Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On the morning of Tuesday, 20 February, an article in the Sydney Morning Herald by the journalist Wendy Frew came to my attention. The article quoted statements from the World Wildlife Fund and the headline was ‘Neglect puts Murray system among the world’s most endangered’. It makes interesting reading because, quite frankly, nothing in the report has any substance. I joined the New South Wales parliament some 24 years ago because I was in conflict with some of the statements made by environment groups which had no scientific basis and no substance, yet it continues to this day.

The journalist is saying that the quality of the Murray River has declined over those years, yet if you go to the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, of which I was a member for at least five years, the facts are starkly different. I seek leave to table a graph from the annual report of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission which clearly shows that the salinity levels at Morgan in South Australia have fallen from some 870 EC units to about 520 EC units from 1980 to the present day and shows that the efforts of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission have cleaned up the Murray-Darling considerably over that time.

Leave granted.

The article also goes on to talk about the European carp which escaped into the Murray-Darling system some years ago and which undoubtedly caused quite considerable problems. But the article does not talk about the current situation in the Murray-Darling system. In fact, what has happened there is that we have an equilibrium in the system and the European carp are no longer the problem they used to be. I do not think there has been any scientific research done on this, but anecdotal evidence from people who have lived along the Murray-Darling all their lives is that the cod are coming back; they are either eating the young carp or the carp have eaten out the food supply and are reaching an equilibrium within the river. As far as the turbidity of the water is concerned, that has improved considerably and the locals will say that at least you can see a metre or more into the water these days and that the turbidity has certainly settled.

The important thing is that we should not allow hyperbole to drive this debate. The Murray-Darling system is the pulmonary artery of Australian agriculture. Sixty per cent of Australian agriculture is in the Murray-Darling system, and it is important that we get the management of that right. There is no doubt that the $10 billion that was put forward by the Prime Minister—and there is no other public interest that is going to put forward that $10 billion; there is no Telstra or Optus that is going to do that—is money that is going to be well spent on managing that system. But we do not need hyperbole. We do not need hyperbole from the scientists—and the Wentworth Group have certainly been guilty of that—and we do not need hyperbole from journalists who are too lazy to do their homework. If they had just gone and looked at the annual report of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission it would have shown them very clearly the present state of the river.

I honestly believe that the fourth estate, as we call the journalists in this place, is an important part of a free democracy, but I would ask that, in future, they abide by their journalists code of ethics. They should not be driving the agenda and a position in these areas; they should be putting forward the facts and not trying to enter the debate through the columns of the newspaper.