Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Justice and Customs) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to continue my remarks on this bill, which is not disputed in any way by the opposition; the Rural Adjustment Amendment Bill 2009 simply extends the terms of engagement that members of the National Rural Advisory Council may have on that council. Yesterday I thanked the members of the council for their engagement with rural communities and their willingness to listen. I also appreciate the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry extending the exceptional circumstances declaration in my electorate of Farrer for a few more months. Pretty well all of the declarations now run out in March 2010. We will be looking to the minister to make further extensions should the drought not lift.

As is always the case at this time of year, we see across rural areas of Australia a patchy result. There has been reasonable cropping in some areas and reasonable water allocations in others but pretty well all along the Murray River in New South Wales we are still struggling. It will have to rain much, much more in the catchment for that to translate to improved water allocations for general-security and high-security users. One of the successes that I believe the previous government had with NRAC was in being able to engender an understanding within that organisation that drought is not just a matter of climate and rainfall but also a matter of water allocation.

I have spoken before in this House about the level of confusion and bewilderment in my electorate on the approach that the government has taken to water generally and to buybacks in particular. More recently, in the central Murray forests of New South Wales the approach of the environment minister to the superb parrot and the ongoing logging operations has indeed horrified us.

I want to touch on the minister for the environment’s actions because we as a community are, as I said, bewildered and confused, but we are also angry and disgusted. Some weeks back the issue hit the newspapers with a statement that the federal minister was directing the end of logging activities in the central Murray forests. These activities are conducted in a sustainable way under the auspices and the environmental supervision of the New South Wales government. The requirements that foresters have to meet in terms of the environment are strong and appropriate and they should be allowed to remain in place. But our federal department decided to use the superb parrot, which is on the threatened species list but towards the lower end of the list, as an excuse to bring the force of the federal EPBC legislation onto this issue and therefore take it away from New South Wales.

I believe it was only because of the strong response in the media, the reaction of talkback radio and the reaction of colleagues in this House and in the New South Wales parliament that the minister and his department took a step back. When I asked him, in consideration in detail on environmental issues last week, whether he would admit that logging in the central Murray forests was in fact not illegal, he did admit that logging was not illegal, but he did not give us any comfort that he or his department would take any action to reassure us about our future and allow this perfectly sustainable logging activity to continue; he just mumbled something about ongoing negotiations with New South Wales.

If you drive through inner Sydney, through the suburbs of Marrickville and Redfern, you will see signs saying, ‘Save the river red gum.’ That is the audience that this minister and this government are playing to—not the people who really matter, whose jobs are threatened, but the inner-city groups. While I make no criticism of their views, I will say this: they are totally uninformed. They, like the minister, have never travelled into western New South Wales and looked at the river to understand its operation or the life of the communities that live along it. If they had, they would not have pushed this decision. The decision comes from a Victorian decision to lock up the forests on the Victorian side of the river. There is a determination by the National Parks Association and the Wilderness Society in New South Wales to do the same on the New South Wales side.

It shows a complete lack of understanding about many things but in particular about forestry. Remember that these forests were not here millennia ago; they have been in existence for maybe 130 years, and they have grown to a level of maturity that has seen the forest stagnate, if you like. In order to regenerate the trees and keep the forest alive, the logging practice has moved from selective individual harvesting of trees to another type of harvesting which involves—and the green movement extravagantly call it clear-felling—removing a patch of trees 50 to 80 metres wide to produce a pocket of light in the forest to allow the air and sunlight in and allow the forest to regenerate. What these forests need more than anything, of course, is a drink, and that will only come when it rains. Nobody is taking the water away from them. The forests need a drink. In the absence of a drink, they are going to struggle, and continuing careful logging, recognising their level of stress, is entirely appropriate.

But this type of patch-felling has infuriated our green lobbies and environmentalists and they have taken serious action—including, as I said, driving this minister and his department to take the extraordinary step of saying they were going to close down activities. The minister has back-pedalled from that, but I still have in my possession the letter that his department wrote to New South Wales forestry demanding four separate actions, with deadlines including 31 May—which has passed, thank goodness—and other actions, all about restricting these genuinely sustainable logging activities along the Murray.

These forests will regenerate either by harvesting or by having a good drink, which will happen in due course. They will not regenerate by fire—unlike the blue gum forests that we have seen burn in the Kosciuszko National Park—because they are not high-altitude forests, but they will burn nevertheless. If they are locked up, that is inevitably going to be the result. If you look at the way that the Indigenous people have managed forestry in these parts of Australia, fire has been a very strong part of that. But the agenda of the federal department of the environment is to lock up these forests, the Lachlan, the Murrumbidgee and the Lower Darling—in fact, all sustainably managed red gum forests in New South Wales. Shame on them. This minister should hang his head in shame for the stress and the worry that he is putting the communities that I represent through.

The other source of stress and worry is of course the water buyback. I have spoken about that before in this House, but the latest example that comes to mind is the purchase of Booligal Station at the end of the Lachlan River. The Parliamentary Secretary for Water talked big about the amount of wetlands that were going to be boosted, birds that were going to return and water that was going to go back into the environment, but he may not be aware that the Lachlan has only reached the Murray twice in white man’s history. Booligal Station is extraordinarily dry not because greedy irrigators are taking the water but because it rarely has a water flow through it, certainly not in these times of drought. But, again, we saw an extraordinary sum of taxpayers’ money allocated to buy this water and buy this land.

I recall a similar exercise with the purchase of Yanga Station, near Balranald, which is also in my electorate. There were big promises from the New South Wales government at the time that thousands of visitors would come to Yanga Station—the small and relatively insignificant farming activities would be replaced by a boom in tourism not seen before, National Parks would be able to station new employees there and the local Indigenous people would be able to get involved. It ticked every box. Unfortunately, well over a year later—probably two years later—we had a rather low-profile opening of Yanga National Park. I do not know whether anyone has done a visitor count, but I know that it would be very small indeed. As for the jobs: of course they have never eventuated. The park is managed from the National Parks office in Hay. There is nothing wrong with that, but New South Wales do not have the resources to put people there to manage the park properly, to even begin to implement all of the promises that they talked about at the time. We are going to see the same thing with Booligal Station, and we are not going to see any real water returned to the environment as a result.

As we who live and work in the irrigation regions of Australia know, all that is being purchased with this silly exercise is air space in the dam. Water reform should be simple—in fact, it is not. I was in Wentworth on the weekend, which is where the Darling meets the Murray in western New South Wales. The town was celebrating its 150th year—looking back 150 years and looking forward 150 years. When I talked to people about what they thought might be different in 150 years time, they were sadly very doubtful that the community would be there in the same way that it is now. The most commonly expressed sentiment was regarding the federal government’s approach to water. Okay, we accept that water is going to be taken out of our districts; we have had that message hammered home. But what is going to happen in its place? And what are you going to do, Mr Rudd, about the dislocation and the rural communities in crisis as a result? What are your plans for our communities, for our future, given that you are removing so much of our water?

But of course no planning has actually happened. I was amazed to see that the Wakool Shire Council, along the Murray River, has done its own socioeconomic study. I should not be amazed, because if these studies are not going to be done by the appropriate bodies and agencies in government then I guess local communities will have to do them, in an attempt to try to make their case. The study that Wakool Shire Council commissioned, by RMCG Consulting, clearly shows that water leaving the district permanently will result in loss of people, reduced income and reduced business in service industries. It was a rigorous study in one district that has about 300,000 megalitres of water entitlement. What this study showed was the level of impact. For every 1,000 megalitres of water lost from the region—and, remember, there are 300,000 megalitres in just this one district—there would be $300,000 of agricultural production lost within this one shire; up to $900,000 lost from the regional economy; $3,500 in direct rate revenue lost, which of course is just the beginning—we know the flow-on effects from that; and the loss of agricultural and regional jobs. If you multiply the effect across a district you do in fact end up with ghost towns along the Murray. As somebody who represents these areas, I am quite frightened by what we have to do as a community to mitigate the effects of this—given, as I said, that the government are very keen to purchase the water. As soon as they can they spruik those purchases from the rooftops—meaningless though they are, as I said—and talk about what good things they have done, to satisfy, I am guessing, the inner-city voters in Sydney, Melbourne and other coastal areas of Australia. But what they have left us with is truly something horrible. I do not want to contemplate the future. So I use the opportunity of this debate on the Rural Adjustment Amendment Bill to again ask the government to please allocate some resources to helping the communities adjust to their future. We know it will be very different; it is already very different. Help us adjust.

One final thing I want to mention in the context of this bill relates to the stimulus funding. Much has been said about the poor targeting of the schools money. But what has particularly irritated me as I have looked around my communities is not necessarily that schools and facilities that are provided to our communities are not what we might really want—sometimes they are, but mostly they are not; they are basically what we are told we deserve—but that the actual mechanism for delivering, for example, portable school halls or other pieces of physical infrastructure is all done from afar. I have heard the most horrific figures about how much the New South Wales government is slicing off. In the case of one school project almost half of the funds, for a hall that half the town does not want, are not even going to leave Sydney; they are directly going from the federal government to the New South Wales government to prop up its ailing bureaucracy and infrastructure—because we all know the parlous state of New South Wales government finances. If these projects were managed locally, what a great job they would do.

A weekend ago I was at an opening of a new occasional childcare centre in South Albury. What was remarkable about this project was that the entire project management was done by the Rotary Club of Albury North. In Rotary you have people with expertise in a wide range of areas. They came together and found the carpenters, the architects, the designers, the builders, the carpet layers, the painters, the fittings and the fixtures, and they went with their networks in local communities, as only Rotary and other service clubs have, and they made all this happen, under time and under budget. It could not have been done by a government department in the same way. It was quite extraordinary. I got back to my office and I had a letter from the same Rotary club raising another matter. They know that carers’ accommodation is needed at the Albury Base Hospital. They and the Zonta Club have been working on a proposal examining how facilities in other regional areas work. They have conducted local-needs surveys, joined with the Bone Marrow Donor Institute and the Fight Cancer Foundation, formed a working group, surveyed similar facilities and they have something up and running. Now, quite reasonably, they are looking to either state or federal government to provide some funding for this. Imagine if we instigated a policy that focused on local service clubs doing project management where they can. Imagine how much local stimulus that would provide—and that appears to be what the government is desperately trying to do. It would not just be at times when we needed to inject money into communities; it could be at any time and it could be an ongoing process.

Every newspaper story about New South Wales that I pick up talks about the extraordinary amounts of money that anybody in New South Wales has to pay to get anything and the ridiculous procurement hoops they have to jump through even if it is for ice-creams, bandages or the smallest of things. They are not allowed to source goods for their hospitals, schools and local communities. We do have the networks there. We have community groups who know how to do this and who can do it better than anyone else. We should be calling on those groups.

In conclusion, I look forward to NRAC working closely with the communities in the electorate of Farrer. We all look forward to the day when they can be put on ice because the drought is no longer, but that day is some distance off. I commend the bill.

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