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

by leave—Finally, we've got the report into this piece of legislation, and I acknowledge the enormous amount of work that went into it from the secretariat, who worked very hard on this particular issue. It is a complex one. It involves many different facets. Of course, the Murray-Darling Basin Plan is a plan that has been in place for over a decade now, but the reason this bill has come before us is that, despite the promises, the plan has not been delivered in full or on time.

There has been promise after promise from both the Labor Party and the Liberal-National coalition over the last decade, yet here we have today a report into a bill that the government would like to, I assume, bring forward and have passed this year to blow out the time frames, because someone didn't do their homework. Rather than just giving them an extension, we want to make sure that the work is actually done. Sadly—and we can see this from the report being tabled today—this bill does not make sure the work is going to be done.

In this current legislation, the report makes it very clear that there are no guarantees that the Murray-Darling Basin Plan will be delivered in full or even within the new time frame. There's no legislative guarantee for the 450 gigalitres that, of course, is so urgently needed to keep our river system alive. There is no guarantee that the outstanding water from the 605 SDLAM programs will be delivered in full and on time. In fact, it's the opposite.

What we saw in the inquiry into this piece of legislation and what this report clearly identifies is that no-one believes that any of these time frames are going to be met. Yet here we are being asked to pass a piece of legislation by the government and extend the deadlines. Even their own government-chaired report says the new time frames will not be met. The Productivity Commission says they won't be met. Every expert in the country that submitted to this report says they will not be met. In fact, the state governments who have been asked to sign up and endorse this acknowledge that these new time frames will not be met. This is, of course, after years, a decade, of dragging the chain, slowing things down, putting all the hard stuff in the hardest basket they could find—plod, plod, plod. Meanwhile, the river system has gotten sicker and sicker.

I'm standing here today in this place, giving this contribution, on a day when my home state and my home town in Adelaide will be hitting 40 degrees. We are heading back into one hell of a hot summer. Forty degrees, and it's not even mid-November. We are heading into a horror summer. Rainfall is going to be low, run-off into the river system is going to be low, and our Lower Lakes and Coorong are going to really start to feel the heat. Our river system from the bottom to the top cannot handle another drought. Our river system from the bottom right up to the top is already so fragile, because so much water has been taken out for greed and for profit, not for the sustainability of the river system.

The whole point of this plan is to return water to the river to keep it alive, because it doesn't matter what business you are in; it doesn't matter whether you're a farmer, or a member of the local community, or a fisherman in the Coorong, or a member of the Murray cod fish school: a dead river is a dead river, and there are no jobs on a dead river. You can't eat cotton. You can't drink mud. A river that is dead is good for no-one.