David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is with great admiration that I would like to compliment the member for Forrest for her speech. She stole most of my thunder there, but I will digress and go back to a bit of the history of irrigation in this country. Several explorers, such as Oxley in 1821, found the south-west of the state a very inhospitable place. Charles Sturt similarly found the south-west of the state and the Murray-Darling Basin very inhospitable. In fact, the Murray and the Darling and areas of the Murrumbidgee were best described as a chain of ponds, with many dry riverbeds along the exploration routes of all these explorers. In fact, when Oxley first visited in 1821, he thought he would be the last man to visit this area because it was so inhospitable.

Go forward 150 years to the flourishing period of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area. You could, as a start-up irrigator and farmer, move down into the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, purchase licences for irrigation and purchase land, which was—I digress—dirt cheap, no pun intended. Land in these areas without water is worth probably a dollar an acre at the most because without water it is worth nothing. You can run a few sheep, live off the saltbush and rely on a few waterholes. But with water the vast breadbasket of the Murray-Darling all of a sudden assumes a huge beneficial property, and that is that you can grow stuff—stuff called food, stuff called fibre; primary production. All of these are ancient terms that seem to be forgotten! Whether it was the Tigris and the Euphrates or the Tiber, civilisations rose out of water assets. It is fundamental to civilisation. That is why water is so important.

The founding fathers of this nation worked that out pretty quickly. It is inhospitable in vast areas of our wonderful nation, but, if you add water, all of a sudden you turn it into a food bowl. There is a lot of conversation happening about the potential of the north of our country. It goes without saying that there is more water there than you can poke a stick at, more water than you can imagine. But what it does not have is the infrastructure to store and distribute it. We have huge amounts of water in the Ord River scheme, but do we have the irrigation system that we have in the Murray-Darling, in the Murrumbidgee or in the other tributaries? At this stage we do not, and we are going piecemeal in developing it. We also have the extremes of nature up there. We have cyclones. We have destruction. We have remoteness.

But in the south-east of this nation we have the Murray-Darling Basin, which is developed and which has the other ingredients for primary production. It has population. It has the infrastructure. It is close to its markets. And it has 150 years of blood, sweat and tears of the pioneers of our nation.

If we go backwards into recent history, we all remember the drought that ravaged the south-east of this nation for about 10 years. As the Government Whip has so elegantly outlined, there is a big difference between water licences and the nominal figure attached to them and the allocation that is given to the irrigators that hold the licences. There is high-security water. There is general security water. The general security licences were a lot cheaper to purchase because the water was not guaranteed. The high-security licences were developed for people with permanent rather than annual crops, like citrus, like grapes—like all those things. Once you grow a plant, you need to have some certainty that you are going to be able to keep it alive, whereas, if you have an annual crop and there is no water and it fails, you have lost and burnt an awful lot of capital, but it is not the end of your enterprise. There is always another crop next year.

During the drought we saw all those horrible images of dry riverbeds. The general impression for those people not living in the area or not involved in irrigation, the stated cause of those dramatic pictures, was that there were these wicked people called irrigators sucking the life out of the rivers. What most people do not realise is that the amount of water allocated to the licences is not what irrigators ever receive. They receive an allocation. During the drought years, people with licences worth $10 million, $15 million or $20 million were getting one per cent or zero per cent of their licence value because irrigators did not have the water either. That is what happens in a drought, for goodness sake. Sure, on paper there might have been overallocation of resources, but at least in Australia we have managed irrigation systems, and they are generally pretty well managed. The water initiatives by the former Deputy Prime Minister, which were referred to, were a really great initiative. They led to a much more sensible allocation of resources. But, having established that, we have a history in the south-east of the country of the Murray-Darling Basin developing huge areas of otherwise useless land into highly productive land, and we should not necessarily look at the far North as the solution to us becoming the food bowl of Asia, because we have a food bowl of Asia already in New South Wales, Victoria and southern Queensland.

Debate interrupted.

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