Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

There we go. Great contribution, Senator Heffernan, it is a great place to raise a family and difficult to make a quid, and in making sure that regional communities can still make a quid they will be making more of it as long as they have water within them.

The Nationals and the coalition seek to ensure that our amendment legislates our commitments and the very real concerns that we hear on a daily basis and that the minister and Craig Knowles, if they had been serious, would admit they heard every day in every consultation that they went to. They stood up in front of those communities, they went to the public consultations, they went to the private little chitchats and they absorbed the pain; they heard the detail. The amount of man- and woman-hours that have gone into trying to get this right, trying to get the balance right between the environment and the healthy river system and viable and productive regional communities is enormous. I look forward to the research project that quantifies it. That is why our amendments will go towards making a bad situation a little better, because they need to plan for the future, to grow the food and their families in a healthy environment. The coalition is interested in not only protecting our food bowl but also in starting to build trust which has been consumed by political process in the development of the Basin Plan.

I urge the Senate, and especially the Greens, to take a similar approach. I hope the debate and final vote will reflect the statements and expressions of concern, the hours of meetings and consultations that have gone into this legislation and the plan around it, that our action will stop devastating, market-distorting water buybacks that not only waste taxpayers' money but also devastate the productive capacity of regional communities. It is not perfect, and I recognise that, but we are 113 years down the track and we have to have a sustainable environment, but more importantly what we on this side of the chamber recognise is that we also have to have sustainable communities.

I hope that our debate will ensure investment in our regions with infrastructure projects that will ensure a vibrant and vigorous future for our regional communities and the environment.