That is how Federal Member for Farrer Sussan Ley addressed Parliament on Thursday, the day after the Federal Senate passed Labor’s controversial Water Amendment (Restoring our Rivers) Bill.
The bill provides allowances for water buybacks to be reimplemented, despite widespread condemnation of the proposal across basin communities.
“Do you know what really hurts me? It’s not the obvious political delight that the minister (Tanya Plibersek) and the Prime Minister have just taken in this achievement.
“It’s the faith that has been broken with the communities that I represent.
“They all came here. They asked nicely. They sat and explained what they do. They tried.
“They said to me and all of my colleagues: ‘Let’s try and work with this government. Let’s try to make them understand’.
“It’s their hearts that have been broken today. It’s those people who get up every morning and work so hard to deliver food, to deliver fibre, to deliver regional jobs.
“It’s people in regional communities, people in small schools, people who care deeply.”
Ms Ley said the “basin’s heart has been broken by a government that has ignored communities”, all in the name of politics.
“We know the glee with which the environment minister looks at all of us and laughs at us. We see it every day in question time,” she said in Parliament.
“We know that she hasn’t set one foot in the basin and hasn’t demonstrated one shred of care for the communities that she’s tearing apart.
“This is a really bad, bad day, and the smile on your face, minister, says it all. It really does say it all.
“The minister and the Prime Minister know exactly what they are doing, for base political gain, because they have banded together with the Greens to take more water out of communities that I represent—out of Griffith, Leeton, Deniliquin, Finley, Barham, Moulamein, Balranald and Wentworth. Do those places mean anything?
“Transitional funding is your code for: ‘We don’t care if we shut down your town.’
“It’s just such a nail in the coffin to single-handedly trade off the lives and livelihoods of the farmers that we represent and to not even to have the courage to look them in the eye and tell them what you had planned: buybacks, the simplest, laziest form of water recovery, with the biggest impact on regional communities.
“The regional communities I represent will not forget this. We will not forget this betrayal.”
“The government refuses to recognise that Australia is also the Murray-Darling Basin and that Australians care about food, about farming, about the people who live in these communities and about the people who love these communities.
“We love our communities. It’s so sad that this Labor government does not.”
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