Senate debates
Monday, 6 November 2023
Documents
Murray-Darling Basin Plan; Order for the Production of Documents
3:18 pm
Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source
I rise to add a contribution to this debate. It is disappointing that the minister has not been able to cough up the details as requested by Senator Davey. Now, Senator Davey and I don't see eye to eye on a lot of things to do with the Murray-Darling Basin. I come from South Australia, and we know what happens when the upstream states don't treat our rivers properly. But let me say this: what Senator Davey has requested is information that is crucial to help this Senate determine what we should do with this piece of legislation. This has been a longstanding issue of debate. I was in here in 2012 when we finally passed the amended Water Act and the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. I was part of a lot of the community consultations in putting that plan together. I sat in meeting after meeting after meeting with scientific experts, who said all the way along that this is not enough. This is not going to save our river. This is not going to put the Murray-Darling Basin on a sustainable footing. The best available science was literally thrown out and ignored. But we had to take what we got. Of course, a big part of that was what South Australia, my home state, fought for, the extra 450 gigalitres to at least get some extra water for the environment.
Over the last few years we've seen floods and rain and runoff at record levels, and some people seem to have forgotten that the dire state of the whole river system is still a problem. As we head back into a drying summer, into El Nino, this is actually when the Murray-Darling Basin Plan is meant to be used. When it's meant to come into its own is in the bad times, not in the good. In the good there's plenty of water around, and people don't seem to have a problem. You need to be serious about sharing the water and looking after the river when there's less about. People get greedy. They want water for themselves. They want to be able to water their crop over there, and it doesn't matter what happens to their neighbour downstream. Communities are being told to truck drinking water in because the quality of water in the river is not for human consumption, or, for those who live in the lower reaches, 'Oh well, suck it up, wait for it to rain.' Or we have the words of Mr Barnaby Joyce, the former water minister, when he told South Australians that, if they wanted water, they should just move to Queensland. The whole point of a plan to share the precious water resources of the Murray-Darling Basin is to have it in place to protect the river and to protect the community when times get tough.
I see nothing so far that's being delivered by this government in relation to this bill that guarantees that that will happen—nothing. I see that the bill is listed for introduction and debate this week. Well, good luck with that. I can tell you the Senate won't be passing it. We're not going to be passing it this week. We want to see the details and a guarantee for how that water is going to be secured, when it's going to be secured and who it's going to be secured for. There's no possible way that this Senate is going to be able to pass a piece of legislation, an amendment bill, that simply kicks the can down the road forever and a day without some ramifications. For far too long people have dragged this out. Too much water is still being taken out of the river system to give it a fighting chance. The whole purpose of this amendment bill is to reverse that: to give our environment the drink it needs and to ensure that towns and communities have clean drinking water. If you can't guarantee that, don't bother bringing the bill to this place.
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