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

It would be very good if the honourable member listened to what I was saying. I just told him that there were 85 empty shops in Mildura. You think that is not important, do you? I said that one in 10 farms had closed down at Mildura, and I was corrected by someone from the local newspaper who said it is closer to one in five. They tell me in Griffith that the figures are almost as bad in terms of empty buildings and closed farms. Twenty per cent of the economic underpinnings of western New South Wales, northern Victoria and south-eastern South Australia has been removed. At Deniliquin—this is the immediacy—there are normally 60 to 70 houses for sale, according to the leading real estate person there, and now there are 155 houses for sale. And you think there is no immediacy involved with this!

The House is now enabling the Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communitiesto take away another 15 per cent. Twenty per cent has already been taken away and now we will take another 15 per cent. Ten thousand people have turned up at the rallies in the greater Griffith area. A member of parliament in this place—I do not know whether he is fair dinkum or not; that is up to him—said he is going to cross the floor, which is a pretty rare phenomenon in this place. But he thinks it is so immediate that he said he is going to cross the floor about it. What I am saying is that this is immediate and it needs to be debated now.

There are other alternatives. There are a dozen other alternatives. I have devoted probably a fair proportion of my entire life to trying to get water development in northern Australia, where of course we are awash with water, so I know a lot about what I am talking about here. If you want to go back to nature, have a look at the Menindee Lakes and Lake Alexandrina, which are entirely unnatural. They are created by man. But of course they are sucking over a million megalitres out of the basin. So, if you say you need three million extra megalitres in the basin, there is over a million megalitres for you straightaway.

A little tiny bit of the floodwaters from the Clarence River—and the honourable member representing that area is very sensitive, but let me say that I would like some of my floodwaters from some of my coastal rivers to be sent the other way, because people die in the flooding in my electorate regularly. Similarly, in the Clarence River there have been deaths from flooding on a number of occasions, so you can turn back a bit of the Clarence.

Quite frankly, you can recycle water. Simply taking your laundry water and putting it into your septic will halve the domestic consumption. There are a dozen ways that we can be going about this without taking the water from the irrigation towns. Whilst the farmers might be compensated, the townspeople are not. For every farmer, there are 20 people living in those towns. Those farmers, of course, are being destroyed because the channels have lost a third of the people who were meeting the cost of keeping the channels operating. That cost is now borne by only two-thirds of the farmers because one-third have gone. The farms have been purchased by the government and closed down.

The issue is whether the greatest achievement of the Australian people, one of the 27 iconic engineering projects in world history, is going to have a third of it closed down. That is the issue before the parliament. There are those of us who profoundly believe that it should not be. That achievement enables the people of Australia to feed and clothe some 20 million people. They are fed and clothed by that magnificent scheme. Nearly one-tenth of our entire peak load base power in Australia is clean and forever and free because that power comes out of the sky. What we are contemplating here is closing a third of that down.

We consider that this is a matter of great urgency. I am very familiar with this because I represent mining areas. When a mine closes down and we lose a quarter of our employment in a town, it takes two or three years for the full economic impact of that to filter through to the communities. It is just now that it is filtering through the communities of western New South Wales, northern Victoria and south-eastern South Australia. Before the full impact of that occurs, we can head it off and raise hope that some of that water may be restored, instead of a tenth of what is left being taken from them. That is why we are asking that sessional orders be suspended and that we have the right to advance this issue before the House. If nothing else, at least it is a matter that should be debated by this parliament.

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