Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

They are on my rivers. I acknowledge the honourable member for New England sitting next to me. He might own the dams, but my electorate uses the water, and I thank him for that wonderful privilege. But those dams are at record lows, and something that is never discussed is the fact that the changes in management practices—and I know that the member for New England talks about this in this House often—mean that now every millimetre of rain that falls on a farmer’s land is retained. There will be no run-off out of an agricultural property in this day and age until the subsoil moisture is full. It is important to remember that when these dams were constructed—with no disrespect to the member for New England—a lot of the areas above these dams were overstocked with sheep and rabbits, and 25 mils of rain would give a run-off event and fill the dam.

Last winter in my electorate at Mudgee above Windamere Dam we had a series of rainfall events, the profile filled up, the spring started to run, and we were one rainfall event from getting major run-off into the dams. Of course, that did not come. So, while we acknowledge that we have been in drought for more than seven years, we must not discount the efficiencies we have made in farming—the fact that we are retaining water and using it. The other side of that is that, further downstream when you get into the agricultural areas, the introduction of no-till farming techniques means that farmers are filling their profile before any water runs off. Indeed, across my electorate now, we are looking at a very good wheat crop. There are some magnificent crops, particularly in the north area in the Mungindi and Weemelah areas and down through Walgett towards Coonamble. Those crops are there because of the management practices of the farmers and the fact that those crops are grown on stored water. When I started in the farming game, as little as 30 years ago, we battled erosion, which is a cause of water run-off, and suffered massive losses. Purely because of the improved management practices as a farming community, we have stopped that.

I think that we do not want to get too excited about gloom and doom. What concerns me in this place is that we are making decisions in the midst of a drought. To think that this is a new phenomenon—that it has not happened before—and therefore we need to take drastic action to do something about it needs some further thought. Indeed, when I was a child, the old-timers in my hometown of Gravesend would talk about the Gwydir River being completely dry in 1910 for a matter of time. As a matter of fact, it had a bed of grass growing across it—it was that long since it had run. Anyone here who is up with history would realise that the Darling certainly went dry on many occasions in the early part of the 1900s and in the late 1800s. It is not a new thing to have drought and the rivers running dry.

If we hamstring the country areas, the rural areas and the farmers in the Murray-Darling Basin so that we secure the water supplies of Melbourne and Adelaide, when we have a wet season and the seasons return to normal and the water runs past our rural towns and farms, down the Murray and out through the lake system into the sea, and as a country we start to struggle with our commitments not only in Australia but also worldwide with our responsibilities for food production, we will wonder what we have done wrong. We need to take a deep breath in this debate and think this through before we severely cut back our allocations to rural areas. Indeed, in my area now, farmers are changing. There are large plantings of citrus going in in more intensive areas so that there is more efficient use of water. We need to keep that in mind. I trust that, as we work our way through the terribly complex situation of what we are going to do with the Murray-Darling, we do not sacrifice our rural communities and farmers for short-term political gain.

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