The draft Murray Darling Basin plan has finally been released after four years of inaction and broken promises by the Labor Government.
After all this time the Basin plan lacks the detail to clearly show where water returned to the environment will come from or where it is going.
The uncertainty for river communities and South Australians will continue without this crucial detail – there is no environmental watering plan showing where environmental water will be used and no details of environmental benefits.
It seems the Government doesn’t want Australians to know the facts behind the headline figures and have again shrouded the plan in secrecy.
The Liberals started this process of reform in 2007 with a $10 billion investments and a plan to manage the river federally, which Labor has sadly strayed a long way from.
Our plan would have returned the river to health by investing in river communities to ensure they were able to produce more food with less water.
Of the $5.8 billion in funding set aside by the previous Liberal Government for water saving infrastructure and on-farm efficiency projects, Labor has only spent $518 million to date, and only as little as $70 million of that on projects that will actually save water.
The current farce cannot continue. We must have a new agreement that delivers a basin system that is well managed in the national interest, not a return to the failure upon failure of state-based deals, which have led to the waste of billions of dollars and gigalitres of water.
Since 2001 I have been advocating for a federal takeover of the Murray-Darling system.
I will continue to work closely with my Parliamentary colleague and fellow South Australian, Senator Simon Birmingham, the Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray-Darling Basin, who is, along with all my South Australian Liberal colleagues, determined to protect the interests of our state and the overall health of the river.
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