South Australian River Murray Sustainability Irrigation Industry Improvement Program

Mr WHETSTONE (Chaffey) (15:08): As a further supplementary question to the Premier, in your good negotiating skills you managed to negotiate about $265 million to $290 million for South Australian river communities. Why is it that New South Wales and Victoria negotiated over a billion dollars each?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL (Cheltenham—Premier) (15:08): Because that's where the water comes from. They are the ones who have the uncovered irrigation ditches. They are the ones who spill more water than we use in our entire system. That's where the investments need to come from. If the member had just decided for one second to set aside his partisan opportunism and actually look at the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, he would see his 2,750 gigalitres (the Mazda that was called for by the dear old member for MacKillop), and he would see strapped on top of that is the extra water that gets us up to 3,200.

What's in the account that pays for that? About $1.77 billion that is set aside in a locked box to get us from the 2,750 to the 3,200. If you want to value the amount of extra effort that was necessary to get this extra water down the river and to give us a healthy river, it is there in black and white.

Where does it need to be spent? The lion’s share of it needs to be spent upstream where they are actually guzzling all this water. That is what we insisted on, and it is no surprise that that is where the money is being spent because we get the benefit because we are downstream. We are the ones who have to put up with the degradation of this river, the depletion of this river, and we were the ones who stood alongside the environmental groups around this nation.

We stood together with our irrigators. They were being encouraged by irrigators upstream to split apart from the South Australian government and actually join with them against us: irrigators versus the city. The great leadership of the irrigator communities up there—Gavin McMahon and Ben Haslett, those leaders of great foresight—decided to stick with us. They decided to trust a South Australian Labor government to work with them to deliver and we did.