Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'd say that the Egyptians knew it and that's how they brought about the Egyptian economy. It's probably the reason why the Romans decided they wanted to basically take over or invade Egypt. It wasn't because of the pyramids; it was because of—

An honourable member: they invented everything.

They certainly had a very good wheat crop, which the Roman empire was very interested in and that was basically what drove them into that neck of the woods. So the politics of irrigation have been with us for as long as man—as a gender-neutral term—has been on this earth. What we also noted in the growth of our nation, whether it's Sydney with Warragamba Dam or Brisbane with Wivenhoe Dam—I remember the application going through for the expansion of the water storage in Canberra to go from 4,000 to 80,000 gigs—is we have got to have water storage if we are going to have irrigation. If you don't believe in building water storages, if you don't believe in building dams then it makes sense that you will not have irrigation. It's worth about $15 billion, the irrigated industry. It is permanent plantings such as fruit, nuts and vegetables. They are in excess of $3 billion each. Cotton and dairy are also incredibly important in that space. Australia, without a shadow of a doubt, is the driest inhabited continent on earth. If you don't have irrigation then land that could be worth $30,000 an acre or, in some instances, maybe $15,000 to $20,000 an acre, will go down to maybe less than $1,000 an acre. Without water, it has much more of a reduced value. So water is wealth.

We have to drive forward. It's incredibly frustrating in this place that every time you go to build a water storage, someone comes up with some reason why you can't do it. I can go through the litany of Chaffey Dam, which we build after fighting for so long. It was the Birralong frog there. Everyone had a reason not to build it. Nathan Dam, to this day, is not built because the boggomoss snail came up there. For the expansion of Warragamba Dam, it is the regent honeyeater; and for O'Connell Creek Dam, it is the scaley snake skink that stops it. If you name a dam, I will tell you the environmental problem that apparently is why they can't build it. This of course is a dip of the lid, worshipping the god of inertia, which believes somehow you can attain wealth without developing the country.

We have so much more knowledge now of environmentally sustainable irrigation. It primarily revolves around what they call 'end of valley flows' and what is a reasonable amount of water to extract, what is an unreasonable amount of water to extract and how you keep the biota of the river in a sustainable form by letting enough through. What we also note with irrigation, of course, is the regulation that a body of water has to move through the watercourse. In times such as these—droughts—where the riverbeds would be completely and utterly dry, below the regulated dams you will still find water flowing. Therefore, because the water brings life, the capacity for the environmental regeneration is so much better. That is just a fact, because there is water in the river.

In the Northern Territory you have a different form of irrigation, which predominantly relies on things such as aquifers—and getting the CSIRO to get proper understanding of the aquifers is incredibly important. It doesn't matter where you go. In St George with the red soils irrigation for such things as onions and rockmelons is proving to be so beneficial. If you go to the Moree, there is the immense wealth that came from Copeton Dam and the irrigation of cotton. Might I remind everybody that if it wasn't for the cotton crop, you wouldn't have cotton seed. If you didn't have cotton seed one of the main dietary components that sustained our cattle through this drought would be lost. Cotton seed, absolutely and utterly, is a high-protein feed supplement that is vitally important and works symbiotically with the feed requirements of stock during the drought. In Stanthorpe it's granite soils. With granite soils you see the permanent planting. Even there now we are trying to drive the Emu Swamp Dam.

Unfortunately, the Labor Party always takes money out of our dams' portfolio. I heard before about what we're doing in the Tasmanian midlands. I was happy to be down there to open part of that, to put federal money towards the development of that, to bring wealth to the midlands of Tasmania. I have been known, in my time in parliament, to be almost pathological in my desire to build more dams. And that will remain, because if we don't have dams, you won't have irrigation. If you don't have irrigation, a lot of people in the world who we are feeding will starve to death.

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