Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question and note that in his electorate of Flynn we have four dams on the list—Connors River Dam, Nathan Dam, Rookwood and Eden Bann. It is extremely important that Australia understands that we have to build dams. We are going to be forced into building dams. In 1980 we were storing 5.5 megalitres per person; currently we are storing around four megalitres per person. If no new dams are built, then by 2061 it will be 2.6 megalitres per person. There is definitely the capacity on norms for us to build dams. The US and Europe store about 10 per cent of their water. The world average is about nine per cent of their water, and we are storing about six per cent of our water.

I think we have to be able to reach back and claim the vision of Curtin, Chifley and Menzies, who built the Snowy Mountains scheme. That was part of the process that the built our nation. If you want zero emissions, you are going to get it from hydroelectricity. If you want to expand our capacity to produce soft commodities, to balance the books again, you are going to get out of agriculture and irrigation. It is absolutely important that people understand that this is not a process that is way into the future—it is happening right now. We have started on Chaffey Dam. We have started on Wallace Lakes. We have started on the Apsley scheme. We have started on the Menindee storage. We are actually doing it. We are actually at work right now doing precisely this.

It is important that if we are going to build dams, we have to understand what the Labor Party is going to do. If we are to understand what the Labor Party is going to do, we would have to actually look at their policy. The shadow minister for agriculture said that he would happily expand on the ALP's NFF scorecard—this was their policy—and convert it into a glossy policy document, but he was not sure that this had a great deal of merit. So the closest that the shadow minister could give us for a policy document was actually the wrong version, because the latest version had us in front; we actually won. But what is sneaking round in the bowels of the Parliamentary Library—I saw it last night and I thought I should table this—is that they actually do have a policy document. They just did not know about it. They do have a policy document but they had not read it. They had not read their own document. So I table, for the benefit of the shadow minister for agriculture, his policy.

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