Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak about the lack of water infrastructure being built in this country and the distraction by both state and federal governments away from talking about it. I note that over the last few weeks there's been a lot of discussion around monetary policy in regard to the RBA, around whether the RBA should be independent and around how much independence they have and why certain sections of the RBA Act should be withdrawn. It's a shame that this conversation is happening, because it's distracting from the real potential of what monetary policy can be, which is to fund the construction of infrastructure. In the same way that companies issue new shares to build new mines or to buy another company or to construct a new factory, countries and federal governments who have their own currency should look at issuing infrastructure bonds to build sovereign infrastructure.

I want to go through the wasted opportunities out there at the moment. Every time it rains we're letting this beautiful, precious water flow out to the sea. I've got the flows from the Murray-Darling Basin that have been released from the Snowy Hydro project, probably Australia's greatest infrastructure project ever. In 2003 the total flows from the Snowy Hydro project was about 2,000 gigalitres. Last year it was about 1,300 gigalitres. At the same time, buybacks have increased from around 2,000 gigalitres to 3,400 gigalitres. So we are now allowing more and more water to flow out to sea rather than capturing it and using it for irrigation. But that's the Snowy Hydro.

There's another place, about 2,000 kilometres up the road from Snowy Hydro, called the Clarence River. It has the potential to deliver twice the energy, twice the power of the existing Snowy Hydro project. And of course there's a number of dams on the Clarence River that would be involved in this. You would be able to build a tunnel—not a very big one—that would push water from the eastern seaboard to the western seaboard. There is often discussion in my home state of Queensland about capturing the water in the north and sending it south. I'd disagree with that proposal. I'm from western Queensland. I know the area where, under this idea, we're going to push water down through the south. But it won't get that far; it will evaporate away. By all means push it out as far as Hughenden, on the black soils there, but you don't need to take it any further.

What we can do in this country is push water from east to west, because we have this wonderful thing called the Great Dividing Range. The scientist in me, looking at a mountain range, sees potential energy. The total energy of a system is of course potential energy plus kinetic energy. When all that water is trapped and caught on the high part of the range it can, depending on where you push it, create energy as it falls down to the coastline. Or, if we want to push it inland, it can create energy that way.

We're debating monetary policy and whether the RBA should be independent, and we also discuss policy, and we're having this debate about nuclear at the moment. But we're missing a very key component of this energy debate, which is hydro energy. The beauty of hydro energy is that it not only can be used to create energy but also can be used for irrigation. I would strongly urge all state governments, particularly Queensland and New South Wales, to look at utilising the water supplies, the water opportunities that we have in those states—and in other states, I should add; there are some good locations for dams in Western Australia—to increase productivity in this country.

I've named the Clarence River. There's also Urannah Dam. There's Nathan Dam. There's the Burdekin Falls Dam. There's Hells Gates Dam. There's the Fitzroy Dam over in WA. They are the potential dam sites from which we can, especially along the eastern seaboard, on the Great Dividing Range, produce hydro energy and actually look at drought proofing, to the extent you can, the inland areas of western New South Wales and parts of Queensland.

It's not that long a pipeline that you need in order to push the water from the Clarence into the Darling system out through Copeton Dam and into the Gwydir. And you could get water into the Darling system from there. That is a much smarter idea than trying to bring it from North Queensland. But I urge all governments to be much smarter about how they go about being productive in this country.