Water opportunities missed: Turnbull

Opportunities to improve water efficiency are being thrown away by the federal
government, opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull says.
Addressing members of the party faithful at a state council meeting in Adelaide on
Saturday, the former coalition environment minister said the state founded by free
settlers had embodied the spirit of enterprise "that had made Australia great".
Mr Turnbull attacked the federal government's strategy of growing debt levels as a
misguided socialist experiment.
He stressed the nation would feel the consequences of virtually no investment in
irrigation infrastructure once the prolonged drought was over.
"The consequence of this neglect will be, that there will be no more water in the
system and we will have a dramatically reduced capacity to produce food and fibre,"
he said.
"We will have farmers using the same wasteful techniques, and irrigation
corporations and cooperatives using the same wasteful techniques of distributing
water as they did beforehand..."
He pledged to complete the Liberals' vision in 2007 of ensuring the Murray River has
the environmental flows it needs.
Mr Turnbull said under Liberal rule South Australia would not be treated with
contempt by the upstream states.
"We need a Murray-Darling Basin that is managed in the national interest."