Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Murray-Darling Basin Commission—Report for 2005-06. We have heard a lot in this place and in the wider community about the future of water management for the Murray-Darling Basin. Of course, we have had some contributions from the Murray-Darling Basin Commission people themselves on the Prime Minister’s proposal. One of the concerns amongst the many that the Democrats have about what is being proposed at the moment for the Murray-Darling Basin is that some of the people with expertise in the fieldwhether that expertise is in management, water policy, the environment or farminghave not been properly involved so far in the development of the Prime Minister’s plan.

I should emphasise—as I try to do each time, to make sure that I am not misrepresented—that the Democrats have been calling for the Prime Minister to do something along the lines of what he announced at the end of January he would do, which was to ensure clear, overarching national management of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission. Whatever criticisms you would make of the federal government in this area, quite clearly the state governments have failed in their duties, by and large, to manage water resources in the basin properly. Clearly it is at a stage where something extra needs to be done. But that something needs to be done does not mean that doing anything is okay; we need to make sure, now more than ever, that what is done is correct and will actually worknot least because there is a large amount of money being put forward, or at least promised, in this area.

With such a major step as the referral of at least some powers from some of the states to the federal government being proposed, if that step fails then it really will make it difficult for the future. That is why the Democrats have called a number of times for a Senate inquiry into this whole proposal. That would get more of the detail out into the public arena so that it would not just be a backroom deal between the federal government and various state governments looking at their short-term political agendas. Even the Murray-Darling Basin Commission people themselves need to be much more in the loop with regard to what is being proposed. As an example of that, you only need to look at the difference between the Murray-Darling Basin Commission’s understanding of how things were going to be progressing in the National Water Initiative and the like at the time that this report was put together and the Murray-Darling Basin amendment legislation, on which we had a report tabled yesterday.

Then we had the Prime Minister’s statement at the end of January, which took another direction again. Now, as I said before, we need a new direction, so there is potential there. But it has to be the right direction, not just any direction. There were some quite good statements in the Prime Minister’s announcement at the end of January. He clearly indicated, amongst other things, that we needed to look at, as a last resort, the need to buy back water allocations. We all know overallocation is one of the significant problems. Yet in the communique released on the agreement between the Prime Minister and some of the premiers some weeks later, a lot more equivocation had crept in. That may be as much the influence of the premiers as of the Prime Minister; I do not know. Then earlier this week in question time in the House of Representatives the leader of the National Party made a statement that the last resort would be buying back water from people who wanted to sell it. Well, we still need to recognise that there may well be a time when we have to buy back water from people who do not want to sell it because that is the problem with overallocation. And just putting forward another big package with another lot of big promises and a lot of extra money is no good if we are not going to take the hard decisions at the end. That would risk not solving the problem, and we cannot afford that any longer.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak to the Murray-Darling Basin Commission—Report for 2005-06 and to my motion of 8 February to take note of the document. The report sets out the work the commission has done over the period 2005-06. The commission has done a good job over many years—since Federation, I think. It has been constrained many times because each of the relevant states and the Commonwealth has always had an interest in this, and anything that was done had to be done in conjunction with all of the states. Trying to get all of the states to agree when they had very differing interests has always been a great difficulty. I attended a number of Murray-Darling Basin ministerial meetings when I was the relevant minister and they always struck me as a group of people who were more interested in their own outcomes than in the outcomes of the nation and in the outcomes for the Murray-Darling Basin itself.

Because of that, I am delighted with the Prime Minister’s initiative to try and get the Commonwealth to have some form of control over the whole of the Murray-Darling Basin system. I have not been closely enough involved in that and have not followed it closely enough to understand exactly what this means in practice and how it is going to be implemented. If the states do not agree to allow the Commonwealth to do what is right for Australia—and, as I understand it, one of the states is still being a bit reticent—then I hope that a referendum might be held to constitutionally provide that, where rivers cross state boundaries, they become the responsibility of the national government rather than of individual state governments. If all the states agree to the Prime Minister’s proposal, that will not be necessary and we will have a national government making decisions that are in the national interest.

I can well understand why New South Wales were so keen to come on board, because New South Wales particularly had grossly overallocated water in that state from the Murray-Darling Basin system for many years. They were almost criminal in the way they allocated water without any real care for where the water was going to come from when it had been allocated. That is fine in wet times but, when it does not rain, when there is no water flowing, what do you do? Quite clearly, the New South Wales government would have been left with a huge bill to buy back water that they had overallocated. I always thought, in many of the meetings I attended, that it was a bit rich of New South Wales—having given out all that water, having been paid for it, in many instances, and having got a lot of political kudos from allocating water licences to landowners—to turn around and say, ‘We’ve done the wrong thing in the past but we want everyone else to pay for it.’ Under the Prime Minister’s proposal, as I understand it, the Commonwealth taxpayer will end up buying back water as a result of New South Wales’s folly over many years. As I say, for that reason I can understand why Mr Iemma was the first one out of the blocks to say, ‘Great idea!’

I hope that by the Commonwealth taking ‘control’ of the Murray they will have a much closer interest in what happens in that very special part of Australia. If it turns out that, for domestic political reasons, the Victorian government decides not to come along with this proposal, then I hope that the Commonwealth government will seriously consider some sort of referendum to constitutionally allow the government to do what I think should have been done at the time of Federation. As I understand it, in a lot of the discussions that were held leading up to Federation there was consideration of whether the Murray-Darling Basin system should be a national responsibility. As it turned out, it was not made one, but perhaps, 100 years on, it is time to look at that. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.