Bill Heffernan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I do not for one moment doubt the sincerity of Senator Siewert’s thoughts and passion behind this motion to refer matters to the Senate Standing Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport. We will, however, be opposing the motion, because if there is one thing that we have had enough of, it is inquiries. What we really need in Australia now is the political will and the courage to do something with all the knowledge we have got. Obviously we need to collect it all onto one database.

I am a farmer, as are my colleagues Senator Sandy Macdonald and Senator Nash, who are here in the chamber. We have actually lived this experience and put our families and our finances on the line, and I have to tell you that there is nothing like farming to put the sweat on the back of the neck and to put your own lifestyle and family at risk. We have learned the hard way that there is a need for adaptation.

The Commonwealth is certainly well aware of the potential impacts of climate change on primary producers. As I have said many times, Australia is fortunate that we have the knowledge that we are on a continent that is going to have serious disadvantage from climate change, especially in the south, in the Murray-Darling Basin. In its heyday it had 4.2 per cent of Australia’s run-off. Thirty-eight per cent of that run-off comes from two per cent of the landscape, which is now under threat of losing something like 3,000 gigalitres through climate change, forest interception and those fires in the Snowy.

I heard my dear friends from the Wentworth Group talking some sense the other day, but on other issues I gently disagree with them. I do not think the answer is to have some political decision so that you might not be able to grow certain crops or undergo certain enterprises on the land or so that you would formally lock country up. I heard the Wentworth Group say the other day that they thought a lot of the country at Bourke and Brewarrina should be locked up. The market sorts that out. The western division of New South Wales 100 years ago was stocked at the rate of one or two acres to the sheep because no-one understood the carrying capacity of the land. In fact, it was grassland, a lot of which is now scrub because it was overstocked at the time. It is now one sheep to 25 or 30 acres. You do not abandon the enterprise; you have to adjust your enterprise to what Mother Nature sends along and at the same time look after the environment.

Despite what a good few people out there in the community who plait their armpits and preen their dreadlocks think—that is, that farmers are somehow the people who destroy the environment—Australia’s farmers are great environmentalists and very responsible. One of the best things that happened in recent times for farmers was Landcare. Landcare was about teaching farmers what was going on on their farm. Back in 2002 the Australian government initiated the government-business climate change dialogue. It identified a process to deliver advice and to form a blueprint for partnerships in agriculture to have a comprehensive approach to climate change. We also partnered up with the former president of the NFF in 2005 and commissioned the Agriculture and Food Policy Reference Group to report on the situation and propose actions for the long-term strength of Australian agriculture and regional Australia. The report on that was delivered in February of this year. It addressed the issues of climate change in agriculture. So a number of things have been happening.

My plea to the parliament today is not to support another inquiry, even though you could have another inquiry and go through all the things that we have been briefed on. We have had comprehensive briefings in the rural and regional committee in recent days. As Senator Siewert pointed out, we have received a lot of valuable information. One of the things that we received was advice that we should get all our information onto one database. I entirely agree with that. We certainly do not need an inquiry to tell us to do that. What we need is action, not more words. In my view, what we need is to create a specific ministry in the government of the day to deal with climate change and water.

Water has been catastrophically mismanaged by the states. A lot of that was not deliberate. It happened because of a lack of science and knowledge and overallocation. There is a phoney argument about whether it is a 1,000-year drought or a 100-year drought. The water situation may well be a one in many hundreds of years event. I am not too sure. But in terms of dryland farming it certainly is not.

The nature of farming has changed, as you have pointed out, Senator Siewert. We have gone from long-term fallow and the days when there was skeleton weed. Senator Sandy Macdonald, you would remember that. You ploughed your pasture in in the spring, then you worked it again when the skello came up and you worked it again and you worked it again and eventually, if a decent windstorm came along, it blew away. These days, you put a crop in and you cannot even see where you have put it. You put it in with a zero tillage machine. Down in my district, we have had a pretty rough trot this year. We had a fire in January and then we had this bloody drought. There is an innovative farmer there, Tony Lehman. He has crops that are going to go eight bags, and crops through the fence are going to go nothing. It is just about how they conserve the moisture and use this machine that absolutely does not open the soil up.

There is plenty of knowledge. What we have to have is direction. I say that we have to create a ministry which embraces climate change, water and the development of the north. As I said at the start, Australia is a very fortunate continent. They say we are the world’s driest continent, but per head of population we are about No. 5 or 6 in the world for water availability. It is just that no-one wants to live where the water is. Sixty per cent of our water is in Northern Australia. There are 78,000 gigalitres running out of the Timor catchment, bearing in mind that 23,000 gigalitres is the run-off—or it was before these new reductions came along in the Murray-Darling. There are 98,000 gigalitres running out of the gulf catchment. About 85,000 gigalitres run out of the north-east catchment, in the Burnett. From the gulf catchment we divert 50 gigalitres, out of 98,000 gigalitres. We divert about 55 gigalitres out of the Timor catchment, out of 78,000 gigalitres. While there is a lot of poor soil mixed in amongst all that, as there is in every district—bandicoot country, we call it—there is a lot of good soil. There are millions of acres of beautiful soil that run through the Barkly Tableland and out through the Kimberley.

I say that we ought to harness the knowledge, put the money towards harnessing the science. I had the CSIRO in my office this week talking to us. Senator Siewert, we will be taking their information to our committee. They were talking about how and why they can help. They obviously cannot make political decisions. But while there is going to be pain in the south there is going to be gain in the north.

At the same time, as I have said many times in the last few weeks, there is a great opportunity for Australians to overcome the shame that we should all feel about the debilitating conditions in which a lot of our Indigenous communities in the north live. I am ashamed to think that we are here today and can have a nice cup of morning tea and so on and there are communities up there where 7,000 kids have no access to high school. They have no economic opportunity. There are all sorts of dysfunctional problems within the communities. As I have said, if you go to the so-called Wadeye Centrelink office, you see that it is a hole in the wall with a phone in it. When you lift the phone up, there is no voice at the other end. You have to press buttons. Someone does not say: ‘G’day. How are you?’ when you lift the phone up. You have to press this button and press that button. And, waiting to use the phone is a line of women—a line like you see at the toilets at half-time at the football. It is a disgrace.

Australia’s farmers need to come to terms with climate change and to do something sensible downstream from the North West gas resource. This year I went to Trinidad and saw the value-adding that they have done. They supply 73 per cent of the United States liquid natural gas. So far, I guess to get the thing up and running, we have had some big sales to China, which are to be applauded. But we are selling gas for four or five cents a litre when we should be value-adding it. If we could get a ministry that looked at all this—not an inquiry but a ministry—we could have infrastructure put in place that would go with this development and we would have a road to the future for those remote Indigenous communities.

In Wadeye, on the first day of school this year 600 kids turned up. There was a mood in the community of, ‘Let’s get these kids to school.’ I met a couple of old nuns there. One was 92 and the other was 85, and the 85-year-old nun still drives the 92-year-old nun around. They are daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart. I was sitting under a tree, and I walked over and said, ‘G’day; I am an old SH boy myself. I went to Bowral in 1949. It cost £4 10 a term.’ She said, ‘You would have known Sister Philomena,’ and I said, ‘No, she was Mother Philomena to me.’ They are still out there doing terrific work in those communities. For the first time, that school had 600 kids turn up on the first day this year. But, because there were no desks, rooms or teachers, after a few days the kids got sick of sitting out in the sun, as it were, and they went home. It was just appalling. Now there are only 200 to 300 kids there. And the 300 to 400 kids who should be at high school have no high school. What hope do they have? So why wouldn’t they play up when the cameras turn up? It is a disgrace.

So if we are going to fix all of that, Senator Siewert—and we can fix it—we need to turn the adversities of climate change in Australia into opportunities. Obviously, there has to be a lot of activity removed from the Murray-Darling Basin—and that is code for some people, through water trading, leaving the industry—and, obviously, there has to be more water returned to Mother Nature. It is a quandary. We are arguing about whether we should return 500 gigalitres or 1,500 gigalitres to the river system when we know that Mother Nature will take 3,000 out anyhow. We had that ridiculous proposition last year for the Snowy Hydro sale. It did not make any sense then and it does not make any sense now.

I think that the time for inquiries is over. I think it is time for political cooperation between the states. I actually think that there has to be a higher authority that takes charge of water. There have been some outrageous propositions put about some of our borders. The stuff-up in the Lower Balonne as to whether you buy or sell a place that has a water entitlement is a lazy solution. Most of the cotton that is grown in some of those places is in overland flow. It is water that is not licensed, it is not costed and it is not needed. It is a national disgrace. We know all that stuff. We do not have to have an inquiry. We just have to have the courage to do something about it. We now have a trigger in Australia to make all this happen. Even people in the cities are now wondering whether in the future, when they turn the tap on, the water will come out.

We do not need an inquiry into the mismanagement of water in Sydney. Sydney’s water infrastructure was set up for four million people, and 430 gigalitres goes out of three outfalls and is wasted every year because there is a monopoly in action there—and the monopoly pays a dividend to the government. It is a lazy way of doing business. It does not matter how wasteful it is, if you get rid of the water, you get the money. There should be a secondary water market in Sydney for recycled water—an incentive in the market. There are lots of opportunities. That will happen in rural Australia.

We do not need an inquiry into the wetlands which you talked about this morning, Senator Siewert. There is no question that in the Macquarie Marshes there are water thieves. You have all of those banks there and no-one has the political courage to go along and say, ‘Take them out because they are not licensed.’ You have the farmers saying, ‘Don’t send water down to the wetlands because they are dead.’ The only reason that they are dead is that someone else is pinching the water that is being sent down there. The agricultural companies and the pastoralists who are doing that—I will not bother naming them here—should be ashamed. You know this from our committee inquiry, Senator Siewert—we have all the photographs. They are only little banks, and they divert all the water from them. That should be fixed. You do not need an inquiry to do that. You just go up there and fix it. I do not want to go on all day—though you could go on all day—about the catastrophic mismanagement, but I think we have been presented with a great opportunity. We have done some great things. I welcome back the Minister for the Environment and Heritage, who has just entered the chamber.