Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

He's not one you can stop! We've worked that out.

I rise to talk about the Cooks River in my part of Sydney, running through the Canterbury-Bankstown area but adjacent local councils as well. The Cooks River has been for some time the most polluted river in Australia. While people will often talk about rivers and put forward photographs of beautiful rivers in regional areas, it's important to remember that, for people who live in lower-income areas, that shouldn't determine whether or not they get natural beauty. It shouldn't be the case. We all accept that people with more money will be able to spend more money on their home, but the right to decent, clean public space is something that should be available no matter where you live.

In my part of Sydney, the remediation of the Cooks River has been a long-term project for many and certainly something that, locally, I've dedicated a good part of my career to. Effectively, what happened generations ago was that the theory was—initially partly as flooding mitigation—just to get the water moving as quickly as possible. That meant that every natural bank was replaced with concrete and every natural stream became a stormwater drain, and we ended up with large parts of the Cooks River where, if you looked at it, you would not think you were looking at a river at all. You would simply say, 'That now is a stormwater drain.'

When Labor were last in government, we started the remediation and we did something really interesting at a place called Cup and Saucer Creek: we intercepted the stormwater. First of all, we put some gross pollutant traps to catch the rubbish, but then we took over a small park and put in some wetlands where the water from the stormwater drain would come in and feed the wetlands. The water would then seep through three different wetlands before returning to the river. Lo and behold: going through a new natural system, the water that would return to the river was crystal-clear, pure water.

I am pleased that, with the change of government and the Urban Rivers and Catchments Program—something that I expect to be part of the October budget—the Cooks River has a chance to again get federal government funding so that we can see a situation into the future where your postcode doesn't determine whether the river has natural banks or concrete. We all saw that lots of people, when they got half an hour or an hour of exercise time during the pandemic, didn't have anywhere particularly nice to go within five kilometres. I want to turn that around. It shouldn't be determined by your postcode.