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

I'd like to first of all say that what we are encountering in regional areas is the most exceptional drought for many in Australia's written history. That is not to say that it is the most exceptional drought in the history of Australia, but in written history it is beyond the pale. I would like to commend a person who is fighting bushfires in these dire circumstances—that is, the former Prime Minister of Australia, the Hon. Tony Abbott, who as we speak is fighting a bushfire at Drake, in my electorate.

We have to manage this drought. We can't actually make the weather change. It will rain, and that's when the drought will finish. We have to be very aware of the extreme circumstances that are currently before us. These extreme circumstances in the natural environment would mean there would be no water in the rivers. The only places that we are seeing water now are below regulated dams and below where there has been the capacity to store water from other times and release it now. So, when people say water is entitled to go down the river, to go to a place, if you want to return it to its pristine, natural condition, then the rivers would be totally and utterly dry. I think that's worth mentioning at the present time, because we have also built the economies of so many regional towns on our capacity to get access to regulated water, and if we didn't have that we wouldn't have these towns.

With regard to the Indigenous authority member, there must also be another side to this debate—that those people are also reliant on the economics that comes from water. In my own area, when I was at St George, I lived next door to the Waters family. Poddy Waters was the Aboriginal elder for the area. Ronny Waters and Jenny Waters were there. There were a whole range of Aboriginal people; they were a big part of our community. For them, the importance of the river was that it gave them jobs, and if you took away irrigation there would be no jobs. One of the greatest advocates for the irrigation industry were Aboriginal people, because that was their form of employment—in Dirranbandi even more so.

The reason I say that is that if we ever get this belief that the only position that is held is that Aboriginal people don't support irrigation, then that is the wrong idea. Where there is employment, they support it absolutely. It gives them the capacity for commercial advancement. It gives them the capacity to have businesses in the area where their families are from and the prospect of a better standard of living. That benefaction might not be directly working on an irrigation farm; it might be owning a shop in town or, like the Aboriginal family next door to me, owning the hotel in town—the best hotel in town, to be honest, the St George Hotel. These things have also got to be part of this mix. So we don't see this as, ipso facto, we'll say 'Indigenous', which means that we're just going to turn the whole place into a national park, because I'll tell you right now: that's not what a lot of Aboriginal people want. They are very aware now—I was recently in the northern part of our nation—that, if they have their lands, their natural asset, they want to be able to utilise it in such a form that they make a dollar out of it. They don't like the idea, at times, that green legislation works its way in and usurps their position, making them merely the mechanism for an extension of green caveats on private assets or the removal of land to basically a national park, under the auspices that it is somehow of benefit to Indigenous people. I've also seen that in the past, when the other side closed down the live cattle trade. One of the biggest groups that that hurt was Aboriginal people. I remember Freddy Pascoe up at Delta Downs saying: 'Well, we've got 60,000 head of cattle here. How does this work now that we're not able to export them?' Why that's pertinent to this bill is that we have to understand that the Indigenous authority member is not necessarily going to be someone who's a raging advocate for the environment. He will probably be a raging advocate for the economic wealth and economic growth of Indigenous people in the Murray-Darling Basin, in whichever form.

I bring up the drought because it will rain. It is going to rain again and you're going to get floods again. I've lived on the Murray-Darling Basin for basically all of my life: in Danglemah, which is in the Murray-Darling Basin; in Moree, which is in the Murray-Darling Basin; in St George, which is in the Murray-Darling Basin; in Charleville, which is in the Murray-Darling Basin; and in Loomberah, which is in the Murray-Darling Basin. Probably the only time I'm not there is when I'm exactly where I am now, Armidale. One thing they have in common is that the economic benefit of living in that basin is its attachment to water. If you do not have that connection, that nexus to water, it would be an absolute bowl of poverty. We have to be very mindful that anything we do does not go to destroy the economic base of these areas. I am certain that an Indigenous authority member would absolutely have that at the forefront of their mind. There is no point in delivering economic misery to people by shutting down any further opportunity of economic growth.

This is something that has been discussed for a while. I'll leave it to the minister to describe how we go about picking this Indigenous authority member. I know there will be many, many applicants. I know not only that Indigenous people are involved in the cotton industry, the commerce of towns in the regional areas and the labour hire industry but also that a large proportion of people in the Murray-Darling Basin, in comparison to a place such as Canberra, are Indigenous. They're not a majority, but they're are a larger proportion than in other parts of Australia—on the coast, for instance. What happens to this system is incredibly important to them.

The government, for its part, has invested billions and billions of dollars into making sure that we maintain the economic integrity of this area by making sure that works and measures have a large role to play in bringing back an environmental outcome without shutting down towns. We've seen in Mildura, the Macquarie and in the headwaters that it is vitally important that people clearly understand that we can provide environmental outcomes without having to shut down towns, and we must also focus on that. I am concerned that the current zeitgeist, by reason of the drought, is that there is somehow this drastic mismanagement of the river system, that there is some magical place where water is stored and has been held against the will of everybody else in the river system. That's not the case.

I remember that one of the great witches they always wanted to burn was Cubbie Station—somehow there was all this water at Cubbie Station. Well, take a drone to fly over it. There's no water at Cubbie Station. In fact, I think the last time they took water was in 2017, and that was only a small portion of water. Some of this mythology has been brought about to drive a political agenda to shut down the irrigation industry, but it's not connected to the hydrological facts. The hydrological fact is that we have the most exceptional drought in the written history of Australia. Until it breaks there will be no water. On the issue of Menindee, what we have there is water released to go south and no water coming in from the north—unremarkably, the water runs out in the middle. Yet you hear some of the rhetoric that is cast around, and it's all about some nefarious process. I'd say the only place that really has a chance of irrigated crops this year is not actually in the Murray-Darling Basin. For cotton it would be up around Emerald, because they still have carryover water there that they can utilise.

I hope that with this Indigenous authority member coming to play we take into account the wide range of views and uses that Indigenous people—they're called Aboriginal people in my area—have for the Murray-Darling Basin. It most certainly has an incredible cultural importance to them. It certainly has an incredible connection to the history of the area, and it is absolutely vital to the economics of the area. In that vein, it is just as vital to other people and the economics of the area. I know that the member for Nicholls will soon give a speech, and no doubt he'll also reinforce the economic imperatives of irrigation to regional towns.

This Indigenous authority member will have a mighty job. It profits nobody if we further shut down the economic integrity of these areas, which is water. It profits nobody to make poor people poorer. It delivers nothing for the economy of our nation if one of our greatest food-producing areas is shut down from its capacity to do it its job. What I might suggest is that the future for Australia, to get a greater sense of water security—and maybe this is something that the Indigenous authority member could be part of the discussion towards—is to get further storages, more infrastructure, to bring new water at times as required from other catchments into the Murray-Darling Basin. There is a sense of contention. Something I've supported for so long is a form of the Bradfield Scheme that can bring water from the north of our nation down into the Murray-Darling Basin. This would cost vastly less than the NBN, but I think its economic benefit would be vastly, vastly more. If our nation were part of China, I'm certain we would have started it years ago.

The more we try to find a resolution and try to find water where water isn't, we realise that there is only one solution, and that's to find water where it's in abundance, in many instances where it's excessive and causes problems, and move it to where it's needed most. If we were able to do that, we would be able to take away so much pressure that has been placed on the economies of so many towns, where they have been asked to give up water for the requirements of the lower part of the river. The Bradfield Scheme, in one of its iterations, would be able to take water from the northern parts between Townsville and Cairns, where on certain weeks more than two Sydney Harbours flow out to sea from one river—I was looking at the Ross River in the last flood—and divert that in such a way that it would go into the Flinders, from the Flinders into the Thompson, from the Thompson into the Warrego, and from the Warrego down the Darling into South Australia.

As long as Australia exists, people will be talking about this. As our population and water requirements increase, this issue will be before us. There are other dam projects that I know the minister is very aware of. One is getting Nathan Dam up and running, so it itself is moving water from one catchment into the other catchment, or part of it—from the Dawson catchment into the Murray-Darling Basin. In fact, it has been cited as one of the mechanisms to help with the water requirements of Toowoomba. The reason these projects are held up is that we've created a litany of legislation and regulation, overwhelmingly at a state level, and a bureaucracy that's so hesitant to actually build anything.

This is all part of a plan that we have to have if we're going to bring about some long-term resolution of the issues pertinent to the Murray-Darling. Right now its greatest affliction is that it just has no water. In the immediate future we don't see any prospects of any water, because we don't see anything on the meteorological horizon that is going to bring water. We should be planning right now to do something that I think would be seminal in the further development of this nation: the construction of water infrastructure so as to move new water into that system.

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