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

Through you, Chair. But it got pretty ugly along the Murray in our state of Victoria when the previous government decided to roll out the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. Senator Hanson-Young was railing loud and proud about the amount of sustainable take that could be taken out of the system. We now know that was incredibly poor advice from Senator Hanson-Young. Our home state has managed to find environmental efficiencies to ensure a healthy river. As the water makes its way through New South Wales, along our beautiful Murray down into South Australia, the sustainable take is much less than Senator Hanson-Young claimed. That is due to the fact that we chose to invest in infrastructure throughout irrigation districts that ensured businesses could still prosper, families could stay on their farms, communities could remain economically viable and the environment could still get the water.

We hear the emotive arguments of the Greens and can get wrapped up in the hyper-rhetoric that they bring to the table. It is going on throughout my home state of Victoria right now, particularly around regional areas. It is just based on whipping up fear in uninformed communities. The fact is, when you put your heads together, sit down with communities and businesses and think about viable alternatives, you can get a triple bottom line. That is what this government is committed to doing.

The Environmental Partnerships Program aims to work with local communities and land managers to achieve positive outcomes for the environment through initiatives like committing more than $9 million to the Coastal Environments Program, supporting on-ground coastal risk management works; a commitment to plant two million trees across regional Victoria and metropolitan Melbourne; the $20 million Communities for Nature grants program, enabling local groups to carry out important on-ground works to conserve and enhance the local environment; investing nearly $16 million to protect priority habitat and threatened species; and investing $9 million over four years to renourish key beaches in Port Phillip Bay, by reintroducing sand to beaches depleted of sustainable sand levels by storm events and coastal processes.

This goes exactly to Senator Di Natale's scare campaign on the Leadbeater's possum issue. The Victorian government is fully committed to implementing all 13 recommendations from the Leadbeater's Possum Advisory Group, with $11 million committed for implementation. For Senator Di Natale to stand up and spruik the fact that our state faunal emblem is going extinct and will have to be rediscovered for the second time in the last hundred years is absolute bollocks. The state government has committed $11 million to implement all the recommendations. This is what environmental policy should look like. This is how to safeguard natural resources—bottom-up consultation, discovering what communities and businesses and people can do and how government can assist them. It reminds me of a community that has approached me on numerous occasions, the Mountain Cattlemen's Association. It is about getting the balance right and how we sustainably and safely use our natural resources for the forest industry, to ensure the Leadbeater's possum habitat is maintained and to ensure that communities like the mountain cattlemen can access those economic resources in our national parks to continue their economic and cultural practices. We can get it right.

Look at the water policy of past Labor governments in our state. The desalination plant is an albatross around Victorians' necks. The $75 million north-south pipeline, which we are still paying for, never delivered a drop for Melbourne. That is what happens when you let the Labor Party and the Greens control environmental policy at a state level. We are getting the balance right. We are reducing red and green tape and ensuring that we can get economic growth out into the regions, into our communities, while safeguarding our natural resources. That is exactly what good governance looks like. Vote 1 coalition.