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

I seek leave to speak for 20 minutes.

Leave granted.

Tonight I want to talk about something that ought not be political, that is in the national interest and that is all about the future of Australia. I want to background that against the climate science for the planet and reduce it to the climate science for Australia and to the catastrophic errors that are being made in water management, including the recent purchase of Toorale Station on the Darling.

As I have said many times in this chamber, the climate science for the next 50 years says that, presuming the world population grows from six billion to nine billion, one billion people will be unable to feed themselves. At present there are 800 million people on the planet who are short of food and one billion people who are obese and eat too much food, which is to the contrary. Thirty per cent of the productive land of Asia, where two-thirds of the world’s population is going to live, will go out of production due to climate change. The food task is going to double. Fifty per cent of the world’s population is going to be water poor, including 400 million people on the great northern aquifer in China and about 250 million people in the northern part of southern Africa. With the food task doubling, there will be 1.6 billion people at the top of the science vagary who will be displaced on the planet. That is a lot of people and a problem which the United Nations will not cure.

Coming to Australia, the same science says—and in all science there is vagary—that there will be a decline of between 25 and 50 per cent in the water run-off in the southern parts of Australia. As water declines in a river run-off, you have to disproportionately return water to the freight of the river for the fish to swim down; otherwise, you have to carry buckets of water down, as it were. So a disproportionate amount of water is going to be available in the southern Murray-Darling Basin, where we already know 38 per cent of the run-off comes from the two per cent of the landscape that is going to be most affected by the change in climate. Presently I am part of the Senate Standing Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport inquiry looking at the future for the Coorong. The Coorong barrages are a half a metre from sea level now and the lakes are below sea level. Hundreds of years ago they were in the sea and they are going to return to the sea.

What has got to happen in the Murray-Darling Basin and what has got to happen right across Australia is that we have got to take possession and ownership of the future based on science, not on the hopes, wills and wishes of the past. This ought to be done in the national interest. The committee that I sit on does not play politics with people’s livelihoods—as Senator Barnaby Joyce would know. We try to get it right in the national interest.

I have had cattle on agistment everywhere, and I am getting sick of it. It is still crook out there in southern New South Wales. I learnt the hard way that if you are going to buy something or agist somewhere then you have to go and have a look. Years ago, I rang up a bloke east of Cunnamulla at Murra Murra—Senator Joyce, do you know where Murra Murra is?