Perin Davey (NSW, National Party, Shadow Minister for Water) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak on the Water Amendment (Restoring Our Rivers) Bill 2023. We have seen this morning the result of the Greens-Labor coalition in government coming to a town near you to buy back your water, to increase the cost of your groceries. We have seen this government and its ideological approach to governing. It does not have a practical approach at all. It is full of promises and full of rhetoric, but it is very short on practical action and very thorough on actions that hurt Australians' hip pockets.

Before they were elected they promised to reduce power bills by $275. That hasn't happened. Your power bills have gone up. They promised your mortgages would go down. That hasn't happened. Your mortgages have gone up. They promised that real wages would increase and, while there have been wage rises, real wages have gone backwards, thanks to inflation. They promised to reduce the cost of living. Well, I'm sorry, but that has not happened.

Now they are going to come and hit your hip pocket again because of this ideological deal. This deal with the Greens will strip further water from productive use in the Murray-Darling Basin on top of what has already been recovered and what is already set aside purely for the environment. It is not the case, as the Minister for the Environment and Water promised on the 7.30 program the other week, that water recovery under this deal will protect drinking water and town water because that goes against the objects of this act. You cannot use this water for drinking water or town water unless we are in an absolutely devastating crisis, which we hope we never get into again. You can't: this water is not for that. So anytime someone stands up and says. 'This water is going to help Adelaide,' or 'This water is going to protect your drinking water,' that is an out-and-out lie. It cannot be used for those purposes. But, taking this water out will drive up input costs for farmers because it will increase the price farmers pay for their water, it will drive up the cost of delivery of the water and it will drive up the cost of groceries.

Just in the last fortnight, Murray-Darling Basin MPs and senators hosted a 'Taste of the Basin' event here in parliament. It was very gracious of the minister to come and to talk to the cotton growers, the fruit growers, the farmers who had come up and the producers. She went across to the SPC stand. SPC produce those beautiful tinned peaches and tinned tomatoes. She said she always likes to use Australian produce in her cooking and that she uses SPC tomatoes. Well, she's just made it harder for that to happen. At our Senate committee inquiry, we heard from the head of SPC that anything that drives up the costs for his farmers and increases the cost of production makes the job of SPC harder and makes it harder for them to compete against cheap Chinese imports. That's what we're seeing today, and to what end?.

The government cannot definitively say what improved environmental objectives they are going to achieve with this water. We know, from the work done by the previous Labor government, between 2010 and 2012, that just holding this volume of water in the portfolio of the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder is not enough. To actually have improved environmental and ecological outcomes from this extra water, you need to address constraints, and there's nothing in this deal today that's going to address constraints. Are they proposing to continue to put pressure on the Barmah Choke, the Goulburn River Choke and other vulnerable environmental areas by trying to ram an ideological volume of water downstream just so they can say they ticked a box? That's what this is about; this is about ticking a box. And at what cost?

We saw on the weekend the Minister for Climate Change and Energy refuse to answer questions put to him by David Speers on Insiders about what the cost of this rush to renewables will be to the Australian taxpayers. Minister Bowen refused to answer the question. We're seeing the same from Minister Plibersek.

She said, 'You don't go to an auction with your cheque pre-signed to tell everyone what you're willing to pay for a house,' but we're not talking about what she's going to pay for the individual entitlements. We're talking about what she's going to pay in total for all of this. How much is this policy going to cost the Australian people? What we do know is that there's an extra $100 million for Aboriginal entitlements. They still don't know how they're actually going facilitate that—they still haven't spent the $40 million that the coalition government set aside for Aboriginal water entitlements because they can't work out how to do it. So instead of fixing the problem they're just going to throw more money at it and hope that, somehow, it works out. So we know that cost, but we don't know the cost of anything else. Even with the past government, we saw that every time Penny Wong went out with a tender she would announce what the total value of the tender process was. But the current minister is absolutely refusing to be clear about what it will cost.

We were talking to the government as well—and, congratulations, Senator Hanson-Young, on reaching your deal. That's the glory of politics. I would have preferred her to support what I was offering to put on the table. What I was offering to put on the table was consistent with what the then Labor government wrote into the original Basin Plan. And don't just believe me: in a press release in October 2012, then Prime Minister Julia Gillard stated that there would be, 'An additional 450 gigalitres of environmental water to be obtained through projects to ensure there are no social and economic downside for communities.' That was Prime Minister Gillard. And in his second reading speech to the House on the Water Amendment (Water for the Environment Special Account) Bill 2012, then Minister Burke stated, 'Importantly, the plan being proposed by the MDBA stipulates that an additional 450 gigalitres of water only be acquired through methods that deliver additional water for the environment without negative social and economic consequences.' That is what I was taking to the government: to maintain the original intent and to keep a social and economic test as a safeguard to our communities in this bill. But that, clearly, is not the objective of this minister. For all of her words about having regard to the social and economic impacts of water reform on basin communities, she was not committed enough to that to write protections into the bill. I think it's a sign this government acknowledges that what they're proposing will hurt basin communities.

At the press conference we saw this morning, the minister refused to state how much will be from buybacks and how much would be through other mechanisms. One thing we know for sure is that the buyback will be more than 225 gigalitres, because if it weren't going to be that much there would be no requirement to lift the cap on buyback as is proposed by this bill. That was my other ask of the minister: if you are honest about your commitment that all options are on the table, that new projects can come forward and that buybacks are only one part of the package then keep the cap on buybacks, because there are still 225 gigalitres available under that cap. Keep the cap on buyback to force your department and your people to focus on alternative options. There would be nothing to prevent the government coming back in 18 months time to say, 'We're near the cap, let's have another crack.' But at least it would signal that they were going to put the hard work in first.

Let me make it perfectly clear: while, yes, I've heard the economists say, 'Buyback is the cheapest form of water recovery,' it is the laziest form of water recovery. It is the simple option. It is pulling out a chequebook and waving it in the air over the heads of stressed farmers—like farmers who are struggling with the current wine industry situation. These are people who will get compensated; they will—farmers will get compensated. And mark my words: the government will pay a premium, because that's how they'll get the water. They're just not being clear on how much premium they will pay. But then the truckies who cart the grapes or the grain to the processing plants will lose their contracts. Then the rice millers and the dairy processors will lose their jobs. Then they'll leave town, so they'll take their kids out of school. Then you'll have teachers who are all of a sudden being told, 'Thanks, but you don't need to come back next year because we're closing one of our classrooms.' And it goes on.

We know that both the Victorian and New South Wales governments have proposed alternatives. Both of them have requested that the government work out how to account for complementary measures such as incidental water savings, rules based changes and changing infrastructure to support fish movement. That work is hard. I admit, that work is hard. The department has continued to refuse to do the work, and the minister has not put the hard word on the department.

So I will be moving a second reading amendment, and I have a series of amendments which I will be proposing through committee of the whole, because I haven't given up. I have to fight, for the sake of the communities in which I live, and the communities that produce 40 per cent of Australia's food and fibre, and the dairy processors, the rice millers, the winemakers and all of those industries in the Murray-Darling Basin. I have to fight until the last minute. I have to throw everything I can at this, to try and take some of the rough edges off this bill which I fear is going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back for a lot of our small communities in the Murray-Darling Basin.

We saw rallies last week in Deniliquin, Griffith and Leeton, all at the same time, because these people are saying, 'How can we be here again?' The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and thinking you'll get a different result.

Now, this is not the first time we've removed water from productive uses, and we're not getting the environmental outcomes we want. There are other ways. We've seen it. Land and water management plans worked, because they're holistic—the Barmah-Millewa choke and so on— (Time expired)