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

I would like to thank the member for Riverina for her motion to allow us to talk about the water situation in Australia. I have been doing a bit more research on the drought situation and the availability of water in Australia. Australia has always been a dry continent. The water distribution has moved somewhat over the centuries, but the amount of water that has fallen on the continent has not changed greatly. The earliest discussion on this was by George Woodroffe Goyder, a government surveyor in South Australia. His explorations, surveys and reports, which stated that the north of South Australia had some excellent pastoral lands and were not just arid sands and saline deserts, attracted pastoralists to the area. Soon he was asked by the government to travel north once more to value pastoral properties and fix new rentals, as many pastoralists were making substantial profits. As early as 1858, Goyder became involved in the selection and survey of government towns. But he soon questioned the wisdom of establishing townships in pastoral areas. By the 1860s, the government was laying out towns in agricultural areas, and it was here that Goyder’s ideas were followed and town design changed.

When pastoralists complained during the severe drought of 1863-66, Goyder went north to reassess their properties. The first eighteen valuations carried out by Goyder were published in the Adelaide Express in September 1864. His line of travel, which amounted to nearly 5,000 kilometres on horseback, marked off the line of drought and became known as Goyder’s line of rainfall. He drew a line indicating the limit of the rainfall, which coincided with the southern boundary of saltbush country. It separated lands suitable for agriculture from those fit for pastoral use only. It also marked areas of reliable and unreliable annual rainfall. When agricultural land became scarce, combined with good seasons and crops during the early 1870s and the expected income of land sales, the government was persuaded to disregard the line and allow farmers to buy land north of the line—a mistake that had long-term implications. So it is not that we do not know that Australia has marked ups and downs in its water availability; it is that some have chosen to ignore it over time, and this has been a prime factor in water being wasted or hoarded in different areas, or degraded in others, and land being overfarmed in some of the driest areas in the continent.

So, while I agree with the sentiments encapsulated in the member for Riverina’s motion, I think we have to start doing the calculations to understand what exactly the problem is. We need to revisit the methods of Goyder. We can do that much more easily now because we have satellite imaging and photogrammetry—rather than riding a horse around, but the principle should be the same. We need to farm smarter and understand the cycles that exist and how they can be adapted by using the natural cycles. With that intelligence, we can understand what crops need for maximum growth. I also came across a book entitled Water, wit and wisdom by Colin Austin, an engineer who made his fortune working in plastics but sold up and, using his curiosity of water flows through soil and with a healthy disdain for bureaucrats and politics, came up with some very plausible solutions to water shortages in Australia. These solutions involved using the natural consistencies of soils, and understanding how water flows through them, saturation levels and how to get rid of the inevitable salt that is part of the irrigation cycle. His ideas are well worth looking at, and I commend them to you. For too long we have worked on the basis that we have a lot of land and, once a bit is exhausted, we can move to another bit. This may have looked okay when we had a population in the thousands but, when we got to the millions, it did not work. We need to help communities understand land better, learn how to farm smarter and really keep in mind that we are a dry continent and that climatic changes will probably mean more extreme weather events. (Time expired)

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