Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I, and also on behalf of Senator Milne, move:

That the following matters be referred to the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Committee for inquiry and report by 30 June 2007:

(a)

the long-term impacts on Australian primary producers, rural communities and the environment of reduced and increasingly variable rainfall, increased temperatures and higher evaporation rates as a result of climate change; and

(b)

potential adaptation strategies to mitigate these impacts to ensure the security of Australian food production and maintain the viability of rural communities.

This referral is about a topic of utmost importance to Australia. There has been mounting evidence for over two decades that climatic patterns in our agricultural zones are shifting. We have seen a long-term shift across a range of climatic measures, including annual rainfall, seasonality, the degree of variability both within and between seasons, higher average minimum and maximum temperatures and more extreme weather events. The impacts of these changes have a cumulative effect. For instance, higher temperatures increase evaporation rates, which combine with lower rainfall to further reduce the amount of water in storage. Furthermore, small reductions in rainfall have been shown to lead to much larger decreases in run-off. For example, in south-west WA, a 21 per cent decrease in rainfall has led to a 64 per cent decrease in stream flows and run-off. The south-west of WA is arguable one of the first places to feel the impact of climate change and also one of the first to acknowledge this and begin to take steps to secure its water resources. I have referred to this in this place on other occasions.

More recently, the Senate Standing Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport inquiry into water has heard evidence from the CSIRO that climate change is the biggest threat to the Murray-Darling Basin. We have also heard from the Murray-Darling Basin Commission that there is serious risk—and this has been in the media extensively recently—that a number of the water storages in the basin will bottom out by May next year and that some of our town water supplies in this region will be in crisis. It is worth noting yet again that when CSIRO released its report into the impact of climate change on the Murray-Darling Basin it was accused of scaremongering.

Despite warnings from the Murray-Darling Basin Commission that we have had the lowest rainfall on record in the last four months, governments have failed to act. A national water summit did not happen until this week, so we have had the tragic situation where many farmers poured out tonnes of water just recently to establish their summer crops when it was too late. Why weren’t they warned earlier that they should not in fact be preparing their soil for summer crops? Not only have they been given false hope; a lot of water has been used that could have been saved. They have invested in getting crops going, and now, if they have already planted, they will have to sit and watch them die or acknowledge the fact that they have accidentally wasted water. Now we have the farcical situation of the PM saying that he is thinking about draining wetlands to ensure town supplies. Hasn’t he got that a little bit back to front?

We have apparently broken all records this year for the hottest and driest season. We have had the lowest monthly rainfall in the basin for four months running. In some areas, we are now entering the sixth year of drought. This is arguably a combination of an extended dry cycle comparable to the Federation drought on top of a longer term shift in climate. What we can be sure of is that there is little to no chance of ever returning to business as usual. We need to be thinking on the basis of a much harder worst-case scenario in the future and we need to be prepared in a way that gives us much greater flexibility to react in a way that minimises the risks and guarantees that water needed for the drinking supplies of towns and cities and water needed to ensure the survival of our environment is available. The point is that we have seen this coming for a long time, but governments collectively have failed to act.

This will be the biggest issue facing Australian agriculture over the next 20 to 30 years. In fact, it is not just the Greens who think that. If you look at the National Farmers Federation 2003 report on this issue you will see that they acknowledged the same thing. We have a narrow window of opportunity in which to act. Unfortunately, we have lost the lead time that we could have had. Australian farmers are an adaptable and resilient mob. They are the world leaders in terms of levels of innovation, ongoing productivity gains and the rate at which they adopt new farming technologies. They are also acknowledged internationally for their ability to make a go of agricultural production in a harsh and variable climate, with some of the oldest, sandiest and nutrient-limited soils on the planet.

Our dry land farmers in particular are very good at managing the risks of a variable climate. In fact, there is good evidence that WA wheat belt farmers have done exactly that over the last 30 years. They have managed to deliver modest productivity gains over a period during which we have in hindsight identified a 10 per cent to 20 per cent decrease in winter rainfall. Records from 59 broadacre family businesses in the WA southern agricultural region show that between 1995 and 2002 these farmers on average increased their net worth and farm profits in spite of trends of decreasing growing season rainfall and higher average daily temperatures leading to more evaporation during the growing season. However, there are limits to how far current strategies for dealing with climate variability can go to help our farmers adapt to climate change and there are serious risks in continuing along this path in the face of a long-term shift in conditions.

The main point here is that we have to start to act now and put a serious amount of effort and Aussie ingenuity—together with the scientific expertise of CSIRO and our agricultural researchers, backed up by rural industry RDCs—into turning this issue around to maintain productivity and growth in our agricultural sectors. We can do this if we put serious effort and serious resources into this now. It is urgent that we act now because of the serious time lag involved in applying research and development. We need five, 10 or 15 years, depending on the particular issue. For example, if we were developing a new species to produce in agriculture, we would need to identify it, develop productive varieties, adapt it to meet regional needs, develop the process machinery, integrate it into profitable farming systems and enterprises, set up the regional demonstration initiatives, make information resources available to farmers et cetera.

But we no longer have that amount of time. Ten or 15 years ago, when we first started talking about the impact of climate change, we probably had the time, but the issue was not seen then to be pressing enough to get it into the political will. Unfortunately, however, a lot of people are now suffering from the impacts of climate change—before we have seriously addressed this issue. We now know for sure that a head-in-the-sand approach will only make the issue harder and more expensive to deal with. There is a real risk that if governments and their agencies send out the message that this is just a passing blip—that this is just a one-in-a-thousand-year drought that will soon break and that we will soon return to business as usual—farmers will push on, trying to make a go in areas that are becoming increasingly marginal. Either they will lose money on crops that fail or their capital will erode while they try to keep up with their interest payments and see out the drought. All the while, they are losing the capacity to make the change and invest in diversifying or transforming their farm enterprises.

This is why it is most important that we put out and gather accurate and relevant information on the changes, the risks and the options for adaption and support. It is not just farmers who are affected, which is why we have included the impact on communities in the terms of reference for this inquiry. There is likely to be a substantial knock-on effect on rural businesses and towns of a long-term drop in farm productivities and returns. Climate change may seriously threaten the security of water supplies to many rural towns, and competition will drive up the cost of water for all users. Less water and higher production costs, together with climate impacts on farm productivity, will impact on the price of food domestically and on the value of our agricultural exports—hence, on interest rates and the economy. Doing nothing about climate change is likely to hurt the economy more. Then there are the impacts on the environment. As farming zones become increasingly marginal, there is a growing risk that farming enterprises will have more impact on the environment.

We already have fragmented landscapes in our agricultural areas, and we have spent a great deal of time and resources in Australia trying to address this issue. We have been fencing, protecting and linking remnants. We also know that there are many threatened species in some of our farming areas. In the agricultural zone in Western Australia, refuges for the last remaining numbers of species have been identified but they will not be able to be shifted quickly enough to cope with the impact of climate change.

We do not know where we need to link remnants that will allow these species to move. We need to identify those areas. We must also look at the combination of climate change and other degradation impacts—for example, salinity. This is particularly important in my home state of Western Australia. Much of our current agriculture systems are based on longstanding Mediterranean systems that, over the years, have been adapted as much as they can be to Australian conditions. Ultimately, there has been a reliance on species that are not well adapted to the variability of our climate and the ancient nature of our soils. This has placed limits on our productivity zones, which are shifting, and our farmers have had to learn to manage the risk that a bad season presents. Western Australian farmers have learned to cope with our variable climate by using a range of strategies that include diversification, selection, opportunistic cropping and conservation practices such as stubble retention and, of course, no till.

Current adaption responses also include: developing improved varieties to cope with heat shock; staggering planting times; sowing a range of varieties, combining more hardy and more productive lines; better timing of cropping operations to suit the weather; and choosing crop varieties and inputs based on seasonal forecasts. The point here is that Australian farmers have adopted a range of strategies to cope with the variable climate. These practices have enabled our farmers to adapt to a point, and farmers have done so for over a decade with climate change, but the point is that there are limits as to how far they can go, and there is a risk that they will run down their resources, both capital and farm productivity, in the longer term.

Economic modelling suggests that broadacre farmers who rely on current technologies and enterprise options to deal with the climate becoming warmer and dryer will in the longer term see a marked drop in farm profits, greater areas devoted to pasture and less to cropping, fewer tactical alterations of cropping and pasture areas from year to year, lower stocking rates, more supplementary feeding and more areas allowed for perennial plants. However, the research shows that farmers could adapt to this likely change in climate and, if they do, farming profits could decline by 50 per cent or more, and less grain would be produced. This clearly demonstrates that the adverse climatic change is likely to reduce farmers’ financial capacity to adapt and adopt because of the impact it has on farm returns; in other words, if they stick with the same process of gradual adaptation, it might run down the farm enterprise and they will no longer be able to adapt. There is a limit under the current circumstances as to where farmers can adapt.

Over time, weathering a series of bad years can have the consequences of eroding farm capital and building up farm debt, which reduces the amount that farmers are able to invest in adaptation. This is problem No. 1, and it is here that it is crucial to provide accurate information to farmers about the likely impacts of adaptation strategies. Problem No. 2 is that adaptation responses and scenarios I have described so far rely on climate change being gradual. If the rate of climate change is slow enough, then varietal development and innovation in agronomy and management can cushion the adjustment costs and reduce the projected decline in farm profits. However, if we have hit a climate tipping point, which many of us feel we have, if things get dramatically worse over a few short years, if we pursue a head-in-the-sand approach and if we do not undertake the R&D necessary and do not share and employ adaptation strategies, then the whole of our agricultural zone is at serious risk. Our farmers, backed up by Australian agricultural research, are arguably the most capable in the world at taking up new technologies and managing climate risks but they need the tools, the information and the support to do that.

We need to undertake an audit to find out where we are up to: what programs are in place, how they are progressing, where the gaps are, and whether our current efforts are anywhere near enough to allow us to respond effectively within the narrowing window of opportunity. We need far more resources, climate modelling and data to enable us to do this. We need to put the same sort of effort and resources into measuring, analysing and modelling our water, land and atmosphere as the US and the EU have put in over the last few years. Farmers in the US can now get a six-week forecast at the level of their farm that tells them with a good degree of accuracy what to expect.

CSIRO’s Water Resources Observation Network is a move in the right direction. But, while CSIRO can theoretically build this system, unless the states and the agencies are prepared to share their data and sign off on a common data and access protocol, we will go nowhere. Then there is the Bureau of Rural Sciences new National Agricultural Monitoring System—another good step in the right direction—as well as the National Water Commission’s Australian Water Resources Information System and atmospheric and ocean monitoring and modelling systems such as the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator. These are all steps in the right direction, but there is no overall strategy that connects them all.

Last month at the water policy initiatives inquiry of the Senate Standing Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport, Dr Bryson Bates, the director of the CSIRO climate change program, was asked about research into climate impacts. He said:

If you are talking about adaptation in the decades ahead, again this is where we run into this problem, if I can be blunt, where researchers in this country—and I am not just talking about CSIRO—are continually nickelled and dimed, chasing $50,000 contracts to look at the impact of climate change on the water supply in one catchment, for instance, when the real problem is exactly the sort of problem you have described. It is the issue of the sustainability of our rural communities and the rural environment. We are not getting to that and we are not getting to that for a very good reason.

It is unfortunate that some of our leading scientists are still not being given the resources and the support that they need. We are approaching the climatic limits of our existing production systems in many areas. This is why I believe we need to undertake a detailed and extensive program of land suitability analysis straightaway and overlay it with our climate change models. We know that our climate is shifting and that what were once regarded as highly productive lands may in the future become marginal. I believe that it is unfair to our farmers, to our rural communities and to our environment to ignore this fact and to let it happen naturally without giving our farmers decision-making tools on which to base sound information.

We need to get serious about our research and development, and we need to get serious about the resources that need to be thrown at research and development. We need lead times. We need trials and demonstration initiatives in different areas. We need to look at native perennial crops that will adapt to our climate and our soils. We have made many strides in that area in Australia, but unfortunately there is no collective understanding of that information.

During the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee oil supply inquiry, it became obvious that the Department of Transport and Regional Services did not even know what research was going on in Australia into lignocellulose, an algae, as a potential biofuel. They knew more about what was going on in America than they did about what was going on here. Although we have the National Agriculture and Climate Change Action Plan 2006-2009, it is focusing on building resilience rather than on adapting to change. The terms of reference for this inquiry are to look at the long-term impacts of climate change on Australian primary producers, rural communities and the environment. We have no collective understanding. There has been no full analysis of it.

We need to look at potential adaptation strategies to mitigate these impacts to ensure security of Australian food production and to maintain the viability of our rural communities. This inquiry is not just about water; it is about agriculture. We need to acknowledge in this country the impacts of climate change and water on irrigated agriculture. But we also need to look at the future of our broadacre dryland agriculture, because it is not in a position to adapt to climate change—which is coming, and it is coming fast.

When we asked ABARE—our leading agriculture resources economists and forecasters—about the impacts of climate change, we heard that the only modelling they have done is on the supposed potential impact on the economy of making cuts to our greenhouse emissions. They have not modelled the impact of climate change on our farming enterprises, and there is no way yet—they told me in estimates—of combining the economic analysis and the science analysis modelling. We are failing our farmers if we do not start looking at this issue seriously and start looking at a framework.

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

I do not for one moment doubt the sincerity of Senator Siewert’s thoughts and passion behind this motion to refer matters to the Senate Standing Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport. We will, however, be opposing the motion, because if there is one thing that we have had enough of, it is inquiries. What we really need in Australia now is the political will and the courage to do something with all the knowledge we have got. Obviously we need to collect it all onto one database.

I am a farmer, as are my colleagues Senator Sandy Macdonald and Senator Nash, who are here in the chamber. We have actually lived this experience and put our families and our finances on the line, and I have to tell you that there is nothing like farming to put the sweat on the back of the neck and to put your own lifestyle and family at risk. We have learned the hard way that there is a need for adaptation.

The Commonwealth is certainly well aware of the potential impacts of climate change on primary producers. As I have said many times, Australia is fortunate that we have the knowledge that we are on a continent that is going to have serious disadvantage from climate change, especially in the south, in the Murray-Darling Basin. In its heyday it had 4.2 per cent of Australia’s run-off. Thirty-eight per cent of that run-off comes from two per cent of the landscape, which is now under threat of losing something like 3,000 gigalitres through climate change, forest interception and those fires in the Snowy.

I heard my dear friends from the Wentworth Group talking some sense the other day, but on other issues I gently disagree with them. I do not think the answer is to have some political decision so that you might not be able to grow certain crops or undergo certain enterprises on the land or so that you would formally lock country up. I heard the Wentworth Group say the other day that they thought a lot of the country at Bourke and Brewarrina should be locked up. The market sorts that out. The western division of New South Wales 100 years ago was stocked at the rate of one or two acres to the sheep because no-one understood the carrying capacity of the land. In fact, it was grassland, a lot of which is now scrub because it was overstocked at the time. It is now one sheep to 25 or 30 acres. You do not abandon the enterprise; you have to adjust your enterprise to what Mother Nature sends along and at the same time look after the environment.

Despite what a good few people out there in the community who plait their armpits and preen their dreadlocks think—that is, that farmers are somehow the people who destroy the environment—Australia’s farmers are great environmentalists and very responsible. One of the best things that happened in recent times for farmers was Landcare. Landcare was about teaching farmers what was going on on their farm. Back in 2002 the Australian government initiated the government-business climate change dialogue. It identified a process to deliver advice and to form a blueprint for partnerships in agriculture to have a comprehensive approach to climate change. We also partnered up with the former president of the NFF in 2005 and commissioned the Agriculture and Food Policy Reference Group to report on the situation and propose actions for the long-term strength of Australian agriculture and regional Australia. The report on that was delivered in February of this year. It addressed the issues of climate change in agriculture. So a number of things have been happening.

My plea to the parliament today is not to support another inquiry, even though you could have another inquiry and go through all the things that we have been briefed on. We have had comprehensive briefings in the rural and regional committee in recent days. As Senator Siewert pointed out, we have received a lot of valuable information. One of the things that we received was advice that we should get all our information onto one database. I entirely agree with that. We certainly do not need an inquiry to tell us to do that. What we need is action, not more words. In my view, what we need is to create a specific ministry in the government of the day to deal with climate change and water.

Water has been catastrophically mismanaged by the states. A lot of that was not deliberate. It happened because of a lack of science and knowledge and overallocation. There is a phoney argument about whether it is a 1,000-year drought or a 100-year drought. The water situation may well be a one in many hundreds of years event. I am not too sure. But in terms of dryland farming it certainly is not.

The nature of farming has changed, as you have pointed out, Senator Siewert. We have gone from long-term fallow and the days when there was skeleton weed. Senator Sandy Macdonald, you would remember that. You ploughed your pasture in in the spring, then you worked it again when the skello came up and you worked it again and you worked it again and eventually, if a decent windstorm came along, it blew away. These days, you put a crop in and you cannot even see where you have put it. You put it in with a zero tillage machine. Down in my district, we have had a pretty rough trot this year. We had a fire in January and then we had this bloody drought. There is an innovative farmer there, Tony Lehman. He has crops that are going to go eight bags, and crops through the fence are going to go nothing. It is just about how they conserve the moisture and use this machine that absolutely does not open the soil up.

There is plenty of knowledge. What we have to have is direction. I say that we have to create a ministry which embraces climate change, water and the development of the north. As I said at the start, Australia is a very fortunate continent. They say we are the world’s driest continent, but per head of population we are about No. 5 or 6 in the world for water availability. It is just that no-one wants to live where the water is. Sixty per cent of our water is in Northern Australia. There are 78,000 gigalitres running out of the Timor catchment, bearing in mind that 23,000 gigalitres is the run-off—or it was before these new reductions came along in the Murray-Darling. There are 98,000 gigalitres running out of the gulf catchment. About 85,000 gigalitres run out of the north-east catchment, in the Burnett. From the gulf catchment we divert 50 gigalitres, out of 98,000 gigalitres. We divert about 55 gigalitres out of the Timor catchment, out of 78,000 gigalitres. While there is a lot of poor soil mixed in amongst all that, as there is in every district—bandicoot country, we call it—there is a lot of good soil. There are millions of acres of beautiful soil that run through the Barkly Tableland and out through the Kimberley.

I say that we ought to harness the knowledge, put the money towards harnessing the science. I had the CSIRO in my office this week talking to us. Senator Siewert, we will be taking their information to our committee. They were talking about how and why they can help. They obviously cannot make political decisions. But while there is going to be pain in the south there is going to be gain in the north.

At the same time, as I have said many times in the last few weeks, there is a great opportunity for Australians to overcome the shame that we should all feel about the debilitating conditions in which a lot of our Indigenous communities in the north live. I am ashamed to think that we are here today and can have a nice cup of morning tea and so on and there are communities up there where 7,000 kids have no access to high school. They have no economic opportunity. There are all sorts of dysfunctional problems within the communities. As I have said, if you go to the so-called Wadeye Centrelink office, you see that it is a hole in the wall with a phone in it. When you lift the phone up, there is no voice at the other end. You have to press buttons. Someone does not say: ‘G’day. How are you?’ when you lift the phone up. You have to press this button and press that button. And, waiting to use the phone is a line of women—a line like you see at the toilets at half-time at the football. It is a disgrace.

Australia’s farmers need to come to terms with climate change and to do something sensible downstream from the North West gas resource. This year I went to Trinidad and saw the value-adding that they have done. They supply 73 per cent of the United States liquid natural gas. So far, I guess to get the thing up and running, we have had some big sales to China, which are to be applauded. But we are selling gas for four or five cents a litre when we should be value-adding it. If we could get a ministry that looked at all this—not an inquiry but a ministry—we could have infrastructure put in place that would go with this development and we would have a road to the future for those remote Indigenous communities.

In Wadeye, on the first day of school this year 600 kids turned up. There was a mood in the community of, ‘Let’s get these kids to school.’ I met a couple of old nuns there. One was 92 and the other was 85, and the 85-year-old nun still drives the 92-year-old nun around. They are daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart. I was sitting under a tree, and I walked over and said, ‘G’day; I am an old SH boy myself. I went to Bowral in 1949. It cost £4 10 a term.’ She said, ‘You would have known Sister Philomena,’ and I said, ‘No, she was Mother Philomena to me.’ They are still out there doing terrific work in those communities. For the first time, that school had 600 kids turn up on the first day this year. But, because there were no desks, rooms or teachers, after a few days the kids got sick of sitting out in the sun, as it were, and they went home. It was just appalling. Now there are only 200 to 300 kids there. And the 300 to 400 kids who should be at high school have no high school. What hope do they have? So why wouldn’t they play up when the cameras turn up? It is a disgrace.

So if we are going to fix all of that, Senator Siewert—and we can fix it—we need to turn the adversities of climate change in Australia into opportunities. Obviously, there has to be a lot of activity removed from the Murray-Darling Basin—and that is code for some people, through water trading, leaving the industry—and, obviously, there has to be more water returned to Mother Nature. It is a quandary. We are arguing about whether we should return 500 gigalitres or 1,500 gigalitres to the river system when we know that Mother Nature will take 3,000 out anyhow. We had that ridiculous proposition last year for the Snowy Hydro sale. It did not make any sense then and it does not make any sense now.

I think that the time for inquiries is over. I think it is time for political cooperation between the states. I actually think that there has to be a higher authority that takes charge of water. There have been some outrageous propositions put about some of our borders. The stuff-up in the Lower Balonne as to whether you buy or sell a place that has a water entitlement is a lazy solution. Most of the cotton that is grown in some of those places is in overland flow. It is water that is not licensed, it is not costed and it is not needed. It is a national disgrace. We know all that stuff. We do not have to have an inquiry. We just have to have the courage to do something about it. We now have a trigger in Australia to make all this happen. Even people in the cities are now wondering whether in the future, when they turn the tap on, the water will come out.

We do not need an inquiry into the mismanagement of water in Sydney. Sydney’s water infrastructure was set up for four million people, and 430 gigalitres goes out of three outfalls and is wasted every year because there is a monopoly in action there—and the monopoly pays a dividend to the government. It is a lazy way of doing business. It does not matter how wasteful it is, if you get rid of the water, you get the money. There should be a secondary water market in Sydney for recycled water—an incentive in the market. There are lots of opportunities. That will happen in rural Australia.

We do not need an inquiry into the wetlands which you talked about this morning, Senator Siewert. There is no question that in the Macquarie Marshes there are water thieves. You have all of those banks there and no-one has the political courage to go along and say, ‘Take them out because they are not licensed.’ You have the farmers saying, ‘Don’t send water down to the wetlands because they are dead.’ The only reason that they are dead is that someone else is pinching the water that is being sent down there. The agricultural companies and the pastoralists who are doing that—I will not bother naming them here—should be ashamed. You know this from our committee inquiry, Senator Siewert—we have all the photographs. They are only little banks, and they divert all the water from them. That should be fixed. You do not need an inquiry to do that. You just go up there and fix it. I do not want to go on all day—though you could go on all day—about the catastrophic mismanagement, but I think we have been presented with a great opportunity. We have done some great things. I welcome back the Minister for the Environment and Heritage, who has just entered the chamber.

Ian Campbell (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is good to be here.

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

We have done some wonderful things. I notice that Senator Bob Brown, at a press conference the other day, gave credit to Mark Latham for locking up the Tarkine. Bob, I was offended. John Howard locked up the Tarkine, and he was not bludgeoned into it by Mark Latham. Mark Latham did not know what he wanted to do then and does not know what he wants to do now.

Ian Campbell (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Latham’s policy was to have an inquiry for 12 months.

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

We do not need any more inquiries. We just have to have the courage to go and do this. There are a range of people who try to fight against and to resist the obvious. It is patently obvious that there is climate change. It is patently obvious that there will be some areas which will have to adapt to the weather in more ways than probably many people realise.

I think a lot of dairy farmers along the Murray River now know that, with the cost of water, growing pasture is going to be a pretty tricky proposition if the Australian people are only prepared to pay $1.14 for a litre of milk but $2.50 for a litre of water. What sense does that make? Consumers in Australia say to our farmers, ‘You’ve got to keep supplying that tucker at cheap prices, old mate,’ yet we import Chinese bottled water—Aqua—and put it on a shelf in the supermarket. It is a lost litre at $2.50; a lost litre for the importer. It comes into Australia at 28c a bottle, 600 mils, and it retails for $1.85 to $2.50. Where is the sense in that? The poor old guy who gets up at four o’clock in the morning to milk the cows can only get half that.

Bottled water is a con job. I have tried it out. I have gone to the tap—as long as you have got reasonable tap water—filled the bottles up, handed them around at an event and people all think they are drinking some special, sparkling spring water from somewhere. It is Mother Nature’s water. It is just that it has come out of a river instead of a spring. Good luck to them all, but we do not need any more inquiries. Everybody knows what has to be done: we just have to get on and do it, and now is the time. I think I have said enough.

Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have some sympathy for Senator Heffernan’s position. I note the angst in the way he has put it forward and I recognise his experience as a primary producer in the Murray-Darling Basin. The underlying tenet of his speech was that we need action to deal with the massive impact that climate change, which we have known about for decades, is having not just in the Murray-Darling Basin but right across the agricultural lands of Australia. The first piece of action, however, is the government saying, ‘We’re not going to support an inquiry proposed by Green Senators Siewert and Milne that looks at (a) the long-term impacts on Australian primary producers, rural communities and the environment, with reduced and increasingly variable rainfall, increased temperatures and higher evaporation rates as a result of climate change; and (b)—listen to this—potential adaptation strategies to mitigate these impacts to ensure the security of Australian food production and maintain the viability of rural communities.

Let us make this clear: there has been a need for action. There has been a need for what Senator Heffernan calls political will and courage. There has been a need for the recognition that the federal government, the most powerful authority in this nation, should take a lead. The angst from Senator Heffernan is because the government has patently failed to do so in the 11 years it has been in office. The patent failure goes right to the top; it begins at the top with Prime Minister Howard because he has turned his back on the scientific evidence. He has turned his back on the powers that he has, including the corporations powers, and he has repeatedly and serially offended the proposal that Senator Heffernan has just put forward that we need to harness the knowledge we have and come to the aid of people in rural and regional Australia.

Senator Heffernan and Senator Milne say, ‘Let’s harness that knowledge. Let’s get it together so that we can act on it,’ and we have an injunction from the Prime Minister’s office, because that is where the fate of these motions is sealed, saying ‘No, we won’t do that.’ Here we are, 11 years down the line, and Prime Minister Howard says, ‘I won’t support an inquiry. I will not support harnessing the knowledge,’ as Senator Heffernan says, ‘and therefore I pull the rug from under informed action.’

Glory be! This nation needs informed action, but we have got a Prime Minister with his head stuck in the sand, turning his back on the information available and therefore the prescription for deliberated action coming to the aid of rural Australia. If we do not come to the aid of rural Australia, the impact is going to be felt by all 23 million Australians. They will feel it in the supermarket, they will feel it in their bathrooms, they will feel it when they go to their refrigerators and, most of all, they will feel it when they think about how much worse it is going to be for their children and grandchildren.

This has been a decade of lost opportunities. This has been a decade of studied ignorance by the Prime Minister and his cabinet. This is a decade, as Senator Milne pointed out, capped off by a budget in May in which the Treasurer did not even mention climate change, let alone allocate the resources that are needed to help the obvious readjustment that is going to happen in Australia.

Senator Heffernan said, quite rightly, that obviously there is going to be the removal of a lot of activity in the Murray-Darling Basin. I would add to that, ‘Ditto elsewhere,’ particularly across the whole of southern and south-east Australia. Then he said, ‘We’ve got to look at the environment,’ and I totally agree. In a jocular fashion, Senator Heffernan said he would be a good Green. The fact is that his knowledge of the threat to and the damage being done to rural Australia by climate change would fit him out for that. But the Greens are calling for action based on knowledge, and poor Senator Heffernan is caught by the Prime Minister’s injunction, ‘We won’t have it through this parliament.’

The best we on the crossbench can do is put forward a motion like this which ends in action. The better thing to do would be for the government to go into action, but it has not, it is not and it will not. The best this Prime Minister can do is last Sunday call a summit for Tuesday morning—so that there is time to watch the Melbourne Cup on Tuesday afternoon—and announce some measures which temporarily make people feel better but which fall enormously short of the national obligation he has to recognise climate change and recognise that, despite his dismissal of the fact of climate change by saying, ‘I don’t listen to doom and gloom,’ for many people in the bush, doom and gloom is their reality at the moment, added to by the interest rate rise yesterday, by the rising Australian dollar and by falling productivity.

Prime Minister Howard, that is a lethal cocktail for so many farms and so many rural communities in Australia, and you have failed to act on it. In fact, you have made it worse by mismanagement of this nation, because good management comes from using the knowledge available to ensure you make the future better, not worse.

But the Prime Minister has patently failed and now we have what Senator Heffernan calls ‘this bloody drought’. With those three words, he sums up the anguish of the minority in government that recognises that inaction is now leading to enormous damage—to families, to farmlands, to the economy and to this nation’s future. Senator Heffernan said rather weakly, ‘We’ve had enough inquiries.’ If that is the case, where is the action plan? Where is the informed program by this government to meet the desperate need of people suffering this one-in-1,000-year drought, as it is being called, which everybody must fear, with climate change, is about to become normal? That is the prediction. It has been predicted for years that what was once a one-in-100-year drought is going to become commonplace and what was a one-in-1,000-year drought will come more often. And it is not just drought but also hailstorms, cyclones and other weather changes right across the field that are going to have an impact on the security of Australians into the future.

Senator Heffernan says that water has been catastrophically mismanaged by the states. This government, under the Constitution—with, for example, its corporations power—has long held the ability to prevent catastrophic mismanagement. But it has failed to do so. Now we have a mixed-up, muddled, inadequate Prime Minister who says, ‘We will have water trading—that’ll fix it; let’s have it across borders,’ and a parliamentary secretary for water, Mr Malcolm Turnbull, who says, ‘Let’s privatise it; that’ll fix it.’ Anybody who has read economics, and has in particular looked at, for example, the privatisation of Victoria’s transport systems and its outcomes, will recognise that good management is required, but so often privatisation, which insists on a profit on top of good management, simply leads to more expensive management, which is not necessarily good and can sometimes be quite harmful.

The same Prime Minister says, ‘I’m still not in the camp of those who are more worried about climate change, but I’ll have water trading,’ in this last, late, desperate stage because it sounds good and it might be an elixir—it is not; good management is—but he will not have carbon trading. He says, ‘I’ll let those people polluting the atmosphere do so for free,’ because he supports, as he said yesterday, dirty coal as the primary means of burning fossil fuels to produce electricity in this country, when we have to change from that. The whole wisdom of the world says we must switch from that course, and our Prime Minister says, ‘I’m right behind the old formula, and if there’s a backup it’s nuclear.’ In this sunny country, he repeatedly gets it wrong, saying that solar power cannot be the answer; renewable energy cannot be the answer. And he does not understand energy efficiency, which is linked to the fastest, biggest alternative source for energy production that this country has. The Prime Minister does not want carbon trading. Well, he is going to have to have it or he is going to have to place a carbon tax on those who pollute, because, with climate change, that is generating much worse problems for our farms, our towns and our huge urban cities. And these problems will be experienced by our children, who will look back aghast at the delinquency of the Howard government’s period in office.

Senator Heffernan said that we need to protect the environment. Well, that includes the wetlands. Just this morning Senator Siewert moved a motion that the state and federal governments guarantee the protection of the Ramsar-listed—that is the highest recognised listing in the world for the protection of bird-breeding wetlands—Gwydir wetlands in the Murray-Darling Basin in New South Wales, and it was voted down.

Yesterday the Prime Minister indicated that he will drain the wetlands. He will block the water to them—with the catastrophic effect that has on the bird-breeding cycle in Australia—if necessary to ensure water for towns. There was no mention of the huge, largely foreign owned, cotton combines sucking water out of these same rivers. The Prime Minister gives them precedence over this nation’s heritage and, presumably, over towns’ water supplies that are so desperately threatened by this climate change and which we do have to ensure until the good rains come again, however temporary that might be.

Senator Heffernan says that the Chinese are sending water here at 28c a litre to undercut our markets. Do you know what? Our Prime Minister is currently negotiating another free trade agreement with China to guarantee that that can happen on a whole range of products—a whole lot of them—to remove all inhibitions to trade.

What he is not negotiating is a carbon tax on transport carrying these goods around the world so that the pollution that comes from long-haul air and sea transport bringing these goods so cheaply into Australia is properly paid for by those who do it. They are effectively being subsidised at the cost of our climate by the thinking of this Prime Minister when he meets President Hu or his successors in negotiating another free trade agreement. Ask farmers in rural Australia if they think that is going to help them through this crisis at the moment.

Senator Heffernan says that he has got a farmer friend who has got new processes in farming which make his farm eight times more productive than a neighbour’s, and we all know of such farming success stories in the face of terrible weather conditions, of terrible drought and a shortage of rain. Would it not be sensible to have an inquiry which was dedicated to action and which ensured that the neighbour was able to increase productivity on her or his farm eight times in the teeth of a drought? Do we just leave it to people to go backwards or do we make sure that they get knowledge and support so that they can change their farms to be productive in the face of changed weather conditions?

What Senator Siewert and Senator Milne are putting forward is a sensible proposal to gather the knowledge and then to go into action to develop an action plan. And Senator Heffernan comes in here and says, ‘No, we just need government action.’ The problem is that we will not get government action, because we do not have a Prime Minister who is able to face up to the awesome threat and reality of climate change and use the powers at his disposal through his government. They have got control of both houses of this place to bring in the enormous changes that this nation is going to have to have, not only to face climate change but also to get commercial, business, jobs and export advantages out of being a leader in the world in such things as environmental technology applied to the land as well as to energy production and water recycling, for example.

Germany and Japan lead the world. Why? Because Australia, through the Howard government, has either turned its back on such research or in some critical cases defunded it, while the Prime Minister pours hundreds of millions of dollars into coal. And so do state governments like the Bracks government, the Iemma government and the Queensland government when they ought to be getting behind sunrise industries—the industries of the future, the industries which are going to bring prosperity and a world lead in business to this country.

So I support this motion of course. It says: let us go for knowledge and, out of knowledge, let us go for action. It is deplorable that the government is going to use its numbers in this Senate today to again turn its back on knowledge and fail to act at a time when this nation needs both knowledge and an action government, not a government locked into the last century’s thinking.

Linda Kirk (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wish to indicate that the opposition will be supporting this motion by Senator Siewert.

Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Once again we had the argument put that we should be thinking about going north, peddling false hope—at least that is the idea—to farmers of the south, that we will just gather the wagons together and head north. That is designed as a distraction from the fact that climate change is the biggest crisis facing our farmers, one that they urgently need to deal with. How can you expect farmers to deal with this crisis without the support from both our state and federal governments, without gathering together every bit of scientific research that this country can gather and focus on this issue? I find it quite distressing, in fact, that the government does not seem to understand the impact that this is going to have on our farmers, and the depth of work that is needed. They seem to have no understanding of the impacts of climate change on our farmers and what is needed to address this issue.

They did not address in their reply the actual terms of reference for this inquiry, looking at the long-term impacts on primary producers and rural communities. That quite clearly comes as an also-ran in the government’s thinking. They have only just acted, for example, to provide EC and drought assistance to small businesses in farming and rural communities—they were quite obviously forgetting that they are absolutely dependent on our farmers—and to look at the impacts on the environment.

There is one area they clearly want to ignore. Given the Prime Minister’s statements about draining wetlands and about people coming first, he quite clearly still does not get the fact that you cannot support people without having a sustainable environment. I bet you that he did not ask the farmers whether they thought that should happen—that is, whether the farmers agreed to draining wetlands. Do you know what? Not one farmer that I have spoken to supports draining wetlands. Maybe the Prime Minister should actually go and talk to farmers first before he starts bandying around ridiculous suggestions like that.

Obviously he also does not take into account that the government has spent and allocated lots of money—and I acknowledge this—to the environment through the Natural Heritage Trust. Billions of dollars have been spent in our farming communities on planting trees. What about the impact of climate change on those trees that have been planted, for example? What about the work that farming communities have done in protecting wetlands and the environment? What are the potential adaptation strategies? We are not just talking about—and I have been talking quite a bit about this—looking at research into developing more crops—we are also talking about adaptation strategies for rural communities and the environment. All of that needs to be looked at. There is nobody pulling that together. Nobody is putting that thought in.

As I touched on earlier, ABARE are not even thinking about it. The only instruction they have been given by government is to look at what the costs are to our economy of making cuts. They are not looking at what the impacts of climate change are on our agricultural systems, rural communities and the environment. None of that work has been done. So how can our farmers be making realistic decisions if they are not getting that information support?

My colleague Senator Brown touched earlier on the question of who is driving the action. What we heard before is: ‘No more inquiries—let’s have some action.’ Who is driving the action? The Prime Minister called a summit on three or four days notice, weeks and months after the warning signals for this season were that our storages would be drying up. He called it so late that farmers growing summer crops had already started getting ready and watering their fields to prepare to sow their summer crops. If action had been taken earlier, they would not have been wasting that water. The Prime Minister then, maybe, would not have come out and suggested that we had to drain our wetlands to support our towns. Just when is this action happening and just who is doing it? I have seen none of it so far, that is for sure.

If you look at what farmers are saying about action for climate change, I actually think that the government has not been listening to them. Let me just read to you a bit of what the National Farmers Federation have said to the Commonwealth government. Their agriculture and land management working group said:

Australia’s agriculture, forestry and land management interests are exposed to the impacts of climate change. Compounding our risk exposure, the agriculture sector is not equipped, at present, with sufficient detailed information about the impact of climate change on different regions and different types of farming activity. Given the extent of this vulnerability, there is an urgent need to enhance understanding of the likely impacts of climate change at a scale relevant to sectors and regions ...

They also said that there is an urgent need to understand the social, economic and biophysical implications of climate change on this sector and to develop adaptive responses accordingly. The Queensland Farmers Federation this year, in their 2006-07 election issues paper, said:

Adaptation to climate change is the biggest challenge facing Australian agriculture in the next 20 to 30 years ... Like all changes, a changing climate brings both risks and opportunities. Those who better understand the nature and implications of the change can adapt more effectively to avoid the risks and seize the opportunities ...

They go on to say:

Agriculture is arguably the most seriously affected sector of the State economy in terms of climate change effects. Yet there has been little investment by the State in identifying the impacts of climate change for farmers, or in preparing farmers for adaptation or mitigation strategies.

And they call for the following:

• a research program to develop regional and industry scenarios for climate change in industry and likely threats and opportunities for industry;
• follow research to identify new plant varieties and farming practices that might be better suited to climate change ...
• raising awareness about and voluntary on-farm adoption of measures to address issues of climate adaptation, greenhouse gas abatement and the identification of new opportunities for rural industries;
• research in terms of mitigation effects and adaptation techniques.

So our farming organisations are saying that there is not enough being done and they need help to identify and address the impacts and to look at adaptation strategies.

There has been other work recently released that I think also impacts in this area. For example, the Productivity Commission last week released a report on research and development in this country and raised some concerns about the focus being on commercialisation and not enough on public benefit. I think part of this inquiry looking at adaptation strategies would also look at how we are handling research development in this country and whether we are putting enough emphasis on the development of, for example, adaptation strategies and the appropriate crops that are needed.

There is work being done in this country. For example, the salinity CRC, based in my home state but operating across Australia, has done a great deal of work in this area. Do we need to upscale that work? Do we need to invest more money? I would argue that we do—but we certainly need to look into that.

As I said earlier, we have no framework. We have no overall view in Australia of what research is being done and where it is being done—and what research is not being done. We certainly do not have an understanding of the land use capability in this country and have not overlaid that on our climate change models to help farmers—for example, those in the eastern wheat belt of Western Australia—to identify just what their future options are. They are facing decreased rainfall and increasing temperatures. How do we help them to make decisions about staying on farm? Is it appropriate that we as a community offer them financial support for ecosystem services?

I for one do not want to see farmers walking off the land. I want to ensure that they can stay there if possible. Perhaps we can provide them with ecosystem services and look at what else they can do to stay there. We need to ask what areas are marginal because, in the future, we might need to consider, for example, phasing out farming in some areas, but we want that to happen in an orderly fashion. We do not want people to suffer. We do not want to provide false hope that farmers can pack up and move north.

As I articulated in this place last night, there are many problems with the so-called ‘developing the north’ option, as if the north is some empty, final frontier that we can develop. It is not appropriate to offer false hope to the farmers of the south by saying: ‘It’s okay, you can move north. We don’t need to worry about you.’ If we truly care about our farmers and the future of our rural communities, we will be looking beyond just their resilience. There is a National Agriculture and Climate Change Action Plan, but it is based around resilience—as if farmers can just keep slowly adapting to climate change. Farmers have been doing that. But they can no longer continue to gradually adapt, because their farm profitability will go down and they will therefore not have the resources to carry out the bigger adaptation that will be needed. We are offering these people the false hope that they might be able to continue the same old same old in areas where that will no longer be possible.

We need to look further ahead and offer long-term solutions, but we cannot do that if we do not know what the possible impacts are. There has been no overall study of the impacts of climate change on our rural producers, our rural communities or our environment. We need to start looking at a full and comprehensive range of those impacts and at our adaptation strategies for them. Climate change requires us to take a quantum leap in the way that we look at these impacts, how we manage our water resources, what we offer—for example, exceptional circumstances and drought assistance—how we encourage innovation to deal with drought and how we manage our farming systems.

We need to look beyond just increasing the resilience of our existing systems to developing new agricultural industries, probably based on native perennials and other crops. We need to open our minds to this, but we certainly will not be doing that through the existing processes. That is why the Greens believe that we need an inquiry to pull this information together so that we can look at what private researchers and the different agencies around the country are doing and at how we can share information. We cannot properly share information across the Murray-Darling Basin yet, let alone across Australia. Who is drawing those information sets together? Who is talking to the states about pulling it together? There is nobody doing that at the moment. How do we do it? How do we encourage states to share information? Those issues are not being addressed. We cannot take action if we do not know what we are actioning; therefore, we firstly need to pull this information together. I strongly encourage the Senate to support the establishment of this inquiry.

Question put:

That the motion (That the motion (Senator Siewert’s) be agreed to.) be agreed to.