WATER Minister Tanya Plibersek has made sure that a bipartisan approach to the Murray Darling Basin is over in the passing of the Labor government’s Water Amendment (Restoring Our Rivers) Bill 2023.
The minister will not engage in the reality of the trauma and damage caused to Murray Darling communities through the re-implementation of buybacks.
From her ivory tower in Sydney’s CBD she has reinstituted buybacks through the rewrite of the Murray–Darling Basin Plan.
Patchwork quilts of dry and irrigated paddocks are out of sight and out of mind to her and her Labor colleagues.
The Teal Independents and Greens, likewise, have no skin in the game and will not bear the pain of buybacks.
Common sense and infrastructure have led the delivery of the basin plan to date, returning water to the environment, but with an important proviso: the socioeconomic neutrality test which the Nationals had all basin states agree to in 2018.
That test was in the spirit of the plan as it was written by labour minister Tony Burke when he held the portfolio.
Ideology and fear of losing Labor city seats to the Greens is what drives the minister.
But that ideology is not even shared by her Victorian Labor counterpart.
I commend Victorian Water Minister Harriet Shing for rejecting buybacks.
Modelling shows buybacks would cost up to 1500 jobs and shave $855 million off farm output in the basin.
This would devastate our irrigation communities across the Sunraysia, Gannawarra and Swan Hill regions.
The resulting loss of farm production will force the price of food up, and that is a cost that will be paid at the checkout by Australian families.
In a cost-of-living crisis, Australia cannot afford another blow through Labor’s poor policy.
