Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

I seek leave to make a statement of not more than five minutes.

Leave granted.

I don't think there is anybody Australia who doesn't want to see a healthy Murray-Darling River system. Our farmers do for the amazing food that they produce that ends up on people's tables and in restaurants and gets exported overseas. Communities rely on it because that's where they live. There's the amazing tourism industry that it supports. In cities, when they turn on the tap, in many cases around Australia the water that comes out of that tap comes from the Murray-Darling Basin system. So achieving a healthy river system should not be anything that should be disputed in this place, no matter where you sit on the political spectrum. That's why I have always been a 100 per cent supporter of the delivery of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan in full.

However, the pathway to delivering this plan is being seriously jeopardised by the bill we have before us at the moment, the Water Amendment (Restoring our Rivers) Bill 2023. It throws out a decade or more of a bipartisan approach that saw the states and territories, as well as Commonwealth, working together to try to make sure that we took politics out of this debate and that the outcomes for all Australians, those that live in the communities as well as those that rely on the communities as well as those that benefit from the communities, were at the forefront of our decision-making. But, sadly, those opposite have put politics back into this debate again. They've put headlines ahead of the actual delivery and making sure that we continue to consider the impact on those that are most impacted by this.

And so, as somebody who always looked at my policy through a lens of regional and rural Australia, I cannot possibly support uncontrolled buybacks, as this bill purports to put forward. Taking this amount of water out of the system via buybacks would completely and utterly decimate the community I live in in Renmark in South Australia.

It would no longer exist. With the pressures at the moment in terms of cost of living for many of our agricultural products, this is not the economic environment to come out and say that you're buying from a willing seller. A willing seller is not somebody who has the bank breathing down their neck; a willing seller is not somebody who's forced to sell their water because they have to keep putting food on the table for their family. You cannot come in here and say that these buybacks are going to be voluntary when the pressures that are on our farmers at the moment for a while heap of reasons will mean that they will be forced to because their banks will be demanding that they draw down on their mortgages.

We cannot possibly support this bill coming into the Senate under its current guise. The consideration of the additional water about no socioeconomic impact was there for a reason. We have to have a balance. You cannot take Australia's major food bowl offline and think that it is not going to have a devastating effect on Australia's economy and then continue to push up the price of food in Australia even more. We have a cost-of-living crisis and a government that's doing nothing about it, and here we have a bill that will potentially push the price of food in Australia completely out of reach of the average Australian. We do not want to see Australians eating 2 Minute Noodles; we want to see Australians eating the healthy produce that's produced out of our river communities.

The move to disregard socioeconomic neutrality, which this bill seeks to do, is a shift away from the original intent of this plan. It is a demonstration of the lack of sincerity of this government about truly delivering the best thing for our plan. Taking the water away without a plan on how you're going to deliver it is also ridiculous. We know that to date the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder has not used all of the water that it holds in order to deliver economic outcomes, so please don't take any more water out of our river communities until you know not only you're going to use it but also how you're going to move it through the system.

It was also absolutely disingenuous that the very communities likely to be affected most significantly by this were completely disregarded when it came to hearings. Holding hearings in Canberra—it's a bit like the Canberra voice; this is the Canberra water bill—you actually have to get out and speak to the people impacted by your legislation if you really want to make sure that you are delivering the best possible legislation and regulations for Australians. The idea that you're not going to go and speak to those communities is an absolute reflection of the disregard and contempt that you hold people who sit outside of metropolitan areas in your decision-making and your policy development. As I said, we cannot possibly support this bill.

I want to quote Craig Knowles, a previous Labor member of the New South Wales parliament, when he said: 'A healthy, working river is what we want. At this rate we may end up with a healthy river, but it won't be working anymore.'