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

I rise to speak with a bit of a wake-up call for stakeholders, river managers and state governments. On 28 June this year, water ministers met to discuss the release of the Productivity Commission's inquiry report on national water reform and to talk about replacing the National Water Initiative with a new national water agreement. It's not such a bad concept after nearly two decades of the National Water Initiative. A renewal is timely. However, I made the point at the time that never before have so many Labor water ministers had so little to say on important water reform, with the meeting running for less than an hour.

At the moment there are draft principles for the new National Water Agreement doing the rounds, drafted by the bureaucracies with very little input from stakeholders, and I'm wondering how much input there was from state governments. This draft principles paper contains over 300 principles, with an immense lack of detail around how they would be implemented and what it would actually mean to implement them.

Governments absolutely need to go back to the drawing board to work with stakeholders to look at what the consequences of adopting these high-level, feel-good principles would actually be if put into practice. We've got to get beyond the theory. We've got to get beyond the 'vibe' and we must start to concentrate on what it means in practice. Can it be done, can it be done affordably and can it be done without negative social and economic impacts across our communities?