MATTERS OF URGENCY
Senator SHOEBRIDGE (New South Wales) (17:46): I rise to very much support my colleagues for bringing this motion, calling on the Commonwealth government to urgently intervene against any proposed plans to privatise Australia's water supply, including the potential sale of Melbourne Water by the Victorian Labor government. It's remarkable that this information has only come out because of secret cabinet documents in Victoria finally seeing the light of day, because it turns out Victorian Labor—like NSW Labor, like federal Labor, like Labor parties and their mates in the coalition—have been secretly planning to flog off pretty much everything that is held in public hands.
What has Victorian Labor been doing? Well, they've been working away, beavering away, bringing in their consultants and their lawyers—the same grifters who feed off the public every time—and putting them under this thing called Project Nerva. Well, what a bloody nerve!
The then premier, Jacinta Allan, brought her senior ministers in—the water minister, the treasurer—and approved a 12-month business case to work out how to flog off and privatise Victoria's water supply and Melbourne's water supply. And who did they bring in to do their dirty work? Well, the usual mob that the coalition and Labor bring in to do their dirty work.
First of all, they appointed consulting giant EY, Ernst & Young, to come in and examine fresh options for how they could flog off different parts of Melbourne's water supply—'Maybe just flog off the treatment plants, or maybe flog off a future revenue stream for water recycling.' EY came in and worked with the then water minister and the then premier and started building this Project Nerva for Victorian Labor.
And, of course, Victorian Labor's got form in this regard, with what they did with VicRoads—the $7.9 billion that they got from privatising part of VicRoads. Not happy with just giving public money to EY, Victorian Labor then decided to bring in more of the grifters. They had their second tranche to try and push Project Nerva, the privatisation of Melbourne's water supplies, and they brought in KPMG and Clayton Utz.
The reason they had to bring in Clayton's was that there's a constitutional prohibition in Victoria about flogging off the water assets, so they brought in big-end-of-town lawyers to try and work their way around the constitutional prohibition against flogging off the water assets. Between them, those grifters—KPMG and Clayton Utz—sucked in another 6.15 million bucks to bring this business case together to try and do a job on the Victorian constitution so that Labor could flog off and privatise Victoria's water supply.
Get this. When they're finally outed—when the second iteration came back to the Victorian cabinet, who was one of the ministers who dug in and said: 'Yes, we've got to privatise the water. We need to make the money off it.
Bring in the grifters'? Who was one of those ministers? Then deputy premier—I'm trying to remember what the bloke's name is—Carroll, now Premier of Victoria.
He's the guy who dug in and said, 'Yes, absolutely, we should flog it off', even when the mood was going against him in cabinet. Then—get this—that same bloke, now the Premier, when he's been outed about trying to privatise Melbourne's water supply, puts out this response to the media when he's asked about it. He says: 'The One Nation-Liberal coalition needs to come clean.
Will they rule out privatising Melbourne Water?' You cannot make this stuff up. You cannot make this up. He's been in cabinet pushing for Project Nerva, pushing for the privatisation.
When he's outed about it, he says: 'Oh, well, hang on—will the coalition privatise it? You've got to ask them!' The gall of this stuff. Watch what they do.
Labor flogged off the Commonwealth Bank. They flogged off Qantas. In my home state of New South Wales, the Labor Party and the coalition between them have made travelling on our roads so expensive it can cost you 70 bucks to go from the CBD up to Baulkham Hills and back.
They privatise every bloody thing. I support this motion 100 per cent and I support the work of my colleagues in Victoria and across this country 100 per cent—Greens fighting to stop this privatisation grift. The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator Ghosh ): The question is that the urgency motion moved by Senator McKim be agreed to.