Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

In saying how we measure the livestock emissions, I cannot begin to tell you just how bad, when you go into these things deeply, the flow of information has been. A lot of it has been emotive hyperbole rather than scientific reasoning. I was sick while on the ethanol tour to Canada and I was watching the television. A science program on Canadian television showed the latest figure of an eightfold reduction for emissions that were originally contemplated. The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry said, ‘How can you get accurate figures?’ What they did was to completely enclose a shed and measure the CO2 content of the air going into the shed with—I do not know—20 or 40 head of cattle in it and then measure the content coming out of the shed. They found out that there was an eightfold reduction in the original figures—I think it was 53 motor cars for one beast and it reduced to eight. That is a sixfold reduction. I think those were the figures—I have them somewhere—but I would urge the minister to question the figures.

The member for New England mentioned the flawed science here. It is a very little known fact that CSIRO produced a report for the Australian Greenhouse Office which actually said that ethanol increased the CO2levels. They were all embarrassed by it—you will not find that report—but the Greenhouse Office blamed CSIRO and CSIRO blamed the Greenhouse Office. It really was very contemptible, and it also showed the lack of science. I rang up the person who did it and I said, ‘Did you ring up a sugarcane farmer because the CO2 goes up and the crop pulls it back down again?’ It goes up and down. If you just burn fossil fuel, it goes up and stays up. That is the fundamental difference. I asked, ‘How could you possibly say what you said?’ He said, ‘Oh, there are all sorts of inputs.’ I said, ‘Name them.’ He said, ‘Ploughing.’ I said, ‘Did you ring up a cane farmer?’ There was silence, and then he said no. I said: ‘How could you possibly have done this without speaking to a cane farmer? If you’d rung up a cane farmer, you would know we don’t plough.’ We plough once every six years. It is just a grass. It just keeps growing, and we keep mowing it; that is all. Once upon a time we did plough, when we burnt the cane, but we do not burn the cane anymore. So we do not touch the soil; we put a huge trash blanket on it. We do not have to put herbicides and all of those things on it now either. We have really revolutionised farming in the cane area.

He then said, ‘Yes, but there is the processing of it.’ I said, ‘What energy inputs in processing? Did you speak to a sugar mill?’ He said, ‘No, I didn’t.’ I said: ‘It is amazing that you could get this document out and tell the federal government that it is negative when the American document says it is 29 per cent positive. One of you is wrong.’ They are a country representing 400 million people; we are a country representing 20 million—I know where my money will be going.

Going back to the sugar mill, I said, ‘If you had rung a sugar mill, you would know that there is not a net taking of energy off the grid.’ We put energy into the grid. We burn the leftover, the bagasse—what you have left over after you take the sugar cane out—and we produce electricity from it. We are net contributors of energy to the grid, not net takers from the grid. So it was quite extraordinary.

I want to strongly endorse the remarks of the member for New England. I came into this matter entirely ignorant. The minister often says he is ignorant. Minister, I have had moo-cows since I was 19 and I was close to farmers all of my life in boarding schools in North Queensland. I had never ever realised the significance that carbon plays in the soil until about three months ago. I had reason to go into it and I was really quite amazed that Australian soil has only one-fifth the amount of carbon in it. Dr Joe Holtum from James Cook University did studies for BHP on putting CO₂ into plants. They put the CO₂ in the ground and they got a 36 per cent increase, which was not as good as the other countries where they had done trials, where they recorded a 44 per cent increase. Because of the increase in carbon in the soil, the moisture stays there for two or three months of the year longer, so you get two or three months extra growth out of the plant. That is one of the major factors contributing to this enormous increase in growth.

But it is true that the average Australian content is one-fifth of what it should be. I do not know whether that is from burning done by blackfellas—and I might add that whitefellas burnt; that is how we mustered cattle. You always see the traditional picture of the ringer with the box of matches. They would burn late in the year—about now actually, maybe a month or two later—and it would not be a conflagration, because the grass would still be a bit green. Then the cattle would come in on the green pick and they would pick them up—exactly the same. They undoubtedly learnt it from the First Australians.

We have a natural cycle in North Queensland which is enormously destructive. At the end of the year there is no ground cover. There has been no rainfall for nine months and the ground is bare to monsoonal depressions, which are invariably associated with cyclonic depressions. The sky falls on the ground that is completely unprotected and massive erosion takes place. The dig at Deaf Adder Gorge by Rhys Jones from the ANU was very interesting because they dug down 30 feet and there were Aboriginal artefacts all the way down to bedrock. The question is: why did the erosion start with the arrival of man? Of course, Rhys Jones’s answer to that question is the firestick farming.

Minister, there are two important points on this fuel for food debate. I had never been overseas when I went on an ethanol tour; that is all I did for the week. We were over there at a cattle station—they call them a ranch over there—and all of their cattle were fed throughout the dry season. It was very similar to my own homeland, the mid-west of North Queensland, except they have cold and we have heat. The land is baked during that period of time. They were feeding distillers grain, which they were buying at prices much, much cheaper than our grain prices. I checked up on the nutritional value, and it is much higher from the Dalby plant. The local graziers and lot feeders are paying more for dried distillers grain than they are paying for grain.

Let me be very specific, Minister. In the first months of this year, the price for distillers grain in the United States was $174 a tonne, the price for sorghum was $240 a tonne and the price for wheat was $320 a tonne. Minister, you would be well aware that all cheese, eggs, butter, milk, chicken, pork and beef is just congealed grain. There is a high grass content, particularly in dairy products, but it is congealed grain. If the Americans can buy their grain for $174 a tonne and we Australians can buy it for $240 a tonne, we are going to be murdered out there! It puts up grain prices—there is no doubt about that. And that is a good thing—these blokes are going broke. Is there something wrong with some of the grain producers making a few quid more than they are making? They cannot stay alive the way they are.

Minister, please go to the cabinet and draw a graph of food imports and food exports; you will see that over the next 10 or 15 years this country will become a net importer of food. If you are worried about food shortages, please start here, because this is the country that will be short of food. What is happening in North Queensland, which has amazed me, is that nothing happens when the food producer leaves. Rich lifestylers buy the land—an American phenomenon too, I might add—and it gets covered in weeds. Minister, if you can afford the time on your next trip to North Queensland, I will take you to some of these places and you can see the whole ground covered by Singapore daisy and giant sensitive weed. So there is that aspect of it. But, Minister, it does not affect the food chain if it is sugar. If we take just one per cent of northern Australia’s landmass—just one per cent—and only seven per cent of our water, along with the sugar industry and a contribution from grain, we can produce all of your fuel forever, at no cost to the food chain whatsoever. There would be a great benefit because our cattle industry would dramatically increase their numbers in northern Australia because they would have access to biodunder and distillers grain. It will benefit the food chain. (Time expired)

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