Page 5176 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 27 October 2010
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water efficiency measures, water is clearly a topic close to our hearts, as it should be, and will no doubt continue to be well into the future.
The Murray-Darling plan has proposed some significant cuts to the ACT’s current diversion cap. In essence, today’s debate is about how we respond to those proposals and how we participate in the reductions that must be made across the basin. Let me first focus on the proposed Murray-Darling plan.
The essential ingredients are a $9 billion fund available to buy back between 3,000 to 7,600 gigalitres across the entire basin and return it to the river system. This is what the best available science shows needs to be returned to the river in order to make it sustainable and viable in the long term. The guide also proposes to achieve the majority of reductions through buybacks and investing in more efficient irrigation infrastructure.
The Murray-Darling Basin Authority have been clear that, while social and economic analysis would be taken into account, sustainable diversion limits would be developed on the best available science, and that at the heart of their decision making are the principles of ecologically sustainable development—that is, if there are threats of serious or irreversible environmental damage, the lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing debate.
Mrs Dunne picked up on this earlier when she picked up some public comments I made on the ABC. I am comfortable about them and absolutely stand by those comments. I am also comfortable with the fact that they are consistent with what my federal colleagues are saying. I am not too shocked or horrified that we have got some joined-up thinking going on there, but our essential response to the broader plan is that, without a sustainable river system, there will be no sustainable communities across the basin.
We also hold the view that we need to build resilience in the river system. We have been over-farming water for three generations now and, as we have discussed in this place before, the scenarios for the future are for hotter, dry conditions. The stress on the river system under those scenarios can only increase.
Certainly the water debate has played a central role in Australian history and even shaped our constitution as we see it today. It is no mistake that section 51 of the constitution does not hand the commonwealth the express power to make laws with respect to water. The founding fathers were forced to leave water rights to the states, never mind the fact that the Murray-Darling flows through four states and one territory. Likewise, section 100 of the constitution reads that the commonwealth shall not, by any law or regulation of trade or commerce, abridge the right of a state or of the residents therein to the reasonable use of waters of rivers for conservation or irrigation, something that was just overlooked. These are quite deliberate provisions that reflect the discussions of the time.
This approach of giving states the ability to regulate water has largely been accepted, despite the fact that good water management requires cohesion. That mistake—which I believe it was to end up with a segmented or fragmented system—has been
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