Nick Xenophon (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

My question is to Senator Conroy, representing the Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities, Mr Burke. This morning, the Adelaide Advertiser held an event on the lawns of Parliament House urging politicians not to overlook South Australia in the plan to return the Murray River to health. At this event, lower Murray pistachio grower David Peake held up a Murray-Darling Basin Commission graph from 2009 that represented clearly that South Australian irrigators have stuck to the diversion caps since they were established in 1968, largely by investing in many self-financed water efficiency measures. I seek leave to table a copy of that graph.

Leave granted.

The graph also clearly indicates that other states have continued to extract more and more water from the system—some over 3,000 gigalitres since the late 1960s. Will the minister acknowledge that South Australia has stuck to the extraction caps where other states have not?