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

It is important to participate in this debate on the Water Amendment Bill 2008, but it is farcical for the previous speaker to say that we should be condemned if it is delayed. This is another ‘gonna’ piece of legislation. It is nearly two centimetres thick and it delivers no practical outcomes. As the second reading speech—to which I will refer in due course—tells us, it is still dependent on states passing legislation, which the Minister for Climate Change and Water in the Senate tells us has been introduced. When one looks at the period of time that the members in New South Wales choose to sit in their place—and most of that is, of course, spent on changing premiers, sacking ministers and trying to fight various other elections because members are resigning—one might wonder when they will ever get around to passing the complementary legislation on which this matter resides. To suggest that it needs any priority in this place in those circumstances is, of course, silly.

There is another reason why this legislation in all its complexity is worthy of criticism. The simple fact is that the Murray-Darling system is not in its parlous state because of lack of legislation; it is in its parlous state because it is not raining. It is drawn to our attention that it is some modern-day miracle and that people have been suddenly producing large amounts of CO2 and emitting it into the atmosphere. I can neither confirm nor deny the truth of that scientific argument, because, contrary to claims made that all the scientists are united on this, I am constantly receiving communications and representations from highly qualified scientists who have an entirely different opinion. As a layman, I am left somewhere in between and choose to look at the problem rather than the cause on this occasion.

It also has to be taken into account that it is some miracle. In fact, it is not that long ago that I read in the paper that some green activist said it was the first time in a thousand years that the Murray River had failed to reach the ocean. There is a photograph over the fireplace in the Berri Hotel—which is virtually the width of the road and a short area of grass from the Murray River; the photograph was probably taken from the front veranda—of the 1914 Berri Primary School picnic being held in the middle of the river. That photograph appears on the front page of a report of the standing committee on agriculture in the previous parliament, which in fact looked at these problems and of which I was a member. The only sign of water in the photograph is a puddle in the foreground in which sits a sunken dinghy. The dinghy has a half-a-metre freeboard, if not less, and half of that is sticking out of the water. That was the Murray River in 1914.

During its heyday as a means of transport, paddle-steamers travelled great lengths up the Murray River and up the Darling. It was quite common that the water levels would fall and they could not get back, but eventually the river flowed again and they did get back. On one occasion a large number did not, and I am advised that some of those vessels were eaten by white ants. That is what the river was like in its natural state. It was Australia’s largest stormwater drain. I am happy that this sort of progress was achieved, because I think water is something that should be used for the benefit of people and, more particularly, to grow food on their behalf. But the reality is that, as man introduced dam storages, lake storages, weirs and locks, the nature of the river was changed irretrievably. I guess there would be some who would say that that was not to its benefit. It is not a natural river. And I endorse that fact.

So what are we talking about? We are talking about the fact that people went out there as pioneers in a desert and created the opportunity to produce 40-plus per cent of Australia’s food. They utilised that water for that purpose, but it relied heavily on the amount of rain that came and the extent to which it filled those storages. The other thing that I find quite outstanding is that this government, in cooperation with the New South Wales government, have gone up to Bourke to buy a station that happened to be storing some of the water up there for the purpose of food production, jobs and economic development. It rained in Bourke just the other day, but that will be of no benefit whatsoever to Toorale Station and the workers once employed there—a number of whom I understand are Indigenous—because, in typical fashion, the New South Wales parliament has taken control of that property and intends to turn it into a desert. It will produce nothing. It will not remain a livestock, pastoral, grazing enterprise and the area of it that was irrigated will be no more.

What is the outcome of that? There is a belief that that water will somehow start filling the lakes near Adelaide, the Lower Lakes. I note that Mr Windsor, the member for New England, who is over there, is smiling because he happens to live up that way. He, of course, would know very well that rivers do funny things. Rivers actually appear and disappear from time to time. Anybody who knows the facts of the northern sections of this basin would know that much of that water has never, ever entered the main waterways of the Murray-Darling system as we know it. It just soaks into the ground, presumably, and that may be a major contributor to the Great Artesian Basin—I do not know. Some argue that there is some beneficial outcome of cutting off that water supply, as compared to using it as close as possible to the source. For every metre that water runs down a river, some leaks away and some evaporates. So if you can catch it right up in the headwaters, why wouldn’t you put it to good purpose there? Why wouldn’t you?

Let me take another point I have made: we do not use water. There is as much water in the world today as there was a million years ago, and there is as much water in the world today as there will be in another million years. Some of it exists as ice, some of it exists as water vapour and some of it is in storages, but nobody uses it. People contaminate it in the process of benefiting from it. We all know what happens to the water we drink! You do not drink it again in that state! I hear greenies on the radio carrying on about how many litres of water it takes to produce a kilogram of steak. It takes none. It just happens during the process where water evaporates out of our salty oceans—in which state we cannot use it—falls on the ground and produces fodder which is consumed by animals, which also have a drink and carefully replace that water on the ground nearby. Of course, if we eat their meat then we carefully extract the water and do the same thing.

We do not use water. We have never depleted the reserves. What is more, at a CSIRO presentation I attended here a fellow got up and quoted a leading astronaut who said that we talk about the ‘planet Earth’ but we should talk about the ‘planet Water’ because the quantities of water that exist on this planet far exceed the areas of land that still protrude above it.

When one takes all those matters into account, what is our problem? Our problem is that there has been a shift in the incidence of rain. As I pointed out, now is not the first time. Obviously there was not much rain around the areas to the north or east of Berri in 1914. The river typically dried up until all the weirs and dams were put in place, which conserved water in localities for its use in those localities. Why then must we go along, as the minister boasts in her second reading speech, and tell people that water is overallocated? It is not overallocated in a flood and it is typical of the climate events here in Australia that nearly every drought, as history records, is followed by a flood.

From my reading of history—and history is something I understand we are going to forbid; you are not going to be allowed to talk about Australian history in other than a black armband fashion—around the time of Federation there was a drought of some years and that was significant. I do not know how many power stations Australia had burning coal in those days but I do not know what caused the drought. I have recently had the opportunity to read the history of public works throughout Western Australia, where a population of 100,000 people could build and fund what is still Australia’s longest freshwater pipeline between Perth and Kalgoorlie. In 1937 the population constructed nearly every dam storage that exists around the city of Perth. I think the most expensive was under £200,000. But in reading this I learnt of the history of the comprehensive water scheme in Western Australia, which virtually services my electorate, and I learnt of the reason that it was implemented in around the 1940s—for a period of years the communities and the farms in that area had no rain at all and it became necessary to get water from the coastal region around Perth.

These are the facts, and we now have a government that does nothing to conserve the little water that is left in that river system due to the lack of rain. No, we are just going to go around, as happened at Toorale, and take away, with the lure of money—the bottomless pockets of government!—the water entitlements of people who have obtained them for the purpose of producing food. But it is worse than that, because I have a book here that deals with one river system: the Murray-Darling basin. The legislation is two centimetres thick. I cannot find a word in the minister’s second reading speech that tells me what this government is going to do about those areas of Australia that have an abundance of water.

A group of we Liberals took the opportunity a few weeks back to visit Kununurra, where, for the expenditure of an amount of money which is probably seven or eight times what they paid for Toorale station to steal water off the agricultural sector, you can expand food production from an available water resource. When we visited Kununurra it was pointed out to us that the amount of water flowing to the sea, from the Argyle storage and over the distribution dam that is part of that system, was equivalent to all the water that was consumed in Sydney and Perth on that day. That is the amount of water that was running to the ocean. Because they have a small hydroelectric scheme there that works 24/7, that water is flowing down into the other dam which is designed to distribute the water through the agricultural area, and there is not enough land to use it. There is plenty of land—hundreds of thousands of hectares extending from Kununurra into the Northern Territory up the valley—but somebody has got to pay for the distribution system.

And all this government can legislate for, and all the minister can tell us about, is how the government is going to save the Murray-Darling system by kicking everybody out. There has been no commitment, as was the previous government’s priority, to reducing the loss of water in a hugely inefficient and ancient channel system where the water leaks from the top and the bottom. There is nobody achieving the efficiencies on property from a pressurised system. There is nobody achieving, from a piped system, the metering opportunities that give accurate control of water entitlements. We see those turning wheels. You get up in the morning after you have put them on all night and—oh, my goodness!—a bit of three-by-two has floated into the wheel. How did that get there? The water has been flowing all night.

I come from and spent 25 years of my life in the town of Carnarvon. It has an irrigation system in the desert based on water that can be extracted only from the sands of the riverbed. Its production per kilolitre of water is the highest in Australia. Why is that? It is because back in the sixties I, as the then shire president, had to fight with the growers to properly meter the bores they installed themselves. They were highly enraged, but boy did they pick up their productivity! A couple of young blokes went to Israel in those days and brought back the first trickle systems and all those things. Surely that is where the money should go. Surely, because the quantity of water is less, government should be out there spending money on infrastructure of whatever sort is needed to improve the opportunities.

If the climate change scenario is so, it tells us there is going to be a lot more rain in the north. We already have one of the biggest dams in Australia up there. It is totally underutilised, and nobody is contemplating doing anything about it. We have the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts proposing to lock up the entire Kimberley region, with all its other freshwater rivers, with all its capacity to produce with renewable power 10 times Australia’s current installed generating capacity. He wants to call it a World Heritage area so the Crocodile Hunter can make a couple more TV shows or that silly Tim Flannery can paddle a boat up there. It is a major resource. Flannery is an opportunistic dope, and if he wants to have a bit of a go with me on television at any time I would love to do that. His attack on the Ord River dam is typical of someone who makes their living out of playing to a very small percentage of the Australian community.

We have a responsibility to feed not only Australians but also the growing population of the Third World. All the evidence at the moment is that we will not even be able to feed ourselves; we can just have a bit of melamine or whatever it is that gets added to food products in foreign places. That is the white stuff you put on chipboard. (Time expired)

See this speech in context