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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Foreign Affairs (Senator Wong) to a question without notice I asked today relating to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.

What a disappointment it is that, after a decade of broken promises and wasted time, we now see the Murray-Darling Basin without the water that was promised to be returned to it from the big, greedy irrigators upstream. Again and again and again, South Australia has been dudded, and I fear we will be dudded once more. We need to make sure that any move to delay action on delivering water for South Australia and delivering water for the Murray is not simply kicking the can down the road but, instead, is actually guaranteeing that the water we need to keep the lower reaches of the Murray flowing is delivered, and delivered in a timely manner.

There have been broken promises, wasted opportunity, politicking, upstream rorting and greed. It is time they ended, and I'll be fighting hard in this place to make sure that South Australia is not dudded again. I don't care what side of politics it is; our state needs a healthy river. We need our water, and the environment needs it more than ever.

While I'm here I also wish to take note of the question put by the opposition to the government in relation to the Voice. What a disgrace we saw in here this afternoon from members of the Liberal and National parties. While that question was being asked, division sown and mistruths promoted, we saw the very same thing happening in the House of Representatives, led, of course, by none other than Mr Peter Dutton, the man who walked out of the apology to the stolen generation, the bloke who has form in turning his back on Indigenous Australians, the guy who thinks his only ticket to leadership and to the Lodge is to keep seeding division, hate and racism.