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

In addressing this debate on the minister’s statement, I do not intend to play politics with people’s livelihoods, and a lot of people have. I think it is a disgrace that the government has set about ambushing rural Australia. For most farmers, this has been one of the biggest ambushes at the most vulnerable period in the life cycle of a farm. Irrigated dairy farmers, having seen the rice crop, for instance, go from 1.2 million tonnes to 18,000 tonnes over three consecutive years, are physically, mentally and financially exhausted. The government has then gone out and propositioned these people with a remedy based on no known science. If the government had had the brains to say—and privately a lot of them will admit they have made a mistake—‘This is the science we are facing, this is the vagary in the science until 2050 and these are the possibilities for solutions,’ it may have made sense, instead of going out there and telling people they were going to absolutely decimate some towns, as some speakers have pointed out. During an estimates hearing the other day the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics said, ‘The figure of 800 job losses is actually net at the end of the tunnel.’ That is when Griffith shuts down and Coleambally shuts down or St George shuts down, and they all go off and get a job in a mine somewhere. But what this fails to recognise is Australia’s participation in the global food task.

You do not have to believe the science, but if your doctor said, ‘That little mark on your arm is a melanoma’, you would either get a second opinion or get it taken off, wouldn’t you, Senator Joyce? The science is saying that, by 2050 with nine billion people and by 2070 with 12 billion people on the planet, half the world’s population will be poor for water. One billion people will be unable to feed themselves by 2050 and 30 per cent of the productive land of Asia will have gone out of production. Two-thirds of the world’s population will live in that area, the food task will have doubled, and there could be 1.6 billion displaced people on the planet. The same science—and you do not have to believe the science, but you sure as hell ought to have a plan to deal with it if it is partly right or three-quarters right—is saying that by 2070 places like China will have one billion people that they will have to feed from someone else’s agricultural resource.

Here we are in Australia proposing that we are going to return a certain amount of water to the environment, and I think that is fair enough. All governments of all persuasions for a long time have made some serious mistakes in water management, and they are still making them. The present government has absolutely decided to ambush rural Australia, without regard to the impact on the global food task and Australia’s contribution to that food task. So by not having set out the problem it has absolutely set terror in some of these communities. Some of these places are absolutely, diabolically distressed now. And what are we going to do about it?

Let us put some facts on the table. No-one likes to talk about the facts. The Murray-Darling Basin has 6.2 per cent of Australia’s water run-off—23,400 gigalitres. I went to estimates the other night and asked ABARE to tell me what the assumption which they were told to model an outcome for the government was based upon. Eventually, with great struggle, we got it out of them that they were told that there would by 12,300 or 12,400 gigalitres of run-off for consumptive use. That is, they allege, a three per cent decline by 2020 in the run-off. The Murray-Darling Basin has 6.2 per cent of Australia’s run-off, 23,400 gigalitres, and 38 per cent of the run-off coming from the two per cent of the landscape between here and north-east Victoria. The minimum decline in run-off due to an increase in temperature of two degrees and a 15 per cent decline in rainfall—and the rainfall pattern is moving south, so south-west Queensland is actually going to have increasing run-off and rainfall, and rivers like the Warrego, the Paroo and the Culgoa will increase their run-off—is 3,500 gigalitres. The maximum is actually 11,000 gigalitres. We are saying, for the purposes of this plan to the never-ending journey through the forest on the water plan for the Murray-Darling Basin, that we are going to have a three per cent decline in run-off.

We do know that, if we made efficiencies between the point of extraction and the point of delivery, we could save about 2,500 gigalitres, before it gets to farm use. We have made some dreadful mistakes in the way we have allowed willy-nilly buying of water and trading of water. They separated water from the land and made it tradeable, and they then set in motion all the sleeper licences. If you are the banker and your client owes you $200,000 and they have got a sleeper licence, you are obviously going to tell him to sell the licence, which wakes up the licence, which further adds to the overallocation of the river system. Then, if you trade those licences up the river, you lose the advantage of water that is traded down the river—having the freight and environmental carriage while it is getting to a point of use down the river. All of these things are a serious mistake.

The government should have said, ‘These are the propositions that the scientists are making. This is the known science on water improvement technology and plant improvement technology.’ In the Ord area they have just got rid of their sugar and got new wonderful crops like Chia. Carnarvon, in Western Australia, is 40 times more efficient with its water use than the Ord and 20 times more efficient than the average across the Murray-Darling Basin. Instead of saying to our farmers, ‘Here is the solution: we are going to shut your town down,’ we should have said, ‘What is the solution to all of this?’—because our best farmers are our best environmentalists in Australia; they are inventive and they are resilient.

While all of this is going on, there are some fundamental problems that have not been addressed. One is: the Murray-Darling Basin plan and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority are toothless, because, while the states still have veto power, it is all a waste of time. While all of this is going on, while we are telling Griffith and Mildura and all these other towns that we are going to take all this water off them, the Queensland government, for God’s sake, is about to issue a 469 gigalitre overland flow licence to Cubbie Station. While all this is going on, we are saying, ‘Hang on, we’re going to issue another licence.’ The biggest water licence that will ever be issued in Australia is yet to be issued. It is not sustainable. The Culgoa has 1,200 gigalitres of mean flow, it has 1,500 gigalitres of on-farm storage and it has destroyed the biggest floodplain in Australia with the plan they have. There is no environmental input in the plan, and yet we are supposed to sit around and cop this.

I have to say: we have made a serious mistake. I think people ought to own up to the mistake. To that end, I intend to move a motion in this chamber to refer the matter to a committee to look at all aspects of it—including the fact that the more efficient you make your irrigation the more pressure you put on the aquifer, because a lot of the so-called waste from the irrigation is actually recharging the aquifer and, at some sections of the river, 40 per cent of the river flow is actually groundwater entering the river. We have not taken that into the calculations. We have not in the past taken into the calculations the 2020 vision for forestry and the 2.5 megalitres per hectare that is intercepted at 35 inches of rainfall by monoculture forestry. So there are a whole lot of things we ought to be dealing with.

If it is going to work, farmers will take it on—non-paddy rice is a good example. Most people do not realise that the paddy in a rice field, which is highly evaporative, is only there to moderate the temperature of the plant. You do not even have to have the water there if you have the gene modification to have the thermostat in the plant, rather than having the blanket, the insulation, of the water. So there are a whole lot of things that we can do, and I am sure Australia’s farmers will meet the task, will be productive and will feed Australia, if they are given the opportunity to do it. But the first thing we have to do is make politicians in this place—most of them have no idea—understand what the challenge is and present that challenge to the farmers and they will come up with a solution. Thanks very much.

Question agreed to.