Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Environment, Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to make a contribution on behalf of the opposition on the second reading debate on the Water Legislation Amendment (Sustainable Diversion Limit Adjustment) Bill 2016, to put forward our views. As we know, the bill seeks to amend the 2012 Murray-Darling Basin Plan, allowing for the second notification of supply and efficiency measures, and further adds a deadline for sustainable diversion limit, SDL, adjustment. The amendment bill also puts a deadline on determination of the adjustment of the sustainable diversion limit until 15 December 2017. This deadline is here to add more certainty to the plan.

The bill is integral, as it allows for the development of supply and efficiency measures for basin states—New South Wales, Victoria, the ACT, Queensland and South Australia—as requested by the Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council. We have in this bill before us an additional year to help develop and refine projects that will deliver for the environment and for farmers.

As those across the chamber would be aware, Labor overcame more than 100 years of conflict and partisan politics to put the Murray-Darling Basin Plan in place. The significance of this achievement should not be underestimated. The basin covers approximately one-seventh of the coastal area of mainland Australia, with over two million people living there, including Canberra and many of our other regional centres: Toowoomba, Bendigo, Albury-Wodonga, Tamworth, Dubbo, Orange, Wagga Wagga, Queanbeyan and Shepparton. It is also home to many bioregions and includes landscapes as diverse as subtropical rainforests in the north, our semi-arid desert in the west, and alpine areas and snowfields in the south. It has an incredible array of animals, including endangered birds, mammals and snakes.

In addition to its environmental assets, the basin contains some of the oldest remains of modern humans. It is worth noting that ritual burial sites at Lake Mungo in New South Wales highlight that humans have been in this region for more than 40,000 years, and the region is home to around 50 Aboriginal nations. They have long and strong connections with the rivers and land in this region. It houses a vast ecosystem, but, as many know, agriculture is the most significant user of the basin's land and water resources. It provides employment for basin residents and contributes significantly to our regional economies. Here in the Murray-Darling Basin region, we have approximately 20 per cent of Australia's total agricultural land area and also one-third of the nation's food supply and exports, which go to many countries overseas, 40 per cent of Australia's farms and 65 per cent of all irrigation farms. The scale of irrigated cropping production in the basin is not matched by any other region in Australia. It was worth approximately $6.7 billion when the Basin Plan was put in place.

While the scale of production is not matched by any other region, the volume of water that flows into the Murray from its tributaries and out to the Southern Ocean can, as we know, be extremely variable. This means the water for farmers and water for the environment, including the precious wetlands, is not always there. Variation also means that, when there is a flood, there can be too much water. These pressures and variability in water availability are expected to increase with climate change. So, to manage the extreme dry times, a plan to buy back water licences from irrigators and improve farm efficiency has been developed. Examples like this highlight how vulnerable the basin is and how we need to ensure its management through supply and efficiency measures for years to come.

So Labor is committed to returning the Murray-Darling system to health through the implementation of this plan. As I previously stated, in 2012 the Labor government introduced the plan, which sought to secure the long-term health of the basin. It set limits for irrigators and other water users and established where more water was needed for the system to survive. The plan aimed to return to the basin 2,750 billion litres of water which was being used mainly for irrigation and allows for up to 3,200 billion litres to be recovered. Stakeholder input was key to developing the plan and to a number of consultation activities taking place, including formal consultation periods, community meetings, round tables, visits to Aboriginal communities, briefings with businesses and almost 12,000 submissions during the consultation period. We know from this that discussions and differences continue to some degree about the plan and its impact. The plan, however, continues to provide a clear framework and certainty that was long overdue. This certainty is critical to rural communities and to the precious environment that exists in our Murray-Darling Basin. The 641-page final plan delivered on the Murray-Darling Basin Authority's draft recommendations, which the water minister at the time, Tony Burke, said would mean an extra focus on infrastructure investments to improve water use efficiency. However, it would not forget water buybacks and water for our environment. Basin state governments along the river system were tasked with coming up with ideas to return 650 gigalitres to the environment, with the final 450 gigalitres to be found in removing capacity restrictions. The bill that we have before us today is another step in this process.

The bill will help people on the ground as well as the basin states. Achieving greater water offsets requires projects that can provide more environmental water and projects that address physical and operational constraints to free up the delivery of environmental water to where it is needed. While some have criticised the delay in implementation of these projects, there is, however, little point having these innovations without the funding and consideration they need; otherwise, they will be set up to fail.

Basin states have submitted a range of projects and have asked for time to further develop some of these. While we do not want to see delays to such an important plan, we want quality projects to receive the attention they deserve and the funding they need, so it is only natural that we would like to support good environmental policy. Labor wants the Murray-Darling Basin Plan to work and we are committed to returning the Murray-Darling system to health through the implementation of the plan. The coalition's political moves to cap water buybacks in 2015 and to slash infrastructure funding in 2014 put pressure on every other component of the Basin Plan, making it more fragile than it needs to be.

We on this side will always carefully monitor the implementation of the plan, because we have always done so. We support this bill so Labor's Murray-Darling Basin Plan can continue to be effectively implemented.