Perin Davey (NSW, National Party, Shadow Minister for Water) Share this | Hansard source

I found the Governor-General's speech yesterday quite enlightening, at outlining the new government's agenda. Despite, in the lead-up to the election, the government claiming that they will govern for all Australians regardless of where they are and where they live there is concern that there are big cuts coming to a lot of infrastructure investments, particularly in regional areas. We've now read reports about the abolition or the pause of the modern manufacturing investments that our government put in place, particularly looking at clean energy and food security issues, which the government has said were priorities. As a nation facing many challenges, cutting infrastructure funding to key regional areas should not be an option.

Cost of living is another major issue facing our communities, and it's one that is increasingly being highlighted by the public, recognised by the Labor Party in the lead-up to the election with a promise to cut power bills by $275 a year, yet there was not a mention of that figure in the Governor-General's speech. Within two months of getting into government that promise seems to have been forgotten.

It's no wonder that recent polling, by Essential polling, done for the Guardian, which is not necessarily a right-leaning publication, found that just one-quarter of voters think Labor is handling the surging cost-of-living pressures. The poll of other 1,000 respondents indicates that the majority of Australians believe—even in an era of deregulation—governments can exert influence over a range of economic factors, including debt, unemployment rates, inflation, fuel prices, workforce supply and interest rates.

At the moment, while the government likes to pretend it's hit the ground running, much of its election commitments are low on details and how it plans to implement the campaign promises on the ground. And what we heard yesterday in the Governor-General's speech was that real action is being supplemented by a plethora of new reviews, strategies, task forces, summits, white papers, plans to have plans, a policy to have a cultural policy, committees, councils, changes to the machinery of government and inquiries announced to give the impression of action. But what I see is more bureaucracy, more red tape and more talk.

Last time Labor was in government they failed to plan for emergencies. They then introduced a one-off tax levy to help fund and pay for flood damage. This contrasts with the coalition's action in government. We established the nearly $5 billion Emergency Response Fund. We've established systems to put in place disaster recovery payments and disaster allowance payments within days of a disaster. With the state governments, we've put in place systems around the Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements, which the government very swiftly implemented following the recent floods in Western Sydney. But had it not been for the coalition government's actions and the coalition government's preparedness, that wouldn't have been able to have been rolled out as swiftly and efficiently as it was.

Our communities have every right to be concerned about Labor's plans for helping during a crisis. After nine years in opposition and five years of drought, fires, floods and pandemic, the best that they can come up with for their emergency management policy is to re-badge our Emergency Response Fund into the Disaster Ready Fund. There are no details about any other changes with it.

They're also going to restructure the agencies. They started by sacking the National Resilience and Recovery Agency coordinator-general, the Hon. Shane Stone AC QC, and they're now merging this agency's functions with those of Emergency Management Australia. And they've got a new acronym to go with it: the NEMRRA, or the National Emergency Resilience and Recovery Agency. But, not just content with sacking the independent, arms-length commissioner, they've now announced a new role for one of their own, appointing Senator Tony Sheldon as Special Envoy for Disaster Recovery. But we don't yet know what the special envoy will do, what his responsibilities will be, what his accountabilities will be and, importantly, how much extra resources he gets in terms of staff and salary. As a public servant, the NRRA commissioner and, before him, the Coordinator-General for Drought, were accountable to the senate estimates processes. We don't know yet who Senator Sheldon will be accountable to.

And, as far as the people on the ground are concerned, they're more concerned about action than seeing another politician get a title. The people of Lismore are still waiting to see what support there will be for commercial landlords and what the industry-specific support packages will look like. Much was made of this in the lead-up to the election, but the detail post then has been scant. We acknowledge there's a time and place for envoys, but we also acknowledge that when they're used there needs to be clear terms of reference and proper accountability. We need to understand how a politician, in this instance, will be better than an independent commissioner. And while Labor can outdo themselves when it comes to longwinded agency titles and departmental names, they also fail when it comes to delivering services to our communities on the ground. Since Labor formed government we are seeing more concern about where bureaucratic offices will be than helping the Australians most in need. We need to get back in business.

Another aspect that I found very concerning in the Governor-General's speech was the statement:

The government will also deliver on water commitments under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, including 450 gigalitres for South Australia.

Since when has the Basin Plan been purely about one state? The entire point of the Basin Plan was to get away from the interjurisdictional fights. The Basin Plan was about the entire Murray-Darling Basin. None of the targets in the Basin Plain were for a specific state, not even the 450 gigalitres which was for the basin.

If you'd let me continue, Senator McAllister, I will get to the point. As former Prime Minister John Howard said on Australia Day in 2007, when he announced the creation of the Water Act, which spawned the Murray-Darling Basin Plan:

Rivers do not recognise those lines on the map that we call state borders …

Yet the Governor-General's speech showed that Labor is again prepared to turn state against state and play politics with one of the most contentious reforms this country has ever undertaken.

On 29 June 2012, the Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council, at the instigation of the South Australian government, requested the MDBA model and assess the benefits of further water recovery and what extra water for the environment would do if key constraints were relaxed. The authority's subsequent report, released in October 2012, showed that the combination of relaxed constraints and an additional average of about 400 gigalitres of water could increase environmental benefits, with many more flow indicators being met for the Murray River, and that it could provide capacity to water mid- to high-level parts of the floodplain in the lower Murray.

However, the same report also made it clear that undertaking detailed assessment and analysis to identify whether any of the constraints tested in the study could actually be relaxed was not within the scope of the report, and the modelling also did not include explicit environmental demands for the lower Darling River and the Anabranch. In plain English this meant that the MDBA and the Labor government at the time had a model but had no idea whether, in the real world outside of the model world, constraints identified could be relaxed, and, worse, the model made no allowance for the lower Darling environmental needs. So unless we acknowledge that the lower Darling has environmental needs we will continue to see fish kills.

As it was, the constraints strategy, if it was delivered, would cut the Darling Anabranch and two key wetland lakes from the lower Darling River to try and get higher flows from Menindee Lakes into the Murray River for South Australia. If we don't want fish kills, if we don't want the drying of the lower Darling to become a regular occurrence then we need to accept the cries of the communities and now the New South Wales government that the Menindee Lakes water-saving project needs to be completely rescoped to make sure we look after the environment of the lower Darling, the environment of the Anabranch and also look after the communities.

For too long we have ignored what the communities have been telling us, particularly when it came to making sure there are no social and economic downsides. The Gillard government, in announcing the 450 gigalitres of environmental water, said it would be obtained through projects to ensure there would be no social and economic downsides for communities. But report after report since then has shown that water recovery has already had a negative impact. The state governments acknowledge this and that is why, in December 2018, the ministerial council agreed to a set of socioeconomic assessment criteria, to ensure the neutrality of efficiency measures in projects proposed as part of the 450 gigalitres. Those criteria are still on the department's website. And it should be noted that it is still very much the Victorian Labor and the New South Wales coalition governments' intention to maintain those criteria.

I also want to note that the 450 gigalitres were to be recovered proportionately across states. That means there would be about 56 gigalitres to be recovered from South Australia, if this target was going to be pursued. There is nothing stopping the South Australian government bringing forward projects to be approved and pursued under that project. I also want to note that, contrary to the negative picture painted by the new water minister about supposedly failing the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, recent reports from the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder and the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water—another long name—say that native fish are fighting back. We have recovered over four million megalitres of water entitlements since 2004 under various water reforms and they are working. Our environmental water managers have learned since that time how to better use infrastructure available and how to target their environmental water management. So this year, in a year with full allocations, farmers' crops are going gangbusters; we have birds breeding, fish flourishing, and wetlands being watered. That is what a good Murray-Darling Basin Plan can lead to. On that note, I thank the Senate for its time.