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

If Northern Australia, the top third of Australia, were a separate country, it would be the wettest country on Earth. Australia is not a country bereft of water; it is just that all the water is concentrated in the top third of the country, where none of the voting population is. The Country Party governments in Queensland had a massive dam-building program, and they had reached Ayr and Emerald, just getting into North Queensland—Emerald is not in North Queensland but Ayr is. At the completion of that, the coalition government in Canberra lost government for the next 12 years and, in the state at the same time, the Country Party vanished forever with the political assassination of Bjelke-Petersen. So the people who were driving the water development had left the scene.

All of that water every year does not just run to the sea. It roars, rushes, tears and rips. We have nine months with no rainfall whatsoever and, at the end of the nine months, the ground protection is gone. All the grass is gone. The land is left bare to torrential, cyclonic, monsoonal rains and massive flooding. At the mouth of the Mitchell River the water is 60 kilometres wide. Any land that is there is just an island. Normanton and Karumba become islands because, similarly, at the mouth of the Gilbert and Flinders rivers we have a similar 60-kilometre phenomenon where the land becomes a mass of freshwater that is lost to the people of Australia forever.

We can never stop those floodwaters but we can utilise some, a very small proportion—probably four per cent would be the maximum we could ever harness because of the nature of the topography. But that four per cent can feed 100 million people, and that is not a figure plucked out of the air; that is the actual figure. Outside of Northern Australia there is no real potential for irrigation outside the Murray-Darling—just little short coastal streams. We have 304 million megalitres and the rest of Australia has only 80 million. But of that 80 the only irrigation water that can be used is the 22 million megalitres in the Murray-Darling.

Eight million megalitres of irrigation water in the Murray-Darling feeds 20 million people. It provides the entire food requirements of 20 million people. I am not going to go into the details of how that sum is worked out. We could simply allow every cattle station in North Queensland to have 200 hectares of irrigation—I had 250,000 acres, 100,000 hectares, and I was easily the smallest of the stations in my area.

If you fly over 200 hectares in an aeroplane, you would not be able to see it. It would be a spot.

But, if you give each of those landholders 200 hectares, it will dramatically help them financially because it is a golden handshake of $2 million, but nobody is losing anything. What does it cost the government? It costs the government nothing. What does it cost the environment? Nothing. It enhances it, because what happens is that when the floods occur the floodwaters carry seeds from weeds, and all of these pernicious weeds get away on the banks of our rivers. If we have pasture for cattle on the banks of our rivers then those seeds cannot get away. What are we doing with this great land that God has given us? Some seven million hectares have been totally destroyed by a weed—the Acacia nilotica tree.

If we also add 31,000-hectare irrigation blocks, we can then provide the cheapest of cheap routes—a superfast highway for our beef going into Indonesia. We can provide a raw material called cattle to them that they can make $3,000 or $4,000 a head off, we get $1,500 a head and everyone is happy. But at the present moment $1,500 is going to the inefficiencies in the system and a little bit of profiteering by the middlemen as well. So that is a great vista of opportunity—the movement up to three million or four million extra head of cattle in Cape York Peninsula, which is mostly populated by our first Australians, who have no jobs and no income at the present moment. Cape York Peninsula has three times the rainfall of Victoria and only 100,000 head of cattle, whereas Victoria has seven million head of cattle. That is where we want to go. We urge the governments of Australia to take us in that direction.