QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE
Mr BURKE (Watson—Minister for the Arts, Minister for Home Affairs, Minister for Cyber Security, Minister for Immigration and Citizenship and Leader of the House) (15:00): I have a couple of things with respect to the interests of the agricultural interests in the electorate of Farrer. First of all, the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder provides an annual report in terms of the objectives being met, and, added to that, we have the review of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan happening at the moment.
The concept of surplus water not being used to keep the basin healthy is not something that the government does. The water that is there is to make sure that we still have a living river system, because there are no jobs on a dead river. There are no jobs on a dead river.
That's the whole reason we had to have water reform, which started with the Water Act under the Howard government, I might remind people. The whole reason we had to have that reform was because, when the rivers were dying, the jobs and the towns were going too. And so you need to have a system to make sure that, with systems that have been very much allocated and allocated and allocated to the extent that the rivers were living as though they were in drought before the drought came, which meant that then, when drought hit, it was harder and more difficult than ever—that's the reason we had to have water reform.
That's the reason we had to have the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. That's the reason we have the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder. When drought comes, the Commonwealth's water holdings, which are the same range of water holdings as irrigators have—as allocations go down for irrigators, they go down for the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder as well.
The allocations—the water holder owns water of a full class. The full range of classes of different water licences are part of the Commonwealth holdings just as they are the holdings that irrigators rely on. But you do not want to go back.
No-one should want to go back to what the system was like before we had this water reform, before the government had the chance, with the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder, to make sure that there is an irrigator there who was making sure the system itself stayed healthy. If it doesn't happen, you then get an increase on the blackwater events and on all the different events that make the water unusable for the irrigators as well at the same time that it's killing the ecosystem and the natural environment.
That's why we had to have water reform.