Ken O'Dowd (Flynn, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today, I want to talk about water infrastructure for North and South Burnett, two big shires in my electorate. In 2011 and 2013, we saw major floods of the Boyne and Burnett rivers and Barambah Creek, in their catchment areas. The water flowed over Paradise Dam, past Wallaville and into Bundaberg, where it did very, very destructive damage to the city. They had two floods in two years—record flooding; one-in-100-year events twice in two years. That was the situation then.

Since those days in 2013, it's been relatively dry, and the dams are getting low. There was little capture of water back in those flood times, and I think that is the problem in that area. We need bigger dams and bigger catchment areas and on-farm storage to stop this dryness of our crops. Many, many crops are grown in that area, and it's sometimes called the food bowl of Central Queensland—in that Gayndah and Mundubbera area, famous for citrus fruit. The Boondooma Dam and the Claude Wharton Weir in Gayndah are the two main sources, and they do supply a lot of farmers with water. But when we get these dry times, like the droughts we're seeing in New South Wales and Queensland, you realise that water is paramount to successful farming.

In January of this year I took my agriculture minister, David Littleproud, to visit some parts of Flynn, but mainly Mundubbera. I showed him blueberry farms, packing sheds—they were packing mangoes at that stage. Of course, the citrus industry is nearly three-quarters finished in that area at the moment. We also had a town meeting with farmers from the North Burnett Region. There is a big potential for much more fruit and vegetables to be grown in that area, and the farmers made David aware of that very point. Coulson Lakes, for instance, has very rich soil—probably some of the best soil in Australia—but they have no water supply and no water security. Isis Central Sugar Mill near Childers is looking at growing sugar cane in Reid Creek, but, again, water supply is the issue. The macadamia nut is now a crop that continues to grow in strength and is very popular with our Chinese importers and in other places around Asia. The farmland, which was formally cane farmland, is now being taken over by macadamia farmers. This is pushing the cane-growing areas out to places like Gayndah and Reid Creek.

The question is: how do we address these problems? I think spending money on water infrastructure in North and South Burnett is the answer. Building a new weir on the Boyne is one project that has been popular with the farmers in that area. Putting extra height on the Boondooma Dam at Proston will favour farmers downstream and also upstream around that Proston area. Extending the height of the Claude Wharton Weir at Gayndah will give potential cane farms in that area the water they need. And I think we need a complete study on the potential of the new weir on Barambah Creek, which comes down from Kingaroy into that Bundaberg area. These are four projects I'd like to see go ahead that would not cost a lot of money in real terms, but they have the potential to produce so much more cropping in that area.

The blueberry farm covers 100 hectares, and that's a lot of blueberry bushes. The owners have said they would double the size of their farm if they had a reliable water offtake out of the Boyne River. So I urge the government, my government, David Littleproud as minister for agriculture, to find money for these properties and get on the with the job, especially in these drought times. I think now is the time to strike.