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

I do not believe he gets it. What we are saying is that we have the power as whitefellas to overpower the aspirations of the original owners of this country. These people simply want an economic opportunity. We are absolutely closing our eyes to what Mother Nature is saying about the planet. You can absolutely learn from the mistakes of the past in doing mosaic development of the north—absolutely learn from the past.

One of the greatest disgraces in the recent past is the overallocation of the Culgoa River. The Culgoa River, the Condamine-Balonne, has a mean annual flow of 1,237 gigalitres. We have allowed whitefellas without any environmental study to build 1,500 gigalitres of on-farm, off-river storage in a system that has an 830 per cent variable flow where from 1921 to 2009, 25 percent of the flow was in four years. We have allowed that to be developed to the point where those four years are every year. This is crazy. We can learn from the mistakes of the past but we can successfully allow the Indigenous people on Cape York Peninsula an economic opportunity. What is wrong with whitefellas? How cheap do we have to be to allow politics in this? Let someone deny that Peter Beattie made an arrangement with the Wilderness Society—he told it to my face—to get inner city preferences and set about a serious 100-year disadvantage by denying the greatest opportunity for our Indigenous people. If the science on the planet is right, northern Australia is going to provide an enormous opportunity in the future to participate in the global food task.

Sure, science has to take place and GM cropping has to take place, but guess who owns the bulk of the land up there, by one title or another? Our Indigenous people. We had a retort here from the Greens a second ago, 'Oh no, you're wrong, Bill'. That is all right if you are plaiting your armpits, smoking pot and living in Darling Point or somewhere. This is about reality and I am afraid that we are denying the aspirations of our Indigenous people.

To learn from the past we went over to 'We of the Never Never' at Mataranka. We went onto a property there owned by a young bloke called Kane Younghusband who had gone from Gilgandra to the Ord. He married a crackerjack sheila there—the daughter of the manager of Carlton Hill Station—and said, 'It is too dear here,' and went to Mataranka. He bought 2,800 acres for $10 an acre and cleared $1 million from melons in the year we were there simply by clearing a bit of it and putting in some irrigation.

Next door, trying their hardest, was an Indigenous property managed by the ILC. We went there and I said to this mob: 'What if one of your young Indigenous blokes wants to do what they have done next door? Would you give him a lease?' They said, 'Oh, we would give him some sort of authority to do it.' I said, 'But what happens if he got killed by a tractor and his wife wanted to go back to Darwin or somewhere? Would he be able to commercialise that lease arrange­ment?' They said, 'Oh no, he would have to surrender it.' I said to them, 'No bank will ever lend him the money to develop it if he does not have something to sell.' That is what is wrong with this system, and we bloody whitefellas are sitting here thinking, 'Gee, it's hot today; we'll turn on the air conditioner,' or 'It's cold today; we'll turn on the heater.' There is none of that up there. There are still somewhere between 4,000 and 7,000 kids in the Northern Territory who have no high school to go to and we are worried about what is going on somewhere over on the other side of the world and feeling sorry for them. What about our own mob?

Let us go back to Cape York Peninsula. What is wrong with using the latest science to give these people an economic opportunity, for God's sake? If you go to Guyra in New South Wales you will see a 25-acre shed full of tomatoes that is a multimillion dollar enterprise. You do not need to have horizon-to-horizon develop­ment to have a successful commercial operation. What is wrong with giving these people the opportunity to do that? What is wrong with saying, 'I'm going to leave my farm to my kids?' What is wrong with that? No, it is good enough for us whitefellas but not good enough for our Indigenous people. (Time expired)