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

There is some beautiful country as you drive up through Cunnamulla and you head east to go to St George. I thought, ‘Oh, gee, this is pretty good country. This will be good.’ I drove into Murra Murra and it was, as you know, bloody scrub. I had already sent the cattle because the bloke said, ‘Oh, send them up. There’s enough feed here for two years.’ Anyhow I learnt a hard lesson—that is, you should go and have a look—because the feed was not there after I had gone to all that trouble. I have never allowed myself to get trapped like that again.

The Commonwealth government need to learn this lesson because, much to my dismay, they have just spent nearly $24 million buying Toorale Station up there on the Darling River at the junction of the Warrego River, and no-one from the Commonwealth has set foot on the property. They have bought it sight unseen. There has been a bit of a fly over from the parks mob and last Tuesday before the sale two girls from New South Wales parks went there to look at—so the people on the property tell me—the machinery and goods and chattels that were given in with the sale. The crops and the stocks are not given in. They were there for 45 minutes. We in our wisdom, to return water to a system to which it is not going to return, spent $24 million buying that property. I just want to put on the record exactly what it is that the government have bought.

Toorale Station covers an area of 98,000 hectares. It is a beautiful dryland property owned by Clyde Agriculture. I note that on the board of the Swire Group, which controls Clyde Agriculture, is the federal government’s adviser on acquisitions of infrastructure and water et cetera Mr Eddington. I have to say also that Mr John Anderson is on that board. I note also that Mr De Lacy is on the board of Cubbie Station, which I will come to. Toorale’s 98,000 hectares—which is roughly a quarter of a million acres—runs 30,000 merino sheep, including 10,000 breeding merino ewes. So it is a viable enterprise in the wool industry. It runs 800 cows. And tucked away down in the corner near the junction of the Warrego and the Darling rivers is between 4,000 and 5,000 acres of country that is prepared for irrigation, of which they generally use two-thirds annually. The Warrego floods perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 acres through a series of banks that were put in 100 years ago or more. The Warrego splits and a lot of the water goes west—