Coalition Senators stop Rudd Labor’s Murray-Darling water grab

“...what’s saved in the Basin must stay in the Basin...” Coalition Senators, with the support of the Greens and independent colleagues, have amended the Rudd Government’s new water legislation to prevent the construction of a pipeline which would suck at least 75 billion litres of water from the Murray-Darling Basin for Melbourne’s urban water use. Leading the debate, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Water Resources and Conservation, The Nationals Senator Fiona Nash, said the move was based on the principle that ‘what’s saved in the Basin must stay in the Basin’. “The proposed North-South pipeline is completely unjustifiable at a time when we desperately need to increase the flow of the system and when Melbourne is allowing 400 billion litres of stormwater a year to run off into the ocean and doing absolutely nothing about it.” Senator Nash strongly rejected accusations from Labor Water and Climate Change Minister, Senator Penny Wong that the Coalition was ‘playing politics with the pipeline’. “I would say that every single person that is affected in the Murray-Darling Basin, and all of those other people who are not even affected but can realise the stupidity of this pipeline going forward, do not think we are playing politics,” Senator Nash told Parliament. “Perhaps if the minister actually ventured out to a few rural and regional communities occasionally, they would tell her that the opposition is not playing politics with this issue.” Senator Nash warned that if the Government used its numbers in the lower house to reverse the Senate amendment, the water-sucking infrastructure would forever be known as ‘Rudd’s Pipeline’. Contact: Murray Lees, media adviser, 0447 34 00 25

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