John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to contribute to the debate on the Water Amendment (Long-term Average Sustainable Diversion Limited Adjustment) Bill 2012. I want to make it perfectly clear that the Murray River will never ever again be the river it was 300 years ago. Mother Nature looked after the Murray for tens of thousands years and then, in the 19th century or earlier, man intervened and built the five barrages down at Lake Alexandrina and at Lake Albert, the locks up the river—lock 4, at Berry, and lock 5, at Renmark—and the dams upstream in the catchment. It is a wonder the Greens have not pursued a policy to tear that all down, to return the Murray to how it was for tens of thousands of years. In the days when Hume and Hovell crossed the Murray, it was a dry riverbed. Because of man's intervention, the river has changed. I am not for one minute suggesting that we go and put it back to its natural state of 250 years ago or so. No matter what we do, the river will be different. From the front of the Renmark Hotel a couple of hundred years ago or so and in a drought you could walk across the river bed. Now it is 200 or 300 metres wide. The water is there because of the dams and catchments upstream. That is simply a fact.

Some absolute fool many years ago suggested that European carp be put in the River Murray. My brother was telling me that in the sixties when he would cross the river at Murray Bridge in South Australia it was a clear, blue river. Now it is a brown mud bowl because some scientist or some fool suggested we bring European carp here and put the carp in the Murray to do away with the weeds that were gathering in the river. The carp ate all the weeds out all right, feeding off the bottom of the river. Now of course the weeds and grass are not there to protect the banks of the Murray, so the banks of the river are eroding away. What an absolutely idiotic thing to do: introduce a foreign species of fish so detrimental to our river system. The carp are all the way up the Darling now—I have travelled upstream—but luckily not into the Macintyre River at Inverell where we live because we have the Macintyre Falls and the carp cannot jump a couple of hundred feet.

If anyone thinks it is going to return to the river of old, they are wrong. It is not going to do that. So we need to manage the Murray as best we can with that triple bottom line—the environmental, social and economic impacts—as my colleague, Senator McKenzie, just said. If you go back to the old times of the Murray when the river was low, the ocean came into the river. Some say years ago you would see dolphins up towards Tailem Bend. Most of it was saltwater in a dry time. We now have the interstate argument: South Australia demands that those barrages stay there and that the Lower Lakes be pure fresh water with very little salinity in them—quite different to how Mother Nature built them. Those upstream get accused of storing water in dams. Yes, dams do store water, and that is what they are built for. But during drought times, the reason there is water in the Murray at the other end is because water has been stored at the top end and let out. The question now is: how much do you let out? It is a very controversial issue.

On behalf of New South Wales, when it comes to the buybacks New South Wales has given plenty. In fact, the previous Labor government of New South Wales had a water minister called Phil Costa. When Senator Wong was the water minister she bought water back but 97 per cent of the water buybacks came from New South Wales. In actual fact, Minister Phil Costa put a moratorium on any more sales of water licences out of New South Wales. This is the question: who pays the penalty? I agree with my colleague Senator Nash that buybacks should be capped. There was $5.3 billion budgeted for improvement in infrastructure and water efficiency—in other words, growing more food with less water. But the government did not carry out that investment. It went on a crazy buyback scheme.

One of my colleagues, Senator Nash, mentioned the Twynam Pastoral Company and the Kahlbetzer family. They sold all their water licences to Minister Wong at the time for $303 million—if my memory serves me right. Some of those rivers do not even run into the Murray. They bought water licences from one of Twynam's properties up on the Gwydir River, and that river runs out on the Gwydir Wetlands. They bought water licences from the Macquarie River but that runs out onto the Macquarie Marshes. They bought water licences out of the Lachlan River—perhaps once in 100 years, in a monster flood, some water might trickle into the Murrumbidgee but 99 per cent of the time nothing gets through the Lachlan. The government spent $303 million to buy water back to increase the flows in the Murray and half of those licences are for rivers that do not even run into the Murray. What a great investment of taxpayer's money that was. Of course, I am being sarcastic. That is the stupidity of this.

I would like to commend our shadow minister and my leader in the Senate, Senator Barnaby Joyce. The Greens get it their way, working with a gun at the head of the government. We know how the Greens operate: they shut down all industry, shut down all food supply and get a scientist to design a digestive system so man can consume trees only, because we are not allowed to grow food. 'Go back and live in the caves and we will give you three sticks a week to maintain your food and warmth'—that is basically the Greens' policy.