Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This motion is interesting for a number of reasons, as there has been a lot of discussion over the years on cloud seeding, including comments made in the 2004 House of Representatives report Getting water right(s): the future of rural Australia. I also know the member for Mallee was itching to get some cloud seeding done over his patch in 2003, but the science gurus were unconvinced that it would work because of the type of clouds floating across his area and the fact that a number of tests had proven inconclusive. Added to this was the fact that the science on climate change was at that time seen as rather irrelevant, as was noted on Ockham’s Razora radio program—this last weekend, in which Sol Encel was talking about the brain drain in Australia. He said:

An ironic commentary on the present concern with global warming is the fact that CSIRO closed down its climate change division a year ago, with a resultant exodus of climate change specialists, most of whom went abroad.

So I am somewhat amused that the poor member for Mallee, who had been left out in the cold by his own government—who dismissed his requests and saw them as trivial back then—now should be flavour of the month. His motion should be picked up. I hope it is.

Tasmania is the home of Australia’s cloud-seeding program, as we have been running trials and actually using cloud seeding over the last forty years. Cloud seeding is a technique used by our hydroelectric commission to increase precipitation over the key hydro generation catchments. Hydro Tasmania has been involved in both operational and experimental cloud seeding over Tasmania and mainland Australia for over 40 years and has developed a great deal of knowledge and expertise in this area. Their own people have estimated the benefits to Hydro Tasmania of our existing cloud-seeding program as being at least six to one.

This is a quote from Hydro Tasmania’s submission to the House of Representatives report I mentioned earlier:

All clouds in the temperate areas of Australia contain levels of supercooled liquid or water at a temperature less than zero degrees centigrade. It is the amount of this water present and the number of naturally occurring cloud condensation nuclei that determine the probability of precipitation from a cloud. The cloud droplets form small ice crystals on the surface of the cloud condensation nuclei. Once the cloud is suitably seeded, the ice crystals falling through the cloud collide with cloud droplets thus growing in size. Eventually when this ice falls from the cloud it melts as its temperature rises above the melting point or zero degrees and falls as rain.

According to Hydro Tasmania’s cloud-seeding people, there are two sorts of cloud treatment. One relates to warm temperatures and one to freezing, the latter being glaciogenic and the most appropriate for Tasmania. Warmer areas would go with hydroscopic seeding, which may be worth investigating for the mainland if this motion is to be considered.

Cloud seeding is expensive and does take a lot of flights, as you need to have aeroplanes in the air for some 20 days during autumn and spring and it takes about 60 to 80 flights to find the right conditions. However, once they are found, it can be a very successful way of producing more water out of the clouds that come out of the roaring forties.

If these trials are going to take place and if the member for Mallee’s motion gets some interest from the government, I would suggest that the CRC be set up in Tasmania and be sponsored jointly by Hydro Tasmania and CSIRO, who already have the research well underway. Funds could be directed to them to apply their results to mainland conditions. We have the runs already on the board. That makes a lot of sense. In fact, considering the success of the Tasmanian ones, Hydro Tasmania’s paper recommended a new series of trials on the mainland, particularly if they followed closely the guidelines laid down in the CSIRO paper Guidelines for the utilisation of cloud seeding as a tool for water management in Australia.

In these low rainfall cycles, Australia must seek a number of ways to manage our water resources. We need to look at water pricing and trading water entitlements, and improve discussions with water users around the nation. We are all seeking answers to our water problems and certainly this is another research consideration. I believe there is an excellent opportunity here and I congratulate the member for Mallee in bringing this to the parliament’s attention. I hope he manages to find some funding for this proposition. (Time expired)

See this speech in context