Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Gascoyne River. It was 30 miles wide at the sea in one case. One day I will tell you the whole story. I guess it was exciting if you were there. I went out to try to find a way to store some of that water. That seems to be an arising problem throughout Australia. We have a lot of lousy dams. You can talk about most of them on the Murray River. They are too big, too shallow and too subject to evaporation.

But, in the days when people saw nuclear energy in a different light, the Americans conducted a program called Plowshare. They actually excavated holes at minimum cost in the deserts of America using this technology. A couple of Australian engineers wrote a paper on it, which came into my possession. They argued that you could dig a mineshaft 1,500 feet deep, half-fill it with TNT and blow a hole 600 feet deep to store water. They told just how you would take it off the river.

They went on to say that you could also drill a hole eight inches in diametre and put the appropriate nuclear device at the bottom of that hole, 1,500 feet below the ground, and also get a 600 feet deep water storage. I thought that was a pretty good idea. In fact, if someone went back in the records of the ABC, they would see a very young Wilson Tuckey arguing that case in the bed of the Gascoyne River. I got a response from a state politician of the Labor kind at the time, who said, ‘We’d have everybody eating radioactive cabbages.’ The first point, of course, was that the hole was 800 feet above where the device exploded.

But Sir Charles Court, who is the best politician I have ever met in his commitment to this nation—and we take great profits from his commitment to gas when nobody else wanted it and from his commitment to other matters—then delivered me a 16-millimetre movie of the Russians doing just that. I have never found many reasons to approve of communism, but this seems to be one of them. In the movie they drilled the hole right in the riverbed. My advice said it should be off the riverbed. They drilled this hole and they all stood there in visual sight of this event. Off it went—boomp!—and here was this hole. They relied on the rim of the crater to be the dam wall, to add to the value of the hole. Within days, they had dozer drivers in there cleaning off the mess. Of course, they portrayed horses drinking the water and other things at a later time.

That is all okay, but when will Australians have the courage to ask themselves: might this be a solution to our water storage issues? In a hole 600 feet deep you do not get a lot of evaporation. These are the things that we have to talk about. The worst thing for the community is for the member for nagger-nagger—I am sorry; I mean Jagajaga—who comes into this place time and again and whinges and moans, ‘The world will end tomorrow.’ I am not planning on it ending tomorrow. I think it is a great place, and I think it will be better when the people who occupy this place come with a constructive attitude. Yes, of course there are problems in everything we do. I thought about this today when they were carrying on with their White Australia policy on imported 457 visa workers. Let me put it this way: a lot of people have car crashes, but we do not ban motor cars.

In the rural areas at the moment, we desperately need these people. The greenies go crook about live sheep exports and say, ‘Slaughter them here.’ I agree—except that we have nobody to do it. I have sheep dying of drought which I guess can have their lives ‘saved’ by going to a meatworks. It is a little less painful. But we do not have enough people to do it in a drought. And we have these people standing up making their nice little political point: ‘Let’s take a negative view.’

I have to say that I can remember, when I was not sure whether the power point was broken or the drill was, putting a couple of bare wires in to see which bit worked. Maybe that worker was doing just that. I bet that, if you put the test around this House, there might have been someone else that did. But that is a simple and single issue and it should not be part of the debate in this place. (Time expired)

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