Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last weekend I attended the Hay Agricultural Show. Hay is a town in the Riverina in my electorate of Farrer, which has a total area of 200,000 square kilometres in New South Wales. I would never have believed that for the constituents I represent the season, yet again, is on a knife edge. Quite a few of the farmers who stopped to talk to me last Saturday were extremely worried about what they would do if the season failed again. For some people it may cost a quarter of a million dollars to put a crop in, for some people it may just be the ongoing investment of running a grazing enterprise or restocking if you have had to sell your sheep or cattle, but very few businesses can take three straight years of losses. It is quite heartbreaking to see the disconnection between what life is like for rural communities, and particularly farmers, and what life is like elsewhere in Australia. I am very conscious that after so much drought relief and drought support, which was very well instigated and managed by the previous government—and I think that the current government has held the line on that, too, and I thank it for that—we in rural Australia, particularly farmers, are seen as constantly having our hands out for help. Nothing irks the farmers that I talk to more than being seen as people who are turning to government—that is, other taxpayers—for a handout.

I stood there in the dust at the Hay Show. It was getting up to 30 degrees, which is way too hot. The horses had come back after the equine influenza outbreak of the previous year but the people had not. There was optimism and there was hope—there always is in those sorts of places. There was also a lot of despair. As local members, we feel enormous frustration because we cannot make it rain. But I can remember feeling quite different when I was part of the government prior to the last election, because I felt I could take a message to that government about what my constituents needed and be heard.

I thank the current Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry for holding the line on the exceptional circumstances declaration, but I am bewildered and confused by the approach of the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts to water. We have just seen the purchase of Toorale Station—it is not in my electorate; it is at the junction of the Warrego and Darling rivers—in order to release the water that is stored there in dams. The purchase of the land that constitutes Toorale Station is a disgrace—and I know that is an overused word in this place. It was horrendous, appalling and unnecessary. I and many others will find it hard to forgive a government that rips out a substantial part of the regional economy—a government which wants to look after Indigenous communities and wants to say to Indigenous Australians that there are work opportunities in a place like Bourke, where there really is so much that we could be doing to support our Aboriginal communities. It was not necessary to buy the land in order to buy the water.

My colleague the member for Murray has, I think, explained to the House how a station on the banks of the Murray River has been purchased in order to send water down the Snowy River, thereby taking water from a stressed catchment and moving it to an unstressed catchment. But there is no plan, there is no strategy, there is nothing underpinning the current move other than a grab for water—a requirement to somehow fly the flag to a group of Australians who perhaps do not understand what it means. We need to make the point loud and clear that it is not necessary to buy up a perfectly productive farm to secure water for the southern Murray-Darling system. But we find that we cannot do that unless we invite the government ministers to visit the area—and I think it is unlikely that they will come because they do not show much interest in coming out to see how things are on the ground.

The New South Wales government are actually broke, so in order for them to put the resources into those stations that they have bought to turn into national parks they will have to go even more into the red—and they will not do it. They will tell the existing stressed national parks service to manage these areas. They will not be managed because the resources are not there, so we will see feral animals and weeds and we will see perfectly productive land being taken out of agriculture and food production. For those of us who have to see it happening, it is quite heartbreaking—and it is totally wrong.