Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission

Dr CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (18:14): I rise to talk about the Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission. We are just a week or so over the first anniversary of the delivery of that report to the government, and in that year I am disappointed to say that almost nothing has occurred as a result of the very useful recommendations and considerations made by that royal commission. In fact, the only clear action that has occurred is that the government, one year on, decided to delete the website, so any member of the public who wishes to find the submissions or read the transcripts is no longer able to do so. They simply get that friendly error sign one gets on the internet when a web page has been deleted.

I understand that initially there was an intention to delete it after the first month. Remonstration was made by senior people, and they decided to keep it for a year. However, to abandon it demonstrates the lack of respect this government has shown to a very worthy, very useful and, in fact, while deliberate and careful, a very pro South Australian report, a report that took the interests of the health of the river seriously—which means the health of the river in South Australia seriously, as we are at the bottom of the river.

There were very many areas, and clearly in now four minutes I do not have time to canvass all the recommendations and all the actions that ought to have taken place. However, I want to talk about two areas in particular. One is that it gives a very cogent and detailed description of the reasonable concerns that are held about the legal basis of the plan and about its management, implementation and monitoring.

Leading up to the last federal election, the Labor Party, although Tony Burke at the time did not want to engage in the discussion about the legal basis of the plan, did acknowledge that the absence of a proper climate science consideration in determining the amount of water required to keep the river healthy needed to be remedied. The Labor Party federally, had they been in government, were to have initiated a climate science review. There has been no such review taking place from the conservatives who won that election.

There is also the question about the oversight of monitoring. I was very pleased to see that Mick Keelty was appointed, and I think that was welcomed in a bipartisan manner possibly across the country. However, I note that that is not sufficient to resolve the concerns raised in the Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission: the absence of monitoring sites, the way in which flood plain water is harvested before it reaches the river and therefore before it is accounted for, the way in which the Murray-Darling Basin Authority itself is largely the gamekeeper in charge.

That is, it is the organisation measuring what is occurring as well as being responsible for it occurring, and it is not doing the two jobs in a sufficiently separate manner for us to be certain that they are monitoring themselves well enough. It is a lot to put on Mick Keelty, to ask him to take on that responsibility entirely. I do not think the governance principles currently in place are sufficient, and the royal commission has very many cogent and detailed arguments to substantiate that concern.

Of course, the other big area for South Australia is this question of the 450 gigalitres. Anyone who cares about the health of the River Murray knows that those 450 gigalitres are not a discretionary add-on but are absolutely essential to our being confident that, at the minimum, South Australia's section of the River Murray, all the way down to the mouth, is going to remain healthy. Without that 450 gigalitres—and it may prove not to be sufficient as the climate dries and warms—we can be more or less confident that we will hit a crisis point in the health of the River Murray.

The deep concerns that were raised by the royal commission about the conduct of the minister in agreeing to overly complex criteria for water efficiency projects to be approved to harvest the entitlements of 450 gigalitres appear to have spooked the Premier and the minister so that they have been incapable of taking the rest of the report seriously. That is a pity because in politics you get criticism, and in politics you have to accept criticism whether you agree with it or not and nonetheless do the right thing for the state.

Let me give a handy hint for what needs to happen. The commonwealth government needs to agree to voluntary buybacks for the 450 gigalitres if we are going to get the other states to act. To do that they need to lift the Barnaby Joyce cap on voluntary buybacks and they need to modify the plan to say that that is the way the 450 gigalitres can be taken. If the government does not do that, then we have no hope of seeing a healthy river.