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

That is the technical term. It joins the Darling downstream. Usually the Warrego has a flood event every year, and it has what we call a large event every three or four years. Most years that it has an event of any proportion, the Darling also has a good flow. In the last 17 years that the manager who is there now has been there, there has been only one year where the Warrego had an event and the Darling did not have one. I think that was two years ago. So in its wisdom, without having a look, the government has decided to purchase this station.

Dr Tom Hatton, from whom we took evidence last week, from the CSIRO is doing a study on the flow regimes of the Culgoa River and the Warrego River. This is not a scientific snapshot including the full drilldown for the environmental impacts of decisions; it is just an assumption on future flows of the system and what can be extracted. He said on the record last week that buying this station is no short-term solution; it is sort of a long-term planning thing. This is about buying a water licence in one of the few places left in New South Wales where they have not separated the land from the water. So to get the water they have had to buy a seriously large grazing enterprise which employs a lot of people and is the lifeblood of a place like Bourke.

By not going to have a look and not understanding the country, they did not understand that there are a couple of banks there—the Boera and the Booka dams—which divert water for two adjoining properties’ stock and domestic water. Those properties have now put their hands up. They are ringing Toorale asking, ‘Well, what are we going to do about our water?’ No-one had thought about it. This is sort of silly stuff. I just want to put on the record exactly what you are buying when you buy these places, because obviously if we want to return water to the likes of the Coorong et cetera then you are not going to get it up there. Tom Hatton, Don Blackmore and Mike Young, all scientists, have put that on the record. We all know that. Anyone who is a practical person will know that the freight component of getting that water through 4,000 kilometres of river from the top end to the bottom just will not work.

I have a list here of what is at Toorale just so that I do not get it wrong. In the extraction regime for Toorale there is an A licence of 67 megalitres, there is a B licence of 1,437 megalitres and there is a C licence of 6,168 megalitres. That water can be extracted according to flow levels at Louth from the Darling. It is an extraction licence. It will go into their storage, which holds about 14,000 megalitres. So you could say that they have 6,000 or 8,000 megalitres of extraction out of the Darling. Then they have 6,000 megalitres gravity-fed into the same storage out of the Warrego. No-one actually knows how much they take because there are no meters and no pumps. It is just sort of a good guess, and no-one has ever queried it. So they have a 6,000 megalitre licence for that. They have bank licences of 972 megalitres and 1,141 megalitres. And, quaintly I think—I do not know of any other that is left in New South Wales; there may be some—they have an area licence.

The original water licences in New South Wales 40 years ago were given on the acreage you wanted one for, not for the volume of water you wanted. They have a 1,620 hectare water licence, which apparently does not get utilised. The Ross Billabong’s storage capacity is 13½ thousand megalitres and they gravitate from the Warrego and pump from the Darling. They have water in the account for the Darling but if the water is not there it is still in the account. You do not actually get it. What they have done there is to buy a pig in a poke. If the water was further down the system you would have it by allocation not entitlement. It is a serious and grave error.

I have to say there has been some amusement from the locals at the lack of expertise shown in the negotiations on the sale of the property. My understanding from the locals is that the government got played on a break, buying it sight unseen. There was no on-ground inspection by federal authorities prior to the sale and purchase. They did not buy water that was separate from the land title—one of the few places in the state where that is the case. I mean, you talk about influence and why they might be buying this place! The Queensland government then, to square up the account, came up the next day and said, ‘We are going to donate 10 gigalitres of water, eight of that from the Warrego.’ It is unallocated water. It is meaningless. It is a smoke and mirrors trick because it is not allocated. So that means it was going to flow down the system anyhow. When it flows down the system to Toorale there is a series of banks that was put in there a hundred-odd years ago. In recent years there has been an effort by the authorities in New South Wales to free up some of the flow. Those pipes let through between 600 and 1,000 megalitres in an event and there is about 2,000 megalitres in the event when it gets to Toorale in a normal high river. So what they have done is to put two four-foot pipes in all the banks. The banks then create an artificial flood in a low river, and in a big river it floods anyhow. They are saying some fantasy about 90,000 megalitres of water returning to the system and somehow finding its way down the river. In fact, there will probably be nothing finding its way down the river if that river remains in the condition it is in now.

The Ross Billabong stores their water. In recent days there was some footage and a photograph in one of the papers of a lot of water at the homestead. That is actually just the stock and domestic billabong. When the thing floods they fill it up for stock and domestic water. I do not understand how we cannot have enough brains to know that if you want to return water to the system you buy water that is separate from the land. Why are they buying this land and putting into some sort of a park a property that is vibrant and enthusiastic, that employs a lot of people, that has 30,000 sheep, 10,000 breeding sheep, 800 cows and irrigation? They are going to turn it into a national park which, I am told, will cost $3 million to $4 million to supervise just to stop it from going to bloody rabbits, kangaroos and burnt out boomerangs or something. At the same time they will put a whole lot of people out of work. If that same water had been bought further down the system somewhere, it would have made sense. Go to the records of the inquiry of the Senate Standing Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport into the Coorong. They will tell you that Don Blackmore, Tom Hatton from the CSIRO and Mike Young said that it is a waste of time. It is a further waste of time because, like the water that Anna Bligh has said we are going to donate to the system, it is a furphy. The water resource plan for the river had no science that was connected to the environment applied to it when it was developed, and the resource operating plan still says they can issue licences. If they buy this water under the present arrangements for the system, they can issue new licences further up the system, Senator Joyce, and take the water before it gets to Toorale anyhow. It is sort of crazy stuff.