Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Water Resources and Conservation) Share this | Hansard source

I acknowledge the contribution made by the member for Moreton to this debate. I find it somewhat incredible that, with schemes that are supposedly as popular as these are, and with the need for extra appropriations, the government has only two speakers on this legislation. I suppose it is because of the member for Moreton’s good country upbringing in St George that he has a sense of duty to defend the indefensible. But if he turns around to find out who his support troops are, he will find that he is it. The member for Bradbury has shown equal courage in debating something that is very hard to sell to the community. However, I sometimes wonder whether we live in the same country. The member for Moreton spoke about how popular the pink batt program is. He obviously has not been speaking to the people in my electorate. I will touch on that in a little while.

We are here to discuss the Appropriation (Water Entitlements and Home Insulation) Bill 2009-2010 and the Appropriation (Water Entitlements) Bill 2009-2010. The fact that the coalition will not be opposing this legislation follows a long-held convention and does not mean that we offer support for the situation that the government have found themselves in through their mismanagement.

I will start with water. The government has brought forward $650 million from future budgets to fund the water buybacks in the Murray-Darling Basin. This has to be one of the most ill-conceived and sinister schemes ever administered by this government. The previous government allocated $10 billion to the Murray-Darling water plan, and $5.8 billion of it—nearly $6 billion—was for replumbing and a smaller amount was for water buybacks. In the last two years, this government has focused purely on the buybacks. There are, of course, plenty of willing sellers. Rural Australia is in a very tight position at the moment. Cash-strapped farmers are selling their water entitlements to make ends meet. It is certainly not something of their choosing and it is certainly not something that they would do with a long-term view; rather, it is something which they have had no choice in.

The interesting part about the water buybacks policy is that there is no water to buy. The government has been spending billions of dollars on buying air and making no difference. The full implications of this policy will not come through now because there is no water in the river; it will not be until the season turns, when the dams fill up and the rivers flow, that we will find that we have lost the ability to feed ourselves. We will be sitting on the riverbanks, with fertile farming land all around us, watching the water flow out to sea, and we will have no ability to use it. With Australia’s population possibly to reach 35 million by the year 2050, I think it incredible that food security—not only securing the nation’s ability to feed its population but also growing its ability to feed the world’s population in the years to come—has been very much put in jeopardy.

While there is this lazy approach to water management of buying out water licences that contain no water, this government is ignoring the possibilities of saving billions of litres of water through infrastructure. On the very day this extra $650 million is being brought forward the Lachlan River in western New South Wales has ceased to flow. If you live downstream from Condobolin, you will find that there is no water in the Lachlan River. The communities that live along that river, the individual property owners on that river—many hundreds of people—are now struggling to find alternative sources of water. Can any of the members who sit in this place imagine what it would be like to live in a community that has no water? Apart from the air we breathe, water is the second most important substance we need for human survival. Something that we have taken for granted for years and years has been taken away from those people. But is there government assistance to help them sink bores or run pipelines to find alternative sources? Not a cracker! I was out in the lower Lachlan area two weeks ago and I saw a great amount of sadness, unrest and fear among that community about their future. That might not seem like much to us as we work in these wonderful conditions, but I have to tell members that, as we speak, the people of western New South Wales who are living in the lower Lachlan River area are hurting greatly.

The water buybacks are having a devastating effect on communities right across the Murray-Darling Basin. There are two very well known cases. One is the purchase of Toorale Station near Bourke in western New South Wales. That took 100 jobs out of that community, and the amount of water that was returned to the river was minimal at best. So now there is a large property of over 100,000 acres that will be turned into a national park. This property produced fibre and food and fed thousands of people, not only in this country but around the world, but now it will lie idle.

When Toorale was purchased I made an offer to my colleagues opposite to buy them a camera. I asked for the first member who could take a photo of the water purchased from Toorale station making its way into the Murray River to give me evidence of that. I said that I would eat my words if I was wrong, that I would apologise for saying something that was not correct. But I know that is not going to happen.

There has been a devastating effect on a community and we have reduced our country’s ability to feed itself. Food security is not just for the 21 million people we have in Australia at the moment; Australian farmers feed 70 million people around the world. So the first people who will go hungry because of the policies of this government will not be Australians; it will be the people in other countries that rely on our grain, our beef and our mutton for their staple diet. They will be the first to suffer.

Not far east of Toorale Station at Bourke is Collymongle Station, in my electorate, a property owned by the Twynam Pastoral Company. The government has purchased the water entitlements from the Twynam Pastoral Company, so the town of Collarenebri pretty well ceases to have a reason to exist. I am not much of a one for conspiracy theories but things are starting to add up. The government does not appear to have the funds to put into infrastructure to pipe water to the lower Lachlan, but it has been splashing billions of dollars around on Building the Education Revolution and the so-called ‘Julia Gillard memorial hall projects’. But with the $1.7 billion overspend, guess which projects were cut back? In my electorate, 18 central schools. Guess which was the first one? Collarenebri central school, where 85 per cent of the students are Indigenous. And one of the major employers in the area is now closed down because of government buybacks.

Collarenebri central school has a science lab in a demountable—a very shabby, ancient, leaking demountable. The cruel irony is that they had pegs driven into the ground for a promised new science lab. With a $1.7 billion overspend on BER, I guess the government figured Collarenebri had no future. They are just a bunch of Indigenous kids and a few farmers’ kids; they won’t miss not having a science lab; they don’t need the same standard of education as everywhere else—and the government pulled the funding.

There are schools in the leafy suburbs of our capital cities which are having multimillion dollar stadiums and the like built, but Collarenebri not only now has no water to sustain students’ parents in employment but the school has less of a facility to empower students. Education is the one thing that will improve their standard of living, and maybe their community and their education has been disadvantaged at the expense of others. This is the mismanagement of this government and it is the scandal of our time. I have just about had enough of watching speakers in this place stand up and say that black is not white—and say it with a straight face and a clear conscience. I do not know how they do that. Rural Australia is hurting because of the policies of this government.

We had a plan for water security that included $6 billion for water infrastructure. Part of that money was announced a few years ago—$300 million for on-farm irrigation efficiency programs with a time frame of six weeks from announcement to application. I was in Griffith about a month ago speaking with the Young Irrigators Forum. They are very keen. Young irrigators in the Murray-Murrumbidgee system are a very switched on, productive group of individuals. I have seen some of the work they have been doing to improve the efficiency of their farms. They were very keen to take part in the $300 million program, but there is no way they could prepare a proposal which would do justice to meeting the criteria in six weeks. There is a great belief that this time frame was set up so that there would not be a complete uptake, so that the government could then say, ‘There cannot be that much need for on-farm efficiency; we can wind that program back.’ The truth is that there is a great need for on-farm efficiency, but we need to be realistic about its implementation.

The minister in charge of this is Senator Wong. Perhaps it is useful to understand the mindset of this minister—a minister who seems to be using climate change as an excuse to decimate regional Australia. Long before climate change was the buzz that it is today, in a previous life Minister Wong was a staff member for the environment minister in New South Wales, one Kimberley Yeadon. In that capacity, she took part in what was known as the south Brigalow bioregion, where the New South Wales government locked up a productive, vibrant living forest which was nurturing many communities and turned it into an environmental wasteland in the pursuit of Greens preferences. Two years after 350,000 hectares were locked up and the foresters were removed, 50,000 hectares of it burnt to the ground—koalas, kangaroos, all the natural fauna and flora decimated. That was for Greens preferences.

I find the politics of this astounding—the dishonesty that is coming into the debate here and the speeches at the doors. We have heard some bizarre comments. The member for Corangamite was this morning talking about the Great Ocean Road in his electorate going under water as a result of climate change. We have heard the member for Makin saying that we need to pass the CPRS legislation because of the heatwave in South Australia. We have not had an explanation of how their policies are going to reduce the temperature of the globe. Indeed, if you accept the full premise of global warming, we are talking about half a degree over 50 years. That is not a heatwave. That is long term and we need to look at productive ways of dealing with that. Rural Australia does offer a lot of the answers but is not being given the ability or the financial incentive to do that.

Another part of this bill is the almost $1 billion being brought forward for pink batts—the Home Insulation Program. I found it amazing that the member for Moreton should say how popular it is. In the last couple of weeks in my electorate I have been overrun by people complaining about this program. In Dubbo, I believe many people—quite often elderly people—have been conned by this program. But, more sinister than that, the Australian taxpayers have been conned by this program. People are selling insulation door to door, signing people up and saying, ‘Your house is bigger than average.’ Having seen some of these houses, I find that hard to believe. Salesmen are saying, ‘You just pay another $200 or $300 more and we will do your whole home with the $1,600 rebate from the government.’ At one home—a timber cottage occupied by a young married couple with a baby battling to get ahead—from what I could see, the installer stood in the manhole with some sort of a hose and fired what appeared to me to be chewed-up newspaper around the hole, over the exhaust fan and over the downlights but possibly at best covering 20 per cent of the ceiling area. Many other people in the street signed contracts with the same mob. Through public pressure, the management of that company did come good, but I think there are many people who will be disgusted when they get into their roofs and find that many of the batts have been thrown and laid about in a haphazard manner. Anyone who knows anything about insulation knows that, unless the complete cavity is covered and all the gaps are closed, it is worthless.

In regional Australia, if people had a choice about where the money was to go, I do not think home insulation would be a big one. Yesterday we had the Deputy Prime Minister in here saying that the government did not have the funds to properly fund the education of country kids at universities. This $985 million that has been reallocated to the pink batts program would educate a lot of country kids at university. As the 17-year-olds across my electorate are just finishing up the HSC and contemplating their very uncertain future next year, they are wondering whether the world has gone mad when we are allocating funds in the billions for people to put insulation in their roofs when we do not have enough money to fund their education.

Reluctantly, I will not be opposing this legislation, but it saddens me that, from a few years ago when we were a country that had cash reserves, we are now borrowing money to put into a very poorly managed program such as the Home Insulation Program and the buyback program, which is the easy way of managing water in the Murray-Darling, while we are ignoring the plight of rural communities. There have been no social studies and no economic study done of the effects on this community. Hopefully, this government will soon wake up and realise what it is doing to the people of this country.

See this speech in context