Minister for Sustainability, Environment and Conservation

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop) (15:29): Today, I rise to make some comments about minister Hunter and his petulant outburst last week. When he was supposed to be working for the people of South Australia with his interstate counterparts, he threw a hissy fit, abused everybody, stormed out and left the table empty and unrepresented as far as South Australia was concerned. The minister's claim was that the federal government was tearing up the Murray-Darling Basin Agreement and he took exception to that. I will come back to that in a moment.

Let me say that I am reminded of our Speaker telling us quite often when we rise in this place on a point of order that we should come to the table with clean hands. I think it was absolutely outrageous of minister Hunter to suggest that somebody else was throwing away the rule book and tearing up an agreement when he, as the Minister for Water in South Australia, tore up the National Water Initiative when he imposed natural resources management levy increases on my constituents and the constituents of some of my colleagues totally outside the agreement his government had signed off on.

The minister certainly was not at the table with clean hands. Indeed, he blatantly tore up an agreement, totally refused to acknowledge the agreement. I have spent the last 12 months endeavouring to get information out of his department through the freedom of information process, and the department refuses to even acknowledge that they have an obligation to supply me with information. Minister Hunter needs to have a very close look in the mirror. Let me turn now to the Murray-Darling Basin Agreement.

The agreement certainly states that 2,750 gigalitres of water will be returned to the basin and that will be returned via measures including buybacks of water and that is guaranteed. The 450 gigalitres that minister Hunter was arguing about were never guaranteed. There were always some caveats over that. At the time, I raised this as an issue with the then premier and the then minister and I took a fair bit of stick for supposedly not sticking up for South Australia, but the reality is that some parts of the agreement were certainly not in the best interests of South Australia. Indeed, South Australians, I believe, were sold a lie as to what the agreement actually said.

I believe that the additional 450 gigalitres of water can and should be delivered to South Australia, but Barnaby Joyce certainly was not tearing up the agreement when he suggested that it might not be delivered. The reason I say that it should be delivered to South Australia is that it was going to be delivered post-2019. It was going to be delivered via water being made available through works and measures. There are a number of works and measures which could and should have been undertaken many years ago, and the principal one is the works at the Menindee Lakes.

At the height of the drought, when the Labor Party was in government in Canberra, there was a huge opportunity to do important work in the Menindee Lakes that would have saved water principally from evaporation forever into the future. It is estimated that those works would have saved something like 174 gigalitres per year of evaporation, particularly in dry years. The federal Labor government of the time completely failed in its obligation to do the right thing by the river and save that water. That opportunity still exists, but the works would be much better done when the lakes are virtually empty. It would be much more difficult to do that work while the lakes have a lot of water in them. The golden opportunity that existed at the time was missed by the then Labor government in Canberra.

Lots of other works and measures can be undertaken. I visited the Riverina some years ago with a number of my colleagues and we went onto one property where the farmer was growing tomatoes. He had installed at substantial cost an underground irrigation system, and he told us that he could grow the same crop and get the same yield using half the amount of water. If you extrapolate that across the basin, it is not very difficult to free up water for environmental flows and, indeed, to find the additional 450 gigalitres but what we have always said is that that should not be done through buybacks: it should be done through works and measures. Minister Hunter wants to go back and read the agreement because I do not think he fully understands it.