Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

My next appointment is going to be in the Sky News studio, where I am going to be talking about, indeed, the other things that I've been talking about this week! I will take the member for Macnamara up on a few points. He talked about the Leader of the Opposition and her record as the Minister for the Environment. I can well remember when the opposition leader was environment minister. She talked a lot about the ocean and the need to protect the sea. She talked about pollution, and that is of great concern. She talked about landfill. We have at the moment a situation in Australia where a lot of local councils are very worried about the amount of space that they have in their tips for the amount of rubbish. We do, as a population—albeit only small compared to other countries—produce a lot of rubbish, and I think companies can do a lot better in the space of packaging to reduce what ends up in landfill. We could do a whole lot more in recycling. I heard the opposition leader, while she was environment minister, talking a lot about the need to have better and more recycling programs.

I also heard the environment minister at the time, the member for Farrer, talking about what I believe is the greatest challenge to humanity, and that is to be able to feed the world into the future. We have a lot of children, not just here in Australia but elsewhere in the world, who go to bed hungry of a night-time. When you see Australia and other countries having the capacity to produce more food, we should be doing that. What I am worried about—very, very worried about—is the fact that we have a great potential and ability to grow more food and yet, supposedly for the sake of the environment, we are taking productive water away from our irrigation farmers, many of whom are in the electorate of Farrer, formerly in the region of the Riverina, with the Murrumbidgee and Coleambally Irrigation Area. They have the ability and the capacity and the potential to grow so much more food, and yet, because of our supposed environmental laws with the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, we're stopping them from doing so. Indeed, I moved a disallowance motion against the Murray-Darling Basin Plan when it first arrived in this House, and I'm proud to say I did that. I'm proud to say I did that with colleagues' support—indeed, even with, dare I say, the former Greens leader's support, although I think he was in the chamber for different views than mine.

We're also here talking about also the fish kill situation in South Australia. Let me remind members in the chamber of the fish kill event between December 2018 and January 2019. Fish kill events, unfortunately, are not new, but we haven't heard anybody in the chamber talking about the one at the moment at Lake Cargelligo in western New South Wales in the seat of Parkes. There is a situation unfolding there which is of concern. Fish kill events, unfortunately, also are commonplace, and they are not always due to climate change. They are due to a number of factors which have been occurring for millennia, and to blame climate change and to blame, as the member for Canberra did, the coalition for the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20 is an absolute folly. It truly is.

If we really want to apportion some blame, we could apportion some blame to Greens policies of making sure that the fuel load in our national parks, which are run by state governments, has not been looked at. There has not been backburning. The fire trails are not maintained as well as they should be. This does lead to combustion. When there is a spark or a lightning strike, this does lead to fires that get out of control. We blame climate change for all these things, but in 1952 there were a million acres of farm- and bushland in the Mangoplah fire, which started in Mangoplah, south of Wagga Wagga, and went right through to what is now Kosciuszko National Park. The Gold Coast cyclone of 1954 killed 99 people. Nobody was blaming climate change then. We need to do more for the environment—we do—but we need to do more for important things such as pollution, landfill, the ocean, food security and food availability to feed a hungry world. We're not doing enough in that regard, and that's what members opposite should be concentrating on.

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