Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to support the member for Capricornia, a very hardworking local member, representing one of our great agricultural electorates. The member for Capricornia made the very good point: agricultural production has risen by 10 per cent to nearly $64 billion—a massive contribution to the national account, and much of that produce is exported and of course it is a sustainable industry.

The member for Hunter made a very good case for doing nothing—there are a lot of reasons why we should not build dams, and we have heard them all before. It has been around 30 years since we built a substantive dam in this country to provide water for irrigation. I was very pleased when our current minister for agriculture announced our dam-building program in the agricultural white paper, which amounted to—whatever the member for Hunter might claim—$500 million for capital costs to build more dams around this country and another $2 billion in loans. I absolutely welcome that from the minister for agriculture. I welcome his commitment to further the agricultural industry in this country, and of course water is a key part of that.

In my electorate of O'Connor we have a wonderfully productive region called the Southern Forests. It is a big agricultural electorate anyway, but the Southern Forests area, based around Manjimup, Bridgetown and down to Pemberton and Northcliffe, is some of the richest agricultural country on this land. It is set amongst 300-foot high karri trees and is a testament to not only the soil type but also the climate. Unfortunately in this drying climate, our horticultural industries in that area need water security. Most of the water at the moment is provided by gully dams built by individual farmers and we have reached the capacity of that particular system, and also the reliability of gully dams given the variable seasonal rainfall is a little bit suspect.

The previous Western Australian government, through its Water for Food program, has come up with a plan, which I think is a very good plan, to pump water from the Donnelly River, which is not far from the river mouth that flows out into the ocean. They assured me there is very little environmental impact to pumping water out of the river, up into holding weir at the high point of the district, and then allowing that water to reticulate throughout the area. We are talking about an area of around 100 kilometres by 50 kilometres. It will be a large area that will provide additional growth to the horticultural industry in that area and will also firm up the existing water supply. I am a big supporter of this particular plan.

Prior to the election in Western Australia, the previous government signed a heads of agreement with the federal government to look at us funding a portion of that project. It is a project of about $79 million. The state government is committed to providing around one third of that funding, the local landholder is looking at providing another third, and they are looking to the federal government to provide the final third of that money through our dam-building policy. I believe this money will be very well invested in my electorate. We have a strong horticultural area through Southern Forests at the moment, but it is just not on a quite big enough scale to host the big food processing plants we see at other horticultural parts of Australia. Horticulture means jobs. It means jobs for the local people, but horticulture, by its very nature, means the work is a little bit intermittent, so we rely on backpackers to a large extent in that area. To that end, I think we came to a good outcome on the backpacker tax at the end of last year. I know that many operators in the area, now that it has settled down, have no problems finding ample backpacker labour, and the Commonwealth government is now being paid our fair share of tax by the backpackers, which is a good outcome all round.

I am very supportive of this particular project. As I said, I will be approaching the agriculture minister, Minister Joyce, to look for his support for this project. We are at the stage where we have done a high-level feasibility study and the costings are there. We now need to move ahead towards environmental approvals, but obviously there is no point in progressing those until we have the funding secured from the federal government. I thoroughly endorse the federal government's dam building program and look for support for my electorate of O'Connor, particularly in the southern regions area.

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