Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Water Amendment (Restoring Our Members) Bill 2023 and to call out Labor for doing a deal with the devil, in the Greens, in agreeing to this plan. This plan is an utter disgrace. All I can say is that the Labor Party of old, and people like Ben Chifley, must be rolling in their graves. That's because former Labor parties would actually build dams. It's exactly what Ben Chifley did after World War II. He used to the sovereign powers act of the Constitution, under the national defence powers, and he actually undertook to build the Snowy Hydro plan. That plan took water from the Snowy River in southern New South Wales and Victoria, and diverted it westwards so it could go into the Murray and the Murrumbidgee—basically, to start a food bowl and southern Australia. That was along the Murray basin and the Murrumbidgee basin so that we could have irrigation and provide certainty to our farmers as to water supply. That's what you call nation-building vision. Yet here today, we have a Labor Party, in alliance with the Greens, that actually wants to destroy primary production in this country.

I notice that we have a South Australian senator in the chamber. Who actually knows what the current depth of Lake Alexandrina in South Australia is? Does anyone know? I know that Senator Grogan there was telling us that we didn't know what we were talking about. I'll tell her what the average depth of Lake Alexandrina is: it's 0.85 metres, which is less than three feet deep. But this plan will take water out of the northern basin, including the Darling River, the Murray and the Murrumbidgee—it will take water away from the farmers—so that it can run all the way downstream to sit in the Lower Lakes in South Australia. Senator Grogan said, 'We have to store water and protect water for future generations.' Here's a fact: water evaporates! If you don't know about that, I think you should educate yourself. You should google 'BOM evaporation map' and you will get an evaporation map of Australia that looks like this. You will see that in the southern part of Australia, where the Lower Lakes are, evaporation occurs at two metres a year.