Perin Davey (NSW, National Party, Shadow Minister for Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Australians, what have we done? After dedicating $13 billion, after recovering more than four Sydney Harbour's worth of water in the name of the environment—on top of three Sydney Harbours already recovered prior to the plan—after employing hundreds of new bureaucrats to manage those Sydney Harbours and to model, and after contracting the equivalent number of academics to monitor, clearly we have completely failed the Murray-Darling Basin. At least that is the conclusion you have to draw if you see the government's latest Murray-Darling Basin propaganda ads, which say, boom, boom, boom:

But water's being overused and the next drought is only a matter of time. We have to make sure there's enough water, otherwise the rivers may run dry.

The ad goes on to say:

If we don't act, it could threaten our iconic Aussie plants and animals, our food supply and affect the drinking water of more than 3 million Australians.

Goodness me, it makes me panic. I am really scared and worried about what the next drought means, but then I think, 'Hang on, in the millennium drought, before the Basin Plan, before we recovered 2,100 gigalitres of water under the Basin Plan, we didn't run out of water and we didn't run out of drinking water.' Okay, Adelaide turned on their desal plant for the first time ever, I think. No, they built the desal plant but they didn't run out of drinking water. We didn't run out of food in the millennium drought before the Basin Plan.

If we were so successful at managing our water then, and since then we've spent $13 billion and recovered four Sydney Harbour's worth of water, what are we doing wrong now? Why are we going to run out of drinking water in the next drought? Don't just believe me about how we managed the basin in the millennium drought. At the time, an international expert in environmental engineering, the late John Briscoe of Harvard University, who was appointed by the government to the high-level review panel to review the guide to the Basin Plan and the Water Act, wrote in 2011:

Over the last 10 years—

which was the period that covered the millennium drought—

Australia did something which no other country could conceivably have managed—in a large irrigated agricultural economy (the Murray-Darling Basin) a 70% reduction in water availability had very little aggregate economic impact.

He went on to say that the institutional response of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan Commission, the basin states, and farmers to the dramatic reduction in rainfall and commensurate reduction in river flows was 'extraordinarily innovative' and 'effective':

Not only for the economy but … for ameliorating the environmental damage of the terrible drought.

So why are we in such a catastrophic position now? How can it be possible that we are at the risk of running out of food and water in the next drought when, under the auspices of the Basin Plan, the more than 2,100 gigalitres of water has been transferred to the Commonwealth for the environment? What is that water doing? I'll tell you what it is not doing. That water will not be flowing to farmers or out of anyone's drinking water taps because it's not allowed to. It's for the environment. So pretending in these ads that the Murray-Darling Basin Plan is about protecting our drinking water and food production is absolute bunkum. This ad, the cost of which we don't know—I've got some questions in to find out—and which is being paid for by taxpayers, as is the associated campaign, is doing nothing but panicking the population. It would give you the impression that the Murray-Darling Basin Plan is a drought prevention plan and will keep water flowing to farmers and running out of our taps in the next drought. But, as I've explained, that is not true. The water now owned by the Commonwealth cannot be used by towns or farmers.

I want to remind people that, when the Basin Plan was developed and taken through parliament by then Minister Tony Burke, he was at absolute pains to point out that the plan was not a drought plan. It was a resilience plan. Even now, the MDBA website states that there are 'no guarantees'. It says:

Even with better forecasting, improved planning and new policies in place, we cannot drought-proof the Basin. Droughts will continue to impact communities and the environment.

Importantly, it goes on to explain:

The need to plan for drought has been understood since the early days of water management in Australia. Before dams were built along the River Murray, dry times meant parts of the river and its tributaries would sometimes be reduced to a series of pools, or cease to flow at all.

These experiences highlighted the need to manage the Murray in a more cooperative manner and build the dams, weirs and other structures to provide a more reliable flow.

That is how we managed the millennium drought. In other words, since we started developing the Murray-Darling Basin—as in developing, building the weirs and the dams—we've learnt to manage the river through droughts. As I said before, during the millennium drought no town on the Murray River ran out of drinking water. Remember, as the MDBA also rightly points out:

During a drought, all allocations are reduced, whether the water is for farming or the environment.

The fact of the matter is that, if it doesn't rain, it doesn't rain. There are no inflows into rivers and streams or into the dams. When the northern basin ran dry in the last drought, between 2017 and 2019, no basin plan could have assisted. No amount of held environmental water could assist the towns that nearly ran dry. At that time, when the rain stopped in January 2017 and with no significant inflows for two years, experts have said, without water infrastructure like dams and weirs, rivers would have ceased to flow by October 2017. But, thanks to that infrastructure and careful management, rivers continued to flow for another 12-plus months. That was thanks to infrastructure, not thanks to the Basin Plan.

Again, I ask: What is the government doing with these propaganda ads? Why are they actually standing up and telling people that $13 billion has been wasted, that 13 years of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan has achieved nothing and that we are now in a more precarious position than we were prior to the Basin Plan? This is misinformation writ large, and the government should apologise to the public for such an appalling propaganda campaign to justify further expenditure of public money to take water away from food and fibre production and away from towns and communities that rely on the basin for their very existence. These ads are a despicable waste of public money, and they are a blatant lie.