Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to make a contribution on this matter of public importance. I think it is worthwhile just recapping in the short time we have available what is actually at stake. We know that, as far back as July 1997, the Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council introduced a permanent cap on the volume of water which could be diverted from rivers for uses such as irrigation. In 2007, the Commonwealth intervened to address the overallocation and established the Murray-Darling Basin Authority That had the charters to develop and implement a Basin Plan to include sustainable diversion limits. CSIRO advised the MDBA about the future climate scenarios for use in modelling future water use and yield from the catchments in the Basin Plan. Under the Water Act 2007, the MDBA is responsible for planning the integrated management of water resources of the Murray-Darling Basin. Then we know that on 22 November 2012 the Murray-Darling Basin Plan was signed into law.

If it is true that Mark Twain said, 'Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over,' then that was a culmination of a decade or more of pretty strong negotiations involving governments of all political persuasions, involving state and federal responsible entities to get something into place that we could sit down and put into practice. Of course, there is the rub. The challenge of whoever looks after water will be to put into practice—on the best advice possible—the agreed position and to manage the environment, return some water to the river and manage the social cohesion and economic fabric of those irrigators right along the river. South Australia is to be credited, and amongst the best advice I have had is that they initiated drip watering and took responsible water positions. Despite advice to move up the river, they decided to stay and just get more efficient. What we clearly have here is a political situation involving the termination of a first-term Liberal Prime Minister—the first time in the history of that party that they have taken such an action.