Rex Patrick (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

In the early days of the Murray-Darling water extraction was pretty much a free-for-all. It was around the 1960s when water quality became an issue. From 1980 to 1983 we saw the River Murray's mouth close for the first time since European settlement. Then we had the 2001 millennium drought. In 2006 John Howard stood up and, basically, started a serious discussion about overextraction in the Murray-Darling, and he announced a $10 billion plan. In 2007, a year later, the Water Act was passed. It called on the government to produce a basin plan which was to work out how to have a properly sustained river. As part of the work for that plan, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority produced a report in October 2010, which said that we needed to limit extraction by 3,900 gigalitres through to 7,600 gigalitres, depending on the level of confidence we wanted in sustainment. That was politically altered back to 2,750 gigalitres. That's all the recovery we were going to get after that. So South Australia stood up and said, 'No, that's not okay. We need to look after the Lower Lakes and the Coorong and the Murray mouth, and we want an extra 450 gigalitres of what are called efficiency measures,' and that was baked into the plan; it was agreed by everybody.

In 2012, the Basin Plan was agreed to. Nine years into the plan, however, we've only seen delivered two of the 450 gigalitres. Unfortunately, it appears the government does haven't a plan for how to get us the rest of the 450.