Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to contribute to this debate. Firstly I acknowledge that the wording of this motion describes the government as 'mediocre'. I get that—it is kind of funny, because of Senator George Brandis's slip-up in his moment of truth on television only a couple of days ago. I want to say, first up, that I think that is pretty soft. It is not that the government is mediocre: they are cruddy, pathetic and useless. All we have seen from this government for the last 12 months is blaming everybody else and not being able to get on with the job at hand.

The one thing I wanted to talk about in particular here today, in relation to how cruddy this government really is, is the behaviour and actions of the minister for water and Deputy Prime Minister, Barnaby Joyce. This is a man who, only four years ago, in the middle of the debates around the Murray-Darling Basin Plan and giving the authority the powers to manage the basin in a way that was meant to set the river system up for a sustainable future, said to my home state of South Australia, 'Oh well, if you don't think you've got enough water, South Australians, just move to Queensland.' That was his response to the very dire situation down in the lower end of the Murray and in SA.

Now that the Deputy Prime Minister is in charge of this portfolio, we see that he could not wait to get his hands on it. He loved the idea that he could finally get his hands onto managing the Murray-Darling Basin, because he has never supported the Basin Plan. He has never supported the approach of ensuring that there is enough environmental flow to keep that river going into the future. We know that, over many decades, too much water has been taken out of the river. The water allocations have been overallocated. Upstream states—particularly, big irrigators upstream in Victoria, New South Wales and, of course, Queensland—have sucked too much water out of the system, so much so that the river was starting to choke. In recent years we have seen the mouth of the Murray close because the flows were not coming down the river, particularly at a time when the climate is drier. We had a long, drawn-out public consultation and debate about how we set the rules so that it is fair and so that we can get above and beyond this political bickering between states and between states and the federal government, trying to understand that you needed an environmental voice and stake in a plan that was meant to manage this river system going forward if you are going to give it any kind of fighting chance. If those communities along the river are going to have any chance of economic and social survival, you have to keep the river alive.

Yet right from day one the Deputy Prime Minister never really supported and was never committed to the idea of having proper water buybacks that would ensure environmental flows to keep this river functioning to give it a fighting chance to get back to health and to keep it healthy going forward. Four years on we now see the minister for water, the Deputy Prime Minister, in charge of this, and all he wants to do is blow up this Murray-Darling Basin Plan. He wants to blow open the agreement and reset the rules, and that, of course, is all about letting upstream states take more water back out of the river again. Giving Barnaby Joyce control of water is one of the cruddiest things that this Prime Minister has done. It is like giving the fox the keys to the henhouse. He is obsessed with making South Australians and the lower end of the Murray suffer, because he wants more water to be given to upstream irrigators. He is not interested in fair rules that keep the river alive. He is not interested in acknowledging that, in a drying climate and in a time of climate change, we have to do more to ensure environmental flows. This government is not just mediocre; it is cruddy to the core. (Time expired)