Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Minister for Resources and Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Hanson-Young for her question. That is not the government's view. The government's view is not that this plan has not delivered increased water and stream flows to the Murray-Darling system. Indeed, the government so far has already recovered more than a thousand gigalitres of water through buybacks, and we are making progress towards the 2,090-gigalitre amount that will be got to before any adjustment mechanism is set and/or the extra water from the up-water process is factored in. This is a significant achievement for our country, to have established a Basin Plan. It's a plan that went through both houses of parliament many years ago, and we remain fully committed to ensuring the plan is delivered on time and in full. Obviously there are a lot of matters to work out through that process. There remain discussions with the state and territory governments to occur.

I recognise that here in this place the Greens are trying to derail the plan themselves through a number of disallowance motions. The Greens have never been satisfied with a balanced economic, social and environmental outcome in the basin. They have always sought to achieve a figure that would destroy many economic communities and cost thousands of jobs. Indeed, one of the disallowance motions goes to the Northern Basin Review. The Northern Basin Review is something that was kicked off by the former Labor government. It's gone through years of consultation with different groups, looking at the figures, particularly in the northern basin. That review came back saying that we could reduce the recovery in the northern basin by 70 gigalitres and that would save 200 jobs. I think those jobs are pretty important in towns like Collarenebri and Dirranbandi. These places deserve to be considered as well. Now that the MDBA has recommended these changes that are part of the plan, we should all get together as a parliament and see this plan delivered so we can get better environmental outcomes while we think of all of those Australians who rely on the river for their town water and their jobs.