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

Thank you very much, Senator Roberts, for your question. The government is also very, very concerned about our primary producers and wants to ensure that they are able to fulfil their productive capacity, particularly at this time, when we are facing one of the worst droughts in our nation's history. I know, having travelled through the basin communities of New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia, that it is very tough for those farmers, who are facing unprecedented dry conditions, to watch environmental flows destined for other states and other places flow past their communities. But that is what the Murray-Darling Basin Plan was actually set up to do—to ensure that water was secured for environmental purposes and was able to be delivered to certain identified environmental assets along and throughout the basin communities. It was also set up to underpin the economic security of our farmers and their productive capacity going forward and to ensure that those communities, those millions of Australians that live and raise families and businesses in basin communities, can actually look forward to a sustainable and prosperous future.

Getting that balance between four different basin states right has, as we all know in this chamber, been a very, very difficult process. It is not one that we here in the National Party and the Liberal Party have resiled away from. We've fought very hard to make sure that that is a fair plan and that the mechanisms we use to deliver it are actually fair. We're the ones that actually fought to make sure a socioeconomic detriment test was part of the ongoing measurement of the success of the plan, and that means making sure our farmers and their communities are still going to be able to raise a family and have a successful business in these communities going forward when we're looking at taking out— (Time expired)