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

They are human. The world’s most precious and important vocation, in my view, is parenthood and the world’s most difficult vocation is the priesthood. I agree with what Senator Ronaldson had to say. I have a very simple mission statement in public life that I try to stick to. With all human endeavour, there are some human failings. I accept that. I try to stick to the fact that I do not like crooks—I usually use a much rougher word—and people who prey on kids, and I would like to think that I do not have a price. I have to say that you can solicit donations from people without being corrupted and influenced by the donations. As a former president of the Liberal Party I collected probably millions of dollars. I have to say that no-one really put it on me. If you do not have a price, it will not affect you. But for a lot of institutions—police et cetera—if they cannot pay the tucker bill, it is an easy way out if someone slips them an envelope of money.

The first time that I was offered a million dollar bribe was only two or three years ago. I rang up Alan Ramsey and said, ‘Ramsey, put this in your diary: I’ve just been offered a million dollar bribe.’ It was to do with the redevelopment of the Malabar rifle range. The bloke who came to see me—and this is the way they operate—just said in the conversation, ‘Senator, and there’s a million in this for you.’ I said to him, ‘Well, old mate, I’ve got a surprise for you: I actually do this job for nothing.’ I immediately rang the appropriate people and took out a bit of insurance by ringing Alan Ramsey and getting him to make a diary note. The bloke never came back, because he was obviously looking for someone he could utilise with a bit of money. You do run into these people. I had some people in my office only last year talking about issues surrounding the development of the Tralee subdivision here in Canberra. As a consequence—and without giving anything away—of those meetings, which were with people from all sides of the argument, I called the Australian Federal Police before one party left the office. You do not have to be affected if you do not have a price.

I have decided that it is much easier to move onto the greater concerns for all Australians in my time here. I do not think that you can deal with the human nature stuff appropriately if you are fair dinkum. Senator Murray, as with what you came up against, you can talk yourself blue in the face and nothing seems to happen. It is a bit like reintroducing pornography into Indigenous communities unless the Indigenous community votes that they do not want to have it. It is ridiculous. In 1999, I commissioned a woman who won the University Medal at the University of Sydney for her thesis on domestic violence in rural New South Wales to do a report on Indigenous child abuse in New South Wales. I can still remember that the people who were on the inquiry into the shutting down of ATSIC did not want me to table this report. No-one else had taken any notice of it. It was graphic. It eventually got tabled. But nobody wants to take firsthand possession of the problem because they do not want to own it.

Up in my office, I have a new secretary. I have had some pretty wonderful calls come into my office, but yesterday a male prostitute rang me because he was about to commit suicide. These things get you down, I have to tell you. The reason that his life has become dysfunctional is that he was seriously abused by a well-known serial abuser at Trinity College in Sydney. I noticed the other day that they have locked up another Marist brother in Sydney and that they are about to lock one up here in Canberra. I get too bloody angry to talk about it.

What I would like to move on to is Mother Nature. All Australians ought to give consideration to the fact that with the way we are headed we have seen the best of the planet. Poor old Mother Earth is taking a hiding if you believe the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the 2,500 eminent scientists. They tell us that in 50 years time 50 per cent of the world’s population will be short of water and there will be about a billion people unable to feed themselves. This is on the assumption that the population increases from 6.5 billion to nine billion in that time. Bear in mind that most of the research and modelling that is going on at the moment is on the energy requirement behind that development rather than on the food task to feed them to get to that point. A lot more work needs to be done on the food as well as the energy.

A billion people will be unable to feed themselves. At the present time on the planet, there are about 800 million people who are short of food and there are a billion people who gorge themselves and are obese for whatever reason. There were no fat prisoners of war, by the way, so you do not have to be obese if you do not stick it down your neck—unless you have a medical condition. The scientists tell us that in 50 years—and we are getting there—30 per cent of the productive land of Asia, where two-thirds of the world’s population lives, will go out of production. They tell us that the food task will double and they tell us—and listen carefully to this—that 1.6 billion people on this planet will be displaced.

When Mick Keelty said a few months ago that the greatest threat to Australia’s sovereignty is climate change, he was right on the money. Fortunately for Australia, we are in a position where we are going to be able to handle this, in my view. But a lot of the planet is not going to be able to. The scientists have estimated that somewhere between 200 million and 300 million people in the central part of Africa will be displaced. Because of the irreversible mining of the great northern aquifer in China, something over 400 million people will be displaced. Places like Bangladesh not only will be subject to the mining of the groundwater which ends up in their rivers—their freshwater is being mined by places like India, who are in full denial—but will also succumb to the rising sea.

China, to its credit, recognises that it has this serious water problem and is undertaking great engineering works to try and overcome it by moving water to where they have depleted their ground reservoirs. One of the things that they have underway in an engineering sense—and they say that you can fix anything with engineering if you have enough money—is the building of a water pipeline that will be 1,200 kilometres of 36 or 37 pipes laid side by side that are each 4½ metres deep. It just goes to show that you can do it if you have enough dough.

I think we all ought recognise that there are lots of problems on the planet. But if the scientists are only 50 per cent right and we have only 800 million people who are displaced or if the scientists are only 10 per cent right and we have only 16 million people displaced, the United Nations will not fix the problem. The United Nations, with great respect Mr Acting Deputy President, or some parts of it, has become a massive lot of immeasurable, unaccountable blubber with all sorts of subcultures. I was pleased to see that they arrested some child predators in Timor-Leste. That is all part of the subculture of that set-up.

Australia, the scientists tell us—we are coming to the good news—is going to lose somewhere between 25 and 50 per cent of run-off in the southern parts of the continent. I am fearful. I declare an interest: I am a farmer. There is a gloomy dry winter forecast for lots of southern Australia at the present time, yet the northern parts and northern New South Wales are having a wonderful season, thank God, so there are some options there. Scientists are saying that somewhere between 3,500 and 11,000 gigalitres might disappear out of the run-off from the Murray-Darling Basin. The Murray-Darling Basin has 6.2 per cent of Australia’s run-off, 23,000 gigalitres, and we have about 70 per cent of the productive irrigated water work in that area. I stood up in this place a few years ago and said that any 50-year plan for the Murray-Darling Basin would exclude furrow cotton and paddy rice. Poor old Sharman Stone, Kay Hull and everyone rang me up and abused me and said, ‘What are you doing?’ It is true—they will be opportunity crops but it will be a question of how often the opportunity is going to come along and whether you can maintain the infrastructure in the meantime. I will not get into too much of the technical side because I do not have enough time.

If that is true, we are going to have to reconfigure not only the way we have settled rural and regional Australia but the way we do our business in rural and regional Australia. I have argued this for many years. In my maiden speech here in 1996 I argued that we should develop the north—that we should commit ourselves to doing the science through a task force on the development of the north. I urge and commend the government to get on with it—I am sure Penny Wong will. Uniquely, if we can maintain our sovereignty, as Mick Keelty said, against the background of the earlier figures of displacement, and occupy and manage the north, Australia will still be a world-leading contributor, punching well above its weight in the export of food and other materials, and maintaining our standard of living.

Bear in mind that in the three main catchments of the north, the Timor Sea catchment has 78,000 gigalitres of run-off, the gulf catchment has 98,000 gigalitres of run-off and the north-east catchment in Queensland has 85,000 gigalitres of run-off, against 23,000 gigalitres in the Murray-Darling Basin, where we all seem to want to do business. If we do not do something about that, in 50 years time Australia will be like the rest of the planet—in serious trouble.

Peter Beattie made a serious error, which the Australian Conservation Foundation agrees with, in the wild rivers legislation where Queensland has locked up the first kilometre from productive land in a great many of the gulf rivers. The gulf has 17 million hectares, which is bigger than Victoria, and very little development. During the last federal election campaign—I thought it was a great exercise of democracy that the government changed without anyone getting too excited and we all went back to work and we are still here today doing business and smiling at each other, unlike a lot of the rest of the world—Mick Keelty set this out. You may recall the 18 fishermen and their families on whose fishing zone we imposed our sovereignty. They decided to come to Australia because we mucked up their business enterprise and we sent them to Christmas Island. I cannot imagine what will happen if the science is right and there are, at the top of the prediction, 1.6 billion people who have to be resettled. I am sure there will be a new set of world orders because people in survival mode will make their own rules.

It is interesting that Australia has the privilege of democracy and our system of government. Bear in mind that, as far as I can see, in this parliament there is not one person in the government who lives or has made a living in the bush—commercially that is. They might have a holiday shack or something. Gavin O’Connor obviously did. I am pleased to see that Tony Burke has been appointed as the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, in which I take a deep interest, because he has a good brain and has been a good listener. We have a lot of work to do.

The wool industry is in a hell of a mess at the present time—it is dysfunctional. The thing we need to do on behalf of Australia’s wool growers is let the world know that Australia’s farmers are its greatest environmentalists. Landcare did a wonderful thing for Australian farmers: it taught us what was happening with our land. We are about survival, so we have to look after the land. We are only the custodians. Also, we care for our stock. We are not into animal cruelty, as some of the lunatics you see on the television would have you believe. Most of them would not know where the sun comes up. Most of them plait their armpits and smoke pot. Mulesing is a very necessary thing at the present time because we do not have other technology. As Ian McLachlan and others have said, they are working on it.

In the meantime, Australia could lead the world because we now have technology for pain relief. We could apply pain relief mandatorily for mulesing, castration and tail docking. I think we should move to that as part of an interim measure of genetic fix or technological fix for what is part of the great Australian bush—that is, fly waves and flyblown sheep. Flyblown sheep is a pretty serious problem. There is a bit of pain inflicted. I have mulesed thousands of sheep. It takes about 15 seconds to knock the top off and, if your teeth are good enough, tear the nuts out, trim around the tail, cut the tail off with the shears and then, if you put on pain relief, away they go.

The alternative to that is a very maggoty, destructive fly wave. So there needs to be some common sense brought to that debate. There needs to be unity in the debate. I think that, because we have been reactive rather than proactive, the wool industry and the government should give consideration to setting up some sort of committee to address the urgency which sits above all the politics and squabbling that is going on.

There are a couple of other issues. I think it is stupid that the Liberal Party and the Nationals have not merged. I was pleased to see Doug Anthony, Ian Sinclair and Peter Nixon in the paper today saying again what they and I said years ago. There are natural constituencies; the Labor Party’s are generally urban and a lot of ours are rural and regional. You cannot compartmentalise constituencies with modern communication and transport. We should recognise that the city needs to understand bush issues and problems as well as the bush needing to understand the city. (Time expired)