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

The government has now managed to alienate every state government in the country on this issue. This puts at grave risk any chance for Australia to achieve a successful outcome of this reform. Every water policy in this country has had the support and cooperation of Australia's federal structure of government. I remember the great reforms we got from The Living Murray agreement—969 megalitres of water went back into the Murray-Darling Basin.

There are clear limits on what the Commonwealth can achieve in water policy as it does not have powers over land use and water infrastructure which are absolutely essential for good water policy management—just like what we have with taps and urinals because that is good water policy management. We must have good water policy on urinals. I have been worried about urinals for years and years because urinals are to do with water. Also, we must look at what is happening at other things that may or may not have been flushed down the urinal by Labor Party policy pertaining to the Murray-Darling Basin. When the coalition were last in government, great strides were made in water reform without the rancour and turmoil that have marked this government's term. One can see that the WELS Scheme is a great example of what can happen when you go about things in a diligent manner because you get a bipartisan outcome, which everybody is happy with—unlike the Murray-Darling Basin scheme.

The National Water Initiative was agreed to and, under it, it was clearly and frankly recognised that there will always be a trade-off between achieving economic, social and environmental outcomes. The government's approach is to wish this trade-off away. Even now, we hear that the government is telling some that it cannot do what it would like to do on water policy because the Water Act puts the environment first and everything else second. What we had before was that we all believed, the Labor Party believed, that we would have an equivalence between social, economic and environmental factors. What we have now is backed up by Professor Judith Sloan and by Professor George Williams, a former Labor Party candidate. Not to be parochial, we also got Professor John Briscoe from Harvard University, Massachusetts, United States of America—where I will be in a couple of weeks time. He said when he had a look over it that the Water Act is an environmental act and if we do not come up with an environmental outcome, the Greens will bring down the Labor Party and destroy them. I want the Labor Party to survive, because I think they are a great party. They are a party of Curtin and Chifley. I think they have done some incredible things for this nation that we are so proud of.