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

I congratulate Anna McPhee on the great work she does in the area of equal opportunity in the workplace for women.

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak today on the matter of water, and for your concession, Mr Acting Deputy President Barnett, in giving me a slot. I do not often rise in this place, but I rise today to talk on behalf of all the farmers out there who cannot sleep at night, who wake up at two o’clock in the morning, who will not go to town and who cannot be left on their own—all as a result of Mother Nature and everything that is beyond their charge. I also rise because there is a lot of emotion in the issues of the Murray-Darling Basin and certainly the Lower Lakes. But can I point out to the Senate that what is happening in the Lower Lakes is just the beginning. The world’s scientists have been telling us for some time that there is going to be a 25 to 50 per cent decline in the 23,000 gigalitre run-off in the Murray-Darling Basin and that this has serious implications for the future. What is happening in the lower reaches is a doomsday scenario with no apparent solution—unless Mother Nature provides it—because the water is not in the system. The same doomsday scenario applies all the way up the system.

Today I want to put the Australian Senate, the federal government, the Queensland government and the people of Australia on notice that we are about to have a serious fraud perpetrated on Australia’s taxpayers. I might lead with the Australian newspaper today which says ‘Dam busters: governments ready to buy land to unlock water’. That is a complete fraud. There is absolutely no need to buy Toorale Station if we want to return their water to the system. Back in my cocky days when there was Dunlop Station and Toorale together a whole lot of banks were put in with no environmental planning and no notice. They were diversion banks. The same thing happened to the Macquarie Marshes. The same thing has happened to the lower Lachlan. There is a 14,000 megalitre licence there at Toorale. It is a separate title to the land. It can be acquired. You do not have to buy the farm. If we are going to spend this money for Australians in order to rescue our water system, we should be buying the water and not the land. If we want to return the land as a national park, the money can come out of some other fund for national parks. Let the water be bought. Let us make greater use of the generosity of the government in applying water for buybacks, but the buying of Toorale Station is a furphy.

I want to go to the Queensland issues and the potential of a major fraud of hundreds of millions of dollars. The background to this is that the Queensland government is not compliant with the National Water Initiative. They have not separated the land title from the water title. The federal government should insist that they do that in the national interest and in the greater interest of Australia’s families. We absolutely have to make them compliant with the National Water Initiative. We have now got a ridiculous situation in the lower Balonne. To give a bit of history on the lower Balonne, the Stevenson family went out there years ago and discovered the flood plain. It is a wonderful flood plain and one unique to Australia. It consists of the Culgoa, the Birrie, the minor Balonne, the Bokhara and the Narren. These rivers, with the exception of the Narren, return eventually to the river system and into the Murray-Darling Basin. But there is a huge flood plain that has to absorb water, and Mother Nature designed that system in a way that the main river channels are relatively small, so when a decent flow goes down the river, the river is not made by Mother Nature to cope with the water; the flood plain is.

Back in the 1990s Cubbie Station got stuck in with the government of the day, which was a disgrace. It is a national disgrace that the law was silent. No-one has broken the law. And so in those days the bigger the bulldozer you used the bigger the water authorisation you eventually got. It was nothing to do with the environment. There was no environmental planning; you just got in there with your bulldozer and eventually the government caved in and gave authorisations. They gave exemptions from environmental planning on the storages. The greatest critic of that at the time was Leith Boully. She was recently, in my view, bought off by the proponents of the system. She was given a commercial-in-confidence arrangement with Cubbie Station. She was then not eligible for a water licence because she has no infrastructure to harvest and store water and yet under the draft ROP, of which she was the chairperson with a serious conflict of interest, the advisory committee to the Queensland government also had the power to put in place recommendations for compensatory payments to the system—and this is a major beneficiary of their own advice. She managed to get, under the ROP, the biggest water licence ever to be issued in Australia. It is not issued yet; it is about to be issued. It is 469,000 megalitres—about the size of Sydney Harbour. I say that it would be perpetrating a major fraud on Australia’s taxpayers if the Queensland government were to go ahead and issue these licences. There are specifically six licences in the ROP. I would bet that no-one has read the Condamine-Balonne draft resource plan July 2007, and if you have you probably do not understand it. I do not have time to go through the technical side today, but why would anyone with one iota of common sense issue water licences knowing that the system cannot stand the water licences, and then knowing that they are going to buy them back, if it were not a cosy deal?

I note that on the board of Cubbie Station is a former Treasurer of Queensland, Keith De Lacy. I note that on Toorale’s board is John Anderson and an adviser to the present government, Mr Eddington. I am not reading anything into that except influence. Why would you do that? I do not know, because not only would I think that that would be a misuse of public funds and perpetrating fraud but the technical reality is that if you bought Cubbie Station you would not return any water to the system, because nature designed the system there to go overland at a certain point. It is artificially overland now because of the height of the Culgoa weir.

The Department of Natural Resources and Water in Queensland has no idea of the true measurements of what happens to the flows in that country. The bulk of the water that is captured for irrigation up there is unlicensed, unmetered, unregulated and does not cost anything. Why in hell’s name would we want to then suggest we would convert an authorisation which was made under the plan—and the authorisation of the ROP is to license the capacity of the earthworks that have been put in place with no environmental planning—into licences that have a financial instrument? It took about 10 minutes to convince the former Premier, Peter Beattie. I said to Peter, ‘Why would you maximise the value of an asset for someone with a government injection of funds and then buy it back?’ It is crazy stuff. We are offering to issue licences to the extent of hundreds of millions of dollars and then we will buy them back, knowing the system will not stand the licences that are about to be issued.

The Condamine-Balonne has a median flow of about 1,200 gigalitres. There is about 1,500 gigalitres of on-farm, off-river storage built into it. It has an 800 per cent variability. I do not want to get too much into the technical side of it, but what is proposed is not sustainable and it will not return water to the system. I am sorry to have to tell the people in the lower Murray-Darling Basin this but, because of the freight component of the rivers up at the Top End there, the evaporation—the Menindee Lakes, for instance, evaporate more water than every pump up the river uses—and all those natural things in Mother Nature’s design of the system, buying Cubbie Station to return water to the system because the Queensland government is too gutless to comply with the National Water Initiative and separate the title will not work. And, when they do separate the title, you cannot trade overland flow because it is specific to the geography in the area. It is a complete furphy and I urge the government to halt the process, pull it up dead and pull the Queensland government in. Get Craig Wallace—I was on the phone to his chief of staff for 40 minutes the other day—and say, ‘Let’s have another look at this.’ The people who are affected downriver by this proposal cannot get a meeting with the Minister for Natural Resources and Water in Queensland. He refuses to meet with them. I think the Commonwealth should insist that there be a conference.

The catastrophic mismanagement of Australia’s water has been peculiar to all governments of all persuasions for all time. This is not a political exercise. I am urging on behalf of Australia’s farmers and all those people who cannot sleep at night that we get stuck in and do this in a fair dinkum way. We need to go back to the start and get some proper advice on what is a sustainable level of extraction. Overland flows are a dangerous interception into Mother Nature because, once you take the head off an overland flood flow, you absolutely impede its progress. As I said, peculiar to the landscape where these licences are to be issued is the fact that overland flow water eventually becomes someone else’s riparian water downstream because it returns to the stream. As I said, the Culgoa is a peculiar little river because it has a small stream. Under what is proposed in the buyback for the four stations these people can go to better technology and will only need a quarter of the water to produce double the income and there will be enough capacity left in the harvesting regime of the river to absolutely take the water that they are going to save anyhow just because of nature.

I will go to what should happen, because I only have a limited time. We should halt the process. We should alert Australia’s taxpayers to the fact that it is a perpetration of major misuse of public funds to, in full knowledge and consent, issue water licences and then buy them back to allegedly return water to the system knowing that the geography and physical makeup of the landscape will not allow that water to be returned to the system. It will be absorbed into what it was always absorbed into, the landscape, and eventually return to the river system.

I say that this is a national disgrace and I think that all Australia’s irrigators are looking to solutions for the Murray-Darling Basin. The climate change prediction for the planet is that something like 50 per cent of the world’s population will be water poor in 50 years, a third of the productive land will disappear, the food task will double and 1.6 billion people will be displaced. We have discussed that in Asia in recent days. Every Australian irrigator ought to understand that it is not the end of the world. We have to go to smarter technology and everyone should study what has happened in Carnarvon. Carnarvon used the equivalent of 8,500 megalitres of water to grow $60 million worth of income in fertigation crops. That same water in New South Wales would produce $3 million worth of cotton in a very wasteful way. I said five years ago in this place that any 50-year plan for the Murray-Darling Basin should exclude furrow cotton and paddy rice as permanent annual crops. They should be opportunity crops. The opportunities are going to be very few and far between and maintaining infrastructure is going to become an impossibility.

I note that in New South Wales they are now growing rice on the North Coast. It is non-paddy rice. The science has moved on for paddy rice; we now have non-paddy rice. We should develop the north, but first we should learn from the mistakes of the south. We have made some grave errors and we are continuing to make those grave errors. The auction on Toorale Station is on 11 September, and the Commonwealth and the state of New South Wales are thinking about buying it to return water to the system. They bloody well know—pardon my language; I apologise for the ‘bloody’—

Guy Barnett (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Heffernan.

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

that they only need to buy the water to return the water to the system. Let the National Parks Fund buy the land if they want to turn it into a national park. The same goes for Queensland. There is absolutely no case to be made for buying properties to return water to the system. What has to happen is that they have to become compliant with the National Water Initiative like the rest of Australia.

We are about to make the same mistakes in the Northern Territory on the Douglas Daly. There are companies up there now that are being issued authorisations to take groundwater. The work on the aquifer is not complete. In a few years time they will say, ‘Hang on, we have this authorisation; you better give us the licence now.’ If I was in charge, I would be making them buy the licence. All the licences up there are Christmas gifts. We are about to give them Christmas gifts and then spend several hundred million dollars buying them back.

I do not have time today to go through the technical detail of why this is all so—it is not the appropriate forum—but I say this: this is not a matter of politics. This is a matter of being fair dinkum about managing the future. We can probably double the production of the Murray-Darling Basin with half the water if we go to better technology, and we need to do that. But the first thing we need to do is get the Commonwealth to assert its authority—because obviously the rivers do not stop at the borders—and get all the interested parties into one room to take a look at it.