Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

For those of us who live in Northern Australia, the Rudd Labor government’s continued failure to meet the development and, indeed, other needs of Northern Australia is legend. With the Rudd government it seems to always be a case of out of sight, out of mind. Senators would appreciate that, whilst Northern Australia—that is, north of the Tropic of Capricorn in Australia—produces something like 40 to 45 per cent of Australia’s export earnings, it only has about five per cent of Australia’s population. As a consequence, as far as Mr Rudd is concerned, it is insignificant politically. If it is insignificant politically to Mr Rudd, then he has no interest in returning to the north of Australia a fair share of Australia’s wealth, much of which, as I have indicated, has come from Northern Australia.

In this debate today I am delighted to be supported by two very significant Northern Australians, Senator Nigel Scullion from the Northern Territory and Senator Alan Eggleston from Western Australia, who was for many years the distinguished Mayor of Port Hedland in that state.

The Rudd government’s insensitivity to development in Northern Australia can be no better exemplified than by the Northern Australia Land and Water Taskforce report that has recently been released by the Parliamentary Secretary for Western and Northern Australia. That in itself is interesting. Originally, the Rudd government announced with great gusto that there would be a minister for Northern Australia. It was not long before it changed to ‘Western and Northern Australia’. Whilst good for Western Australia, I keep asking: why isn’t there a minister for Queensland or a minister for Victoria or a minister for Tasmania? It seems that Mr Gray’s attention has been diverted from the north to his home state. It is also worth noting that, while Gary Gray is a nice enough sort of fellow—I think his heart is in the right place—he lives in Perth and has little direct connection with the north of Australia.

The Northern Australia Land and Water Taskforce was, as we all know, set up by the Howard government. It was chaired at the time by my colleague Senator Bill Heffernan and contained a number of northerners. It was a task force that was specifically tasked with showing the way forward for sustainable development of Northern Australia. The task force did a lot of good work with the original personnel on that group. Unfortunately, when the government changed, so did the task force personnel and the terms of reference for the task force. Rather than having, as was originally intended, a blueprint for Northern Australia, a way forward, a leadership exposition of what needs to be done and what can be done in Northern Australia, we have this pathetic report recently released by Mr Gray from the new task force.

Time is not going to allow me to go through these reports—the associated scientific compendium and the science review—which are many hundreds of pages. Suffice it to say, here was a classic opportunity for a government and a government appointed committee to show optimism, to show leadership, to show the way forward and to show how it could be done in Northern Australia. What has the task force report delivered? Not the optimism and the way forward that we had hoped for but why it cannot be done, why it need not happen and how you have to be cautious with everything that occurs. Regrettably, while some of the information in the report is sound, the emphasis given to the negatives has meant a curtailment of the march towards further development of Northern Australia.

What I want to emphasise to all those greenies who lauded the recommendations is that recommendations such as ‘by 2030 one-third of the lands in Northern Australia should be locked away in the National Reserve System’ are just stupid. That recommendation was applauded by the greenies. It is interesting to note that the first public exposition of this task force report was the day before it was publicly released and widely gloating was one of the task force members, who also just happens to be a member of the WWF and who is renowned for his antagonism to sustainable development anywhere and particularly in Northern Australia.

What these people do not understand is that in the world today there are 80 million new mouths to feed every year—80 million new people come into this world. Someone has to feed them. Places like China, which used to produce a lot of its own food, had its own food bowl on the plains, are no longer able to grow the food to meet that country’s need, let alone export to the world. For the future of the world, we need to look at places around the world that can have sustainable production of food into the future. Regrettably, this task force report did not do that but put forward all of the negative stuff. If the radical greenies who applauded this report could understand that we do need increased food production then they would not have been quite so supportive of this report and critical of development.

There is a mosaic of good lands in Northern Australia and there are billions of megalitres of water that flow out of Australia every year from Northern Australia. And yet, at the same time, we all know of reports that the south of Australia, the Murray-Darling Basin, which used to feed Australia, is getting drier. Here we have a classic opportunity to sensibly pave the way for sustainable food production in Northern Australia. However, that great opportunity, I have to say with a great deal of regret, has been lost.

I was amused to hear Senator Carr in question time today say that his government believed in science for science’s sake and did not want to influence scientists with politics. Well how come with this task force, after the report had been released and when there was criticism of them not seriously considering water storage damming proposals in Northern Australia, they let it slip that they did not even investigate dams in Northern Australia because they had been told that the Queensland, Northern Territory and Western Australian governments, and the Commonwealth government—all Labor governments I might add—had a no dams policy and so therefore they should not even bother looking at dams. What sort of a scientific report is that when one of the great big elements of any look at sustainable development has been removed from the purview of the scientists looking into it? I happen to know that there are sites on the Gilbert River in my state of Queensland and on the Flinders River at Richmond, the O’Connell diversion, which are well advanced in their plans. They are sustainable and they can harvest water. And this report, instead of working out how that could be done and looking at how we could do it in a careful way—and we all want it to be careful—simply ignored those sorts of proposals.

All in all this report is a great shame; it is a great opportunity lost. It is typical of the Rudd government’s complete inaction when it comes to Northern Australia and the possible development of the north. I can assure the Senate and the people of Australia that a Tony Abbott led government in the future will take a much more sensible view of sustainable development in the north and will allow the north to develop in a sustainable way in the manner in which those of us who live in the north know that it can.