James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

The coalition deplores the Water Amendment (Restoring Our Rivers) Bill 2023 because parts of it are a real kick in the guts for regional Australia and, in particular, for south-west Queensland. Though the coalition supports extending the deadlines for the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, the coalition cannot support the removal of the social and economic neutrality test on recovering water for environmental purposes because to do that hurts my communities in Queensland, particularly in south-west Queensland.

The Murray-Darling Basin Plan is an incredibly sophisticated part of our water policy in Australia. It covers Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, and the Murray-Darling Basin Plan is a core aspect of our national framework for water policy. This is because, currently, the water in the Murray-Darling Basin is used to support the 2.6 million people that live across the network of rivers. The basin provides irrigation for much of our agriculture, supporting over 7,000 irrigated agricultural businesses that produce $24 billion worth of food and fibre each year, including all our nation's rice and 96 per cent of our country's cotton. The towns in south-west Queensland are heavily reliant on the Murray-Darling Basin for crop production, especially across St George and Goondiwindi. The Paroo, Warrego, Condamine, Balonne, Moonie and the broader border rivers support almost all of the agriculture production across southern and south-west Queensland. So what aspects of this bill say to those people—the constituents of mine and of Senator Scarr—is that they aren't important. They are second-rate. They are second-class Australians according to this bill.

With years of bipartisan support, the coalition and the Labor Party have worked together to ensure that water is allocated for environment purposes only if it has a positive or a neutral social and economic impact on the welfare of relevant regional and rural communities. This Labor government want to change that. This bill removes the provision for water being extracted for environmental purposes to have a positive social and economic impact on the relevant communities. What this bill does, these piles of printed paper, is kick those communities and punch those communities. It scratches and slaps them and pushes them down. This is the modern Labor Party, who do not care about Australians who live west of the Great Dividing Range. This is the modern Labor Party, who are more concerned about doing preference deals with the Greens to ensure they survive and stay in power. If this bill is about supporting rural, regional and remote Australia, as those on the Left have so arrogantly claimed, then why remove the provision that requires it to support rural, regional and remote Australia? This is deplorable. This is a joke. This is a kick in the guts. The removal of this provision is not only a backflip on Labor policy; it panders to their new woke base and ignores the pleas of farmers and irrigators, who want to ensure that you have food on your table at night.

We are in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, but this government is so out of touch that this bill, through their policies that underpin this bill, will increase the cost of food and vegetables by removing water from farmers, who, in some areas, are in the middle of a drought or in the middle of a long dry. It also removes support from those who live in these communities. I wonder why they want to do that. Why do they want to hurt Australians? Why do they want to hurt Australians who live west of the Great Dividing Range? It comes down to where the modern Labor Party are at in terms of their policy platform. They know that the only way they can ever win elections is by doing preference deals with the Greens. This is the modern Labor Party.

The Labor Party have shifted so far to the Left that they are leaving behind generations of Australians and leaving behind large swathes of Australia. That is a shame because it is important in Australia's democracy that there is a broad Centre Left party and a broad Centre Right party. But what we see with the Labor Party now is just a left-wing party that thinks food comes from a supermarket. The Labor Party think that farmers are something that they read about in history books. The Labor Party think that modern Australia does not need rural, regional and remote Australia. This is the fundamental difference between our two sides of politics. On the Centre Right, on the Right side of politics, we believe that all Australians, regardless of where they live, whether they live in a place called St George, which I guarantee probably no Labor senators have ever been to—