Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

He was a good minister, too. It fell apart a bit after he came down here, but he was a good minister in the New South Wales parliament. I think it might have been under the Deputy Speaker’s hand that a cloud-seeding trial was carried out in the northern part of New England. It was a very successful trial. The clouds were of the correct nature that could be inseminated, and rainfall was recorded.

One of the great problems that the member for Mallee and others have had with regard to this, which he alluded to earlier, is the statistical significance of some of the scientific research. In a nation as dry as this one, in a nation that has a great dividing range and a nation that has had the conclusive evidence that has come out of the Tasmanian environment, to have given up on research into this particular climatic occurrence and the way in which to encourage rain, I think is an absolute disgrace.

Climate change is an issue in this place now. It is for two major reasons that I believe this issue has been thwarted over recent decades. One is the far-reaching antagonism between the protagonist, Ian Searle, who did a tremendous amount of work on cloud seeding—and I congratulate him—in the early Tasmanian hydro, the Snowy hydro and the trial that happened in northern New England in the mid-nineties, and some people within the CSIRO who had an antagonistic attitude towards the concept.

I urge the government to have a very close look again at this particular issue. We are the driest continent and nation in the world and we have not done the research that others have done. The Israelis, the Texans and people in many other parts of the world have carried out research and are still carrying out research to perfect the ways in which clouds can be inseminated and rain can be encouraged. As to the idea that we should not do something that is supposedly unnatural: we have created an unnatural environment in many of our climate systems through the additional pollution that climate change has driven us towards.

We need to look at all the options. The Prime Minister keeps saying that: let’s look at all the options in terms of energy and the climate change issues. I urge the government, and support very strongly the member for Mallee, to put in place a cooperative research centre on climate. One of the issues at the top of the list in a drought stricken nation such as ours should be what we can do to aid and abet natural rainfall in areas where it previously occurred.

See this speech in context