Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

There is a fair bit that the member for Perth just said that I agree with. To develop the north of Australia we have to look around the rest of Australia and see what has gone before. We have seen the troubles in the Murray-Darling Basin. There were troubles with salinity, overfarming and other things that went on there. In speaking to people around Australia you would think that the Murray-Darling River system was the biggest in Australia. That is far from the truth. The Murray-Darling starts in Queensland and ends up in South Australia. It only rolls into one major exit. In Queensland we have the major river systems of the Burdekin and the Fitzroy rivers. They run into the Murray-Darling, Lake Eyre, the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Pacific Ocean.

My comments in relation to this will be, by necessity, representing north Queensland in relation to the development of northern Australia. When it comes to the development of northern Australia, I agree with the member for Perth: we must get our baseline science right because we must not make these mistakes again. When you look at the development of northern Australia and across the top end of Queensland, there are 25 river systems. We know what is in about five of them. When we come to development of northern Australia, the approach of someone like Dr Damian Burrows at CSIRO, with his freshwater research to know what is actually going on in river systems, makes the most sense to me.

When you are talking about the development of Australia, everybody wants the development in their area. What we have done wrong before is taken a higgledy-piggledy approach of $5 million here and $20 million there to see what comes up. But if you do the matrix the right way and look at the whole thing and ask, 'Who has the water?' and put that down and overlap it with who has the arable soil and overlap that with who has access to ports and transport you will come up with five or six projects that we could really progress. I have always said that, when it comes to the development of northern Australia, the one thing we cannot do is put in a $25 million mung bean crop in the Gulf of Carpentaria if it is going to ruin the $1 billion prawn industry. You cannot put in a dam if it is so flat in that area that the fastest runner in the world, Usain Bolt, cannot keep up with the rate of evaporation. We have to make sure that we do this right.

At the end of the day, we have to recognise that a group of people have gone from opposition to government and we cannot play too much politics. There are eight seats north of the Tropic of Capricorn. There are 142 seats south of it. So for Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey, Andrew Robb, Julie Bishop and Warren Truss to come in here and say, 'This is the future of the country,' says a lot to me. It says a lot to the people in the north of Australia. Suddenly we have people understanding that this is basically half the country, with a tenth of the population, a minute number of seats and even fewer senators representing that part of the world. We know this is the way we have to do it.

Andrew Robb spoke in Townsville last year just before the election. He said that, at the moment, if you look at the tropical world, there is a population between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer of about 500 million people who would be considered middle class. That number is expected to grow by 2030 to 2035 to 3.6 billion people who will need quality protein, quality food, quality education and quality health. They will also need electricity.

What we have to do is recognise those opportunities and make the most of them. We are in a perfect position with the work that the government has done in securing a free trade agreements with Japan, Korea and is well on the way with China. We have to make sure we develop those things. We cannot ignore the role of Papua New Guinea in the development of Northern Australia. We must look at where our largest neighbour is. Our largest neighbour is Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation in the world. Sometimes our relationship is prickly, but at all times we are able to do business with people.

So when it comes to the development of Northern Australia the first thing you must accept is that at last we have a government that is taking it seriously. At last we have a government that is extra doing the hard work to put down the patchwork to make sure we are looking at the macro situation and from there we can develop the projects. That is what we have to do with this process and we will deliver for the north of the country. I thank the House.

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