Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

If you listen to the Labor Party and you listen to the Greens, you'd think that all is lost for the Murray-Darling Basin, when it isn't, because communities and industries right up and down the river have done the heavy lifting over the last decade, particularly in my home state of Victoria, where water licences actually deliver actual water. It is the industries and communities up and down the basin who've seen almost 80 per cent of the water required under the plan delivered. What else has happened over the last decade? We've got better science. So the bald numbers of gigalitres—and some say 'gigababble'—that we've been arguing about over the last decade are meaningless, because what we actually want is a healthy river, healthy communities, and healthy environmental assets that this plan was set up to deliver.

The fact is we now have better science, so we can use that existing amount of water that we've been able to get back under sometimes very trying and difficult circumstances and use it in a better way to deliver the environmental outcomes that we all want to see. Instead of using the science, the Greens and the Labor Party—the government in particular—is much more interested in getting votes in capital cities where people don't understand and, worse, don't care about the millions of people that live in the Murray-Darling Basin and grow our food and our fibre.

The reality is we have studied this to death. The reason the 450 gigalitres was subject to socioeconomic tests was because we know that water is wealth.

We know that that is how not just the river is sustained but our capacity to grow food and fibre is sustained, families are sustained and communities are sustained. Coming after the 450 gigalitres and removing the need for socioeconomic impact to be assessed, evaluated and compensated for just shows the level of disinterest and disregard this Labor government and Minister Plibersek have for rural and regional Australia.

We've heard the National Farmers Federation president in recent weeks calling out the Labor government on the cumulative impact of its decisions across a whole range of portfolio areas and for the absolute disregard it has for the nine million of us that don't live in capital cities and export 70 per cent of what we grow so that one in four Australians can have a job. Just because we live outside, the government can't see us, don't feel it and don't know it. They think we are not worthy of actually having a government that cares about what happens.

When Anthony Albanese came to government, he promised to be a prime minister for everyone and that no-one would be left behind. It is decisions that this government is bringing in on the Murray-Darling Basin Plan which will mean rural and regional basin communities will be left behind, and the suicides that will come will be on the Labor Party's head. They care about a number, not actually about environmental, social and economic outcomes. Even Minister Burke, a Labor Party minister, when he set this up recognised that there would be a negative, detrimental cost to taking water out of these communities. Somehow that doesn't matter anymore.

I just want to say thank you to the Labor Party in Victoria, who are standing up against their mates in Canberra. That is a tough thing to do, but they are doing it because they know that coming after this water will decimate our dairy industry and our horticulture industry in northern Victoria. They're coming back in with buybacks. There are 450 gigalitres that are supposed to not be taken unless they can prove it is not going to hurt people. But they can't and they won't. That's why this committee didn't go out into the basin to hear from real people, hear from our farmers and hear from our communities. This bill will tear up a decade-long agreement to collaboratively manage our river system. It turns its back on how we all agreed to make sure water is there for people, for businesses and for the environment. Shame on Labor.