During its passage through parliament, the government’s Water Amendment Bill 2023 was subjected to almost 70 amendments. Deals were being made on the run. Nobody has a clear idea of how this massively amended Bill will affect farming, communities or the environment.
The Murray Darling Basin Plan can’t be changed without the consent of every State Premier. This government failed to follow that step, not only for the bill but also for these amendments that were introduced at the last minute. The Bill is a mess, the process is a mess, and it will leave a mess behind it.
The motion I put forward here is to refer the Bill to the relevant committee to try and make sense of the changes and see what else needs to be done to make the changes workable. The issue of the Commonwealth buying back water from a State that opposes water buybacks also needs to be sorted.
Transcript
As a servant to the many different people who make up our one Queensland community, One Nation continues to support a fair outcome for all those in the Murray-Darling Basin in Queensland and across the connected river system. The government last week advanced a bill that evolved drastically as it passed through Senate debate—some would say catastrophically through Senate debate. First, the Greens demanded changes for their support. Then Senator Van, Senator Thorpe and Senator Pocock added some tinsel for their respective ideologies. Much like a Christmas tree that the whole family decorated, it looks a bit crook. In fact, I would suggest that nobody knows how the bill is going to actually work.
The council of water ministers dealt with the bill in August this year and failed to issue a communique, which is a record of proceedings that would ordinarily detail any specific approval or rejection of suggested changes to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan 2012. A communique is available on their website for every meeting, going back years, except for August. When I requested it, Assistant Minister McAllister failed to provide it, after first saying it was available. Instead, the federal water minister, Tania Plibersek, put out a political statement that an agreement was made between the federal, New South Wales, South Australian, Queensland and Australian Capital Territory governments to deliver the Murray-Darling Basin Plan in full. Firstly, the ACT is not a state. It is not a voting signatory to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, so the so-called agreement reached was only between three of the required four states. Secondly, what was the agreement? I hear you saying an agreement was reached, yet no proof of that has been posted, beyond the minister’s statement.
Did New South Wales sign on to allow as much as 700 megalitres of buybacks from New South Wales farmers, or not? New South Wales Premier Minns said in a recent press release that he did not sign off on water buybacks and instead only signed off on $700 million in federal money for water projects. Victoria has not agreed to this legislation and is not a party to the buybacks. They’ve made that abundantly clear.
South Australia has not been honest with their farmers. I have not heard a word about the buybacks being planned from South Australian irrigators. I hear you say, ‘Hang on just a minute; the water is for South Australia.’ That’s true. The government is about to buy back water for South Australian river flow from South Australia. Their irrigators can wave to their water as it flows out to sea. I call upon the South Australian Premier, Peter Malinauskas, to answer a simple question: how much water did you agree could be purchased from South Australian farmers in that August meeting? How much, Premier? I’m hearing as much as 40 gigalitres is intended to be purchased from South Australia, which only has an irrigation pool of 400 gigalitres. That’s 10 per cent.
Queensland Premier Palaszczuk has not said a word about water buybacks. With an election coming up next year, the farming community should know what the Premier has just done to them. But they don’t know; she won’t tell them. I ask the Queensland Premier to be honest and to come clean: how much Queensland water did you agree to be bought back into Queensland? I understand the game that all the premiers except Victoria’s are playing: ‘Don’t talk about water buybacks. Blame the federal government. Defend Labor’s vote against the Greens and the teals. Get re-elected. Shhhh!’ It’s such a simple plan—except that it breaches the rules around the operation of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan itself. All state premiers must sign off to every change. The minute one state is out of something like water buybacks, the other states have to pick up the slack.
My state of Queensland loses more water and without a further hollowing out of the bush. The Water Amendment (Restoring Our Rivers Bill) 2023 was heavily amended—and many of us say catastrophically amended. In the House of Representatives the water amendment had five crossbench and 31 government amendments. In the Senate the bill had a haphazard mishmash of 20 government amendments. That’s a total of 51 government amendments to a bill that was introduced to parliament, plus five in the Senate from the Greens and eight from the crossbench. That’s 20 amendments to the bill in the Senate plus 31 in the House of Reps, reflecting yet another bill brought into the Senate without adequate thought and becoming a scrambled me due to opportunistic trading and deals.
This is no way to govern our country. It is shoddy governance. It is dishonest governance. And who pays? It is farmers, farming families, rural communities, regional Australia—everyone and anyone who eats. The reason there were so many amendments, including government amendments, is that the process of consultation was a complete farce. The government consulted with everyone they knew who would agree with them, and that was it. Irrigators in rural communities were ignored. The bill was pushed through a committee that the government controlled and was sent for a vote when it was so full of holes—51 holes that the government recognised. So the parliamentary process tried. The question remains: did we fix it? Did the premiers approve all these amendments? The amendments could not possibly have been approved. The Senate barely had time to read them. The premiers have most notably not even seen the amendments. The Environment and Communications Legislation Committee reported on what has become a very different bill. The premiers voted on a different bill—a bill they couldn’t agree on, and they haven’t seen the latest version.
At the very least, we need to see how these amendments fit together and what the impact of these amendments will be on the Murray-Darling Basin, on the environment and on the communities in the basin. Potential harm from the bill needs to be detected now and plans for mitigation canvassed immediately. We need to determine exactly what the rules around changes to the plan are so that amendments are done correctly next time. We need to assess what happens when the federal government starts buying up water in Victoria and the Victorian government rejects or objects. This legislation may be a High Court challenge waiting to happen.
As a new senator back in 2017, when I was in south-west Queensland in the town of St George in the Balonne shire I heard firsthand of the enormous damage to Queensland and northern New South Wales communities. As a result of that, Senator Pauline Hanson and I travelled the Murray from Albury to the Murray mouth, listening to regional communities in southern New South Wales, northern Victoria and South Australia. Later, when I returned to the Senate in 2019, I flew over the whole basin, listening closely to farmers, to communities and to people who had an argument for the environment. I then crossed the basin four times from east to west listening—in Queensland, northern New South Wales, central New South Wales, southern New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, including the regions of South Australia. We developed a credible water policy based on science and people’s needs, environmental needs and national needs.
The late John Bristow was a world-renowned expert on water. He visited our country in 2007—I’ve read a paper he published on it—and he declared that we had the best water management in the world. He was an international water expert, and he said we had the best water management. Later, in 2007, John Howard as Prime Minister and Malcolm Turnbull as water minister introduced the Water Act 2007. As has been repeated four or five times now, the aims of the Water Act are: to include compliance with international agreements—what the hell has that got to do with our federal legislation?—and to change the Murray-Darling Basin Commission to the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. That destroyed cooperation that had successfully managed the basin with cooperation between states and the Commonwealth. Commonwealth departments started to dictate and started to lie. John Howard and Malcolm Turnbull’s Water Act separated water allocations from land ownership—a catastrophe that has to be corrected.
The Water Act, to its credit, required a register of water trades, yet the Liberal-National and Labor parties have refused to install a water registry, even though it’s required by the legislation known as the Water Act. I moved an amendment to require a water register to be developed. It was passed in the Senate and rejected in the lower house by the Liberals, Nationals and Labor Party.
We now see that another feature of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan is that it led to contradictions of science and nature. It completely reversed the science. This is a mess due to globalist policies, working through the Greens—the Howard-Turnbull Water Act of 2007. On his next visit to Australia in 2011, John Bristow proclaimed that Australia had slumped to the worst—the world’s worst—water management for one reason: politically driven policy. He belled the culprit. The people in this parliament, the federal parliament, at federal level.
While mindful of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan’s catastrophic foundation, for now, as a result of the catastrophic mish-mash of the latest legislation changes last week, we need to scrutinise the latest legislation while keeping in the back of our minds the mess that the Murray-Darling Basin Plan is. Only a committee inquiry can sort this out and ensure such a monumental, haphazard, dishonest change to a 10-year-old plan is the right thing to do. I move:
- That the Senate notes that:
- the water Amendment (Restoring our Rivers) Bill 2023 was passed with substantial amendments; and
- the amendments were not reviewed by a committee and have not been approved by the Murray Darling Basin Ministerial Council.
- That the following matters relating to the Water Amendment (Restoring our Rivers) Bill 2023 be referred to the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee for review and report by the 30 March 2024:
- the operation, effectiveness and implications of the amendments made;
- matters relating to the approval of the amendments by the Murray Darling Basin Ministerial Council; and
- any related matters.
Agreed – thank you for your hard-working & commonsense approach