Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2026-2027

Mr McCORMACK (Riverina) (15:58): The government is reclaiming $103.9 million from the National Water Grid Fund because it's 'uncommitted', yet councils and water utilities are queued up with shovel-ready projects. Uncommitted doesn't mean unneeded; it means undelivered. This is a delivery failure.

Will the minister tell us how many ready-to-go water grid projects sit unfunded whilst this $103.9 million is handed back? From that same fund, $140 million has been committed to Queensland for 2029-30 with no named project and no location. We're asked to wave through $140 million for a project that on the papers does not yet exist.

Will the minister name the particular project? Where is it? What does it deliver, and why can money be found four years out for an unnamed Queensland project but not for the communities from which $103.9 million has just been taken?

The Sustainable Rural Water Use and Infrastructure Program collapses from $479 million this year to $357 million next year and to just—wait for this—$3 million in 2027-28. Then it's gone—completely gone. This is the program which helps farmers lift water efficiency and recovers environmental water without ripping it straight out of irrigation for river towns.

Why is the government defunding the one tool that recovers water without hollowing out communities, leaving only buybacks? Lazy, lazy politics equals water buybacks. The Sustainable Communities Program, which is meant to cushion the socioeconomic hit of buybacks and water recovery, is also cut after 2028-29, justified by a claim that the Murray-Darling Basin Plan will be 'delivered in full' by the end of 2027.

Good luck with that. The government has not shown how this will be done. It has not.

So I do ask: will the Murray-Darling Basin Plan be delivered in full by the end of 2027—yes or no? If the minister cannot guarantee it, why switch off community support on the assumption that it will? That is exactly what the minister is doing with this particular initiative.

Costs across the budget papers for water recovery are marked 'not for publication'. The department's own tables admit this is because of commercial sensitivities and ongoing government-to-government negotiations with the states. This is—I hate to say it—a polite way of saying there are deals being done with your money that this parliament is not allowed to see.

What is being offered to sweeten those deals, what's the total value hidden behind these NFP lines and when will basin communities get to see what's been promised on their behalf? Our river communities are hurting, and whenever the government goes in and buys more water out of these river communities it not only distorts the water market and the price of water; it also hurts the baristas and the schools.

Coleambally Central School, for example, has had its student population halve over the past decade. It hurts motor mechanics and small businesses across the board, because they don't get anything in return. It's the farmer who gives up the water who gets paid, sometimes at an inflated figure, and that farmer often leaves town, taking their family and their children with them.

Sometimes, they head for the coast—and good luck to them—but it leaves a community which is a shell of what it once was. The Murray-Darling Basin Plan, to this end, does not mean that these communities should lose their socioeconomic status, but unfortunately they are and unfortunately the government implements lazy politics by buying water out of these communities and shelling out these communities.

It's simply not right. Our river communities and our irrigation communities, many of which are based on soldier settlements back after the First World War, are being short-changed by this terrible government.