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

As I said, Senator McLucas, there is not a person in the Labor Party, in the government, who lives and/or makes a living in the bush. Part of what you have done is taken away what is the flagpole of Australia, the very mast of Australia, in new technology and the future for irrigation: Carnarvon. Carnarvon wanted—and we agreed and approved—$1 million to put new joiners on their pipes, for their pressurised system. Every irrigator in Australia should either go to Carnarvon or know about Carnarvon to know where the future lies. Carnarvon uses the latest and greatest in Israeli and Spanish technology. They draw 11 gigalitres—11,000 megalitres—out of the Gascoyne River. They divert 3½ gigalitres of that water—and you will notice I am not using any notes; I do not need to read this, I know it—to reticulate the town of Carnarvon. They use 8½ gigalitres to supply the farmers there. The farmers there do not measure their water in gigalitres or megalitres; they do it in kilolitres—it is that precious. I delivered to the minister’s office today a paper I wrote—which is pretty unusual for me—in 2002 which was the ‘gumboot story’ about how, if we did not move with the times, we would have had to move Adelaide and deal with paddy rice—and I will come to that in a minute—and furrow cotton. But with 8½ gigalitres of water, Carnarvon produces $60 million worth of income from things like tomatoes, lunch-pack bananas, table grapes and capsicums. If you were in New South Wales with that 8½ gigalitres of water, you would produce $3 million worth of cotton. Carnarvon produces $60 million worth of produce.

If you go up to what is a great frontier for Australia, the Ord, with 40 times that amount of water—335 gigalitres of water—you will see they produce the same income, in a very old-fashioned and inefficient way. To their great credit, they withdrew the tender document for Ord stage 2, because it was a lazy document. As the chairman of the task force under the previous government, I said, ‘By March of this year we’ll have you sorted and you’ll be underway again.’ Well, there has not been a stroke of advancement for Ord stage 2. I went up there and I could not believe it. ‘Here is 14,000 hectares of country,’ the Ord tender document said, ‘and here is 335 gigalitres. What am I bid?’ That is all it said. It was a lazy document. There was no price signal for the price of the water and no disconnection between the land and the water. If you were a smart bloke who wanted to do at the Ord what they do in Carnarvon, you would not get paid for it; you could not separate your water to pay the bank for the technology. I said to the government at the time: ‘What arrangements have you made with the Northern Territory? Where does the drainage for Ord stage 2 go?’ They said, ‘It goes down the Keep River.’ I asked, ‘Where’s the Keep River?’ They said, ‘It’s in the Northern Territory.’ I asked, ‘Have you had a discussion with the Northern Territory about the sovereign issues of the bank?’ They said, ‘No, we were going to leave that up to the developer.’ That would have been some guy from the Gold Coast, with a pair of white shoes. So, fortunately for us, they withdrew the document. Carnarvon, as I said, is the hope of the future for Australia’s development of food technology.

We are at the present time in an overallocated regime in the Murray-Darling Basin, which, as I say, has 23,000 gigalitres of run-off, which is 6.2 per cent of Australia’s run-off, trying to do 70-odd per cent of Australia’s water farming in a situation where we have completely overallocated. In fact, we are about to impose a serious fraud on Australia’s taxpayers because we cannot get the Queensland government, who are a bunch of cowboys, to be compliant with the National Water Initiative. We are about to issue licences on the Condamine-Balonne based on earthworks where there was no environmental planning, which was the worst of the thinking of blokes like Russ Hinze in his time. By the way, all governments of all persuasions for all time have cocked up water planning. Everyone is to blame. We are about to issue a series of licences up there in full knowledge that we are going to buy them back. We are about to issue the biggest water licence ever issued to an individual farm in Australia—469,000 megalitres. Co-signatory and co-beneficiary of the licence—on the licence in the draft plan—is the chairman of the ministerial advisory body which is advising the government on how to issue the licences. It is a serious fraud on Australia’s taxpayers.

I sympathise with the government on what to do about it. I know what I would do about it: I would simply go up there and say to the Queensland government, ‘Halt the process; let’s do a full environmental study into the lower Balonne.’ The lower Balonne is a unique catchment that separates itself into five rivers and two creeks which eventually, after the flood goes overland, finish up back in the river and contribute to the Darling. But—as with Toorale station, which is at the junction of the Darling and the Warrego—we are talking about buying a farm to get some water. It is a fraud. God help us!

Going back to Carnarvon, Carnarvon needs $1 million to fix up its pipe system. It is the most efficient irrigation system in Australia. It is a beacon of technology for the planet. I do not know why, but the present government has withdrawn the $1 million they needed. I am pleading with the government today—and, I have to confess, I have rung the minister, because I only became acquainted with this yesterday—to revive the $1 million to help Australia’s farmers while we are down here making this false argument on the Murray about the lakes et cetera.

This time last year, I wrote to the previous government saying, ‘This time next year’—which is now—’we’re going to have a doomsday scenario in the Murray,’ because last year the snow did not actually melt; it evaporated. We are now at a doomsday position, and it shows itself up politically at the bottom of the river. But what is happening at the bottom with the lakes is happening all the way up the system. We have doomsday all the way up. At Leeton the rice farmers are on their fourth failure. If there is not any water, there is no magic formula. Everyone in here keeps talking about—the minister spoke yesterday about this—buying water. They keep talking about water. What is water? They are talking about doubling the price of buying back entitlements. Buying back entitlements will return no water to the system. You have to buy allocation. This is dreamtime stuff.

So what are farmers up to for the future? What are the challenges? Farmers face global cartels in fertiliser, chemicals and fuel. We have the ACCC. I rang Graeme Samuel the other day, and to his credit he took the call. I said: ‘Sorry, mate, that I had to say that you’re as useless as tits on a bull, but you were. You didn’t go looking.’ Here is a docket from a resupplier in Ayr in Queensland. This supplier is charging a sugar farmer who has bought fertiliser, for which the price has trebled in two years, 18 per cent a month—not a year—interest. The reason the reseller is charging the grower that is that Incitec Pivot are charging the reseller 17 per cent a month interest. And the ACCC does not think there is anything wrong with that? They are not looking too hard.

The great challenge facing not only farmers but the planet for the future is how we are going to feed ourselves. The world has been modelling future energy requirements, and we have this false argument about uranium and nuclear power. I chaired the oil inquiry. The situation was quite apparent, as it was in the wine inquiry. The wine inquiry took 20 minutes to discover that consolidated retailing and consolidated winemaking were going to put grape growers out of business. It is the same as Woolies. Woolies were on Four Corners the other day, pure as the driven snow, but anyone who gets a contract to supply Woolies eventually goes down the chute because they keep cutting back the costs. They will not pass the costs forward. It is the same as airlines flying today, as shown in the CASA inquiry. I said to them, ‘At some stage of the game the airlines have to have the courage to say to people who are flying, “We’re going to actually charge you the real cost of flying.”’ They may continue, by cost cutting, cutting back the servicing of their planes and all of that stuff, to keep themselves flying financially, but they will be physically crashing. That is what is going to happen to Australia’s farmers unless we can pass our costs forward. We are dealing with world cartels. I have to say that the Nauru government are not very happy about this; they have written recently to my committee. We have a situation where in Nauru, up until two months ago, they were getting $40 a tonne for their rock phosphate when the global price is $300, and we as a country are giving them foreign aid because they are going broke. This is crazy stuff.

So the great challenge for the future for Australia’s farmers and for the community is not what is in the garage; it is what is in the fridge. I have to say that the inquiry of the select committee which I chair is going to look at how we will in the future supply food that is affordable—which may mean a redefinition of what is affordable—from an environment that is sustainable and a farmer who is viable, who is paid to get out of bed and do it and not do it under some sort of slave or serf labour. That is the great challenge facing the planet. If 50 per cent of the world’s population is water poor and there are 1.6 billion people displaced—when Mick Keelty said that last year no-one took any notice; Mick Keelty said last year that the greatest threat to Australia’s sovereignty is climate change, and he is right.

Debate interrupted.