this low. The Labor Party have become so ridiculous now that even in seats in Brisbane the Greens are beating them—the Labor Party are coming third. Why have the Labor Party put themselves in this position? Because they are totally and utterly incompetent, and the Australian people are seeing them as totally and utterly incompetent. They were elected claiming that they would support regional Australia, and look what their first decision was going to do to regional Australia—destroy it! (Time expired)