Senator Nick Xenophon's political wheeling and dealing, which delivered an extra $900 million to be spent on the Murray Darling in the next two years, highlights exactly what is both right and wrong about an independent holding the balance of power.
First, what is right about the situation. Senator Xenophon proved that by holding firm in the political horse-trading his vote did not come cheap.
No vote should, which was exactly why the Senate was created. As the house of review the members should exercise their power to scrutinise and amend legislation where need be. Having a variety of political views on the cross benches can result in healthy amendments to legislation.
Indeed, Government's should be open to taking the feedback of the Senate and its inquiry system - if the Howard Government had listened to the Senate backlash instead of using its majority to rush through the unpopular Work Choices legislation, the whole political landscape could now look remarkably different.
But the downside to this situation was that Senator Xenophon's horse trading was a negotiation with one man's point of view, and not the implementation of any broader and more detailed Senate inquiry into the merits of the legislation in question.
And so it came to pass that in return for passing its $42 billion economic stimulus package, the government was conned into spending an extra $900m on the seemingly unrelated issue of the Murray Darling's health.
It no doubt sounded great to Xenophon's constituents in South Australia.
But as Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce pointed out, the ridiculousness of the deal is that the independent Senator was able to extract more money from the Government than Water Minister Penny Wong could from her own cabinet. It was a vote buying exercise that either skipped or ignored the usual public service scrutiny, because of all people Wong should know that the deal could create more problems than they are designed to solve.
The most notable problem is what the increased spend on buying back of water licences will do to the water market. At first glance it appears the package simply speeds up the buyback process, but in fact the Murray Darling States have an agreement under which only 4pc of water entitlements are allowed to be bought out of any water region in any one year. It is a policy from which Victoria is loathe to shift, despite the push from other states to lift the cap to 6pc.
What this effectively means is that there is a finite amount of water which can be bought by the government in any one year, meaning it will be extremely difficult to spend the extra $500m on water buybacks without inflating the price of water.
That in turn has consequences for irrigators who are genuinely trying to buy or sell water in order to keep their businesses running.
And of course there is the long term problem of what removing water from rural communities will do to local economies without corresponding investment in building replacement industries.
With the Opposition arguing that the Government should be spending taxpayers' dollars more efficiently (indeed much of Labor's stimulus package will go to social infrastructure rather than works to build economic capacity during the recovery) they should also cast their focus on Xenophon and what could be a very inefficient allocation of public funds with potentially dire consequences for the bush.
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