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

We travelled around and we saw illegal low-point drainage from the pumping of the gas where they were bleeding the salt water into the local creeks. And you do not think Australia's taxpayers should be interested in this and the federal government should take some responsibility, and you imagine that we can just come in here and joke about the politics of Senator Bill Heffernan doing something and senator someone else doing something else. This is us worrying about where we are going to be in 50 or 100 years time and not looking back and saying, 'Why did we do what they have done in Bakersfield in the United States or in a lot of the western river systems there, which have stopped running because of the poor administration of the extraction of bore water? Why in God's name did those politicians back in 2012 let that happen; because they wanted to play politics with one another?'

The referee of the Earth is Mother Nature and Mother Nature is more powerful than anyone in any parliament anywhere. We need to absolutely work in conjunction with and assist Mother Nature to assist the human race to feed itself. I repeat that barring a human catastrophe, Senator Conroy, by 2050—Senator Nash is sick of hearing me say this—with nine billion people on the planet, 50 per cent of the people on the planet will be poor for water. The world's freshwater is three per cent of the world's water and two-thirds of that water is permanently tied up in snow and ice. There is more water in the clouds and the ice than there is in the rivers and lakes. And the world is losing one per cent of its agricultural productive area of land per annum due to a number of reasons. By 2050, with nine billion people on the planet, 50 per cent of the people will be poor for water. All science has value, all human endeavour has failure, and it might only be 50 per cent right, but even if it is 40 per cent or 30 per cent right it is a big problem. Two-thirds of the world's population will be living in Asia and 30 per cent of the productive land of Asia will have gone out of production, the food task will have doubled and possibly 1.6 billion people on the planet will have been displaced. By 2070 with 12 billion people in a place like China that country will have to feed half its population from someone else's resource. At the present time we spend $40 billion on agriculture research and $1.5 trillion on defence. The world's food task for the future does not have a solution; the world's energy task has umpteen. In the future what is in your fridge is going to be far more important than what is in your garage.

So we need to take this legislation seriously, and to not have included the impact of salt upon the land is irresponsible. Senator Conroy, we did agree to an amendment and I have spoken to the minister's office on this. It is a sensible amendment because it includes salinity. (Time expired)