Thursday, 4 August 2022

Northern Victoria Region

Mr QUILTY (Northern Victoria) (12:53): (1900) My constituency question is for the Minister for Water. As the minister will know, irrigation and the Murray-Darling Basin plan are critical issues in Northern Victoria. The most recent meeting of the Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council was in April 2021. Since that meeting four of the six ministers that sit on the council have been replaced. The MDBP is fatally flawed. We have had enormous amounts of rain over the last two years, but the plan does not account for floodwaters and environmental flows. Targets are not scientific but political. We are in the bizarre situation of having so much water in a system that cannot contain it, while at the same time we are committing to a plan saying we need to take more irrigation water out of the system. We should be building more dams instead of fiddling. The plan will not achieve its buyback targets. The problem is not the water, it is the plan. We have full dams and flooding rivers, and the MDBP says the environment still does not have enough water. The plan is broken and needs fixing immediately. Minister, will you call a meeting of the Murray-Darling Basin Ministerial Council and fight for the interests of northern Victorian irrigators?