Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

I thank senators for their contributions this morning and in the second reading debate. Senator Lambie, you've made a number of observations about areas where you believe the bill ought to have gone further. You've also made a number of observations, which I agree with, about the shortcomings in the last decade. The truth is that settling a set of workable arrangements for a healthy working Murray-Darling Basin was a very difficult political challenge indeed.

I was talking to someone just yesterday who referred to the fact that in the debates leading up to the Federation a good proportion of the record of conversation between the different states when they were contemplating forming the Federation was, in fact, about how the Murray would be managed and how the assets and the resources in the Murray system would be worked. It is a longstanding feature of Australian politics. It took the last Labor government to work through the very complex issues, balancing the economic interests, the community interests and the environmental interests in that system. The truth is that many decades of development saw more water resources allocated for productive use than could be sustained in that system. The test for government—which was met in a bipartisan way at that time—was to find a fair way of redressing that and responding to it. Unfortunately, in the years that the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments were administering this plan, they didn't make sufficient progress. On coming to government, we were advised that it wouldn't be possible to implement the plan in full on the current policy settings. That's the process that has led to this bill.

We know these are hard questions for communities to deal with. Change is difficult. That's true, whether it's change that comes about as a consequence of global economic forces shaping the preferences for crop production in the basin or change that comes about because a warming planet is creating drier conditions in parts of the basin. It's also true about policy changes. It's why we have tried to work through this in a sensitive, consultative way, engaging with all the stakeholders to try and find a way through this, working with the states and territories and the various parts of the basin community.

You asked about economic modelling for this bill, Senator Lambie, and I think what you are really referring to—

Progress reported.