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

Sadly, I have been in this place long enough to have been here when the abomination that is the Murray-Darling Basin Plan was put in place. I've watched that plan decimate communities, industries, towns and families right throughout my home state of Victoria. It was the sad fact in Victoria, because we had a very highly regulated irrigation system, that it was our water that the Labor government back then, when Penny Wong was the water minister, could enter into our communities for. If you purchased Victorian water, you were actually guaranteed of getting water because of the highly regulated nature of our system. And so, today, when we know over 90 per cent of the water originally envisaged under the plan has been recovered, over half of it comes from regional Victoria. We have paid the price for this plan. Despite it encompassing four states and one territory, it is the Victorian regional communities which have paid the very worst price under this plan. That is why the Labor government in Victoria does not support this piece of legislation. It does not support the water minister going back into the market with forced buybacks and does not support the 450-gigalitre political solution that was arrived at back in the day to get certain members in this chamber across the line. It was never meant to be part of the total plan. It was always a political solution.

We have a Labor Party that doesn't understand the regions, doesn't care about the regions, wouldn't know the Barmah Choke if it fell over it and has not sat down in the pubs and footy clubs of Kerang, Cobram, Swan Hill, Mildura, Echuca and Shepparton. Eighty per cent of our national pear crop comes from Shepparton and the Goulburn Valley. Horticulture and dairy industries in regional Victoria have done the heavy lifting in this water recovery task. It says everything about the government and their attitude to those nine million of us that don't live in capital cities that they cannot wait to give our farmers and our regional communities a Christmas present that will devastate our productive capacity and will devastate families.

I was taken to task for talking about the mental health impact this policy has had over the last decade on these communities. Hard men, grown men and proud men were brought to tears and worse, and it will be the same with this because it is an incredibly blunt, pathetic response to achieving environmental outcomes. The truth is that a decade ago when we set this thing up we didn't have the science and the telemetrics on our creeks and rivers—the measurement tools to understand how best to water environmental assets didn't exist—so we thought it was all about a base number: 'If we get this many gigalitres down the river then all the Ramsar wetlands will be tickety-boo.' No, they won't. We have pushed too much water down river and it's actually destroying environmental assets as a result. Guess what the scientists say? 'Don't push so much water down the river, because there are natural constraints. Let it sit longer and be slower. That's what our kind of environment needs.' That's what our environment actually needs.