Bill Heffernan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to give a non-legal perspective to what this is about. You will probably use my qualifications as a farmer, a worn-out wool classer and a welder. This is about the disenfranchising of the aspirations of the Indigenous community. There is no question that the Indigenous community of Australia has been treated disgracefully. I went to a community as the Chairman of the Northern Australia Land and Water Taskf­orce and talked to a grandmother in that community in which whitefella social habits have completely destroyed the com­munity to the point where this lady was looking after a girl who had to be surgically put back together after being pack raped at 20 months. Senator Furner, do not ever tell me I do not care about Indigenous people. He can refer to my maiden speech, the first time I stood up in this parliament. All Australians should hang their heads in shame for the treatment that Indigenous people have been given.

To give you an idea of what this is all about: in the Northern Territory, where the Indigenous people learn from what is going on around them, 45 per cent of the Northern Territory has Indigenous ownership, for which they get no benefit generally—Mistake Creek and one or two places are an exception—I met a whitefella who was bragging to me, as chairman of the northern taskforce, that he had 17,000 cattle on this blackfella country, as we call it. Blackfellas do not mind me calling them blackfellas because we are mates; I am a whitefella. I said, 'Oh yeah, what are they getting out of it?' He said, "Mate, I give them $10,000 twice a year to get on the piss.' I felt like smacking him in the bloody head—that is the treatment we hand out. This is about the aspirations for our most precious resource, like our bloody jackeroos and jillaroos, our Indigenous people are the foundation of Australia and we are saying to them, 'No, mate, you can never own your own home and write out a will and pass your home to your kids. No, we can't do that.' So we have this ridiculous proposition.

Let me put it into a global context. By 2050 with nine billion people on the planet—we need to see this in the broadest scope and then bring it down to the area of which we are talking—barring a catastrophe of some sort, 50 per cent of the world's population poor for water, 30 per cent of the productive land of Asia having gone out of production, two-thirds of the world's population living there, the food task doubling and possibly 1.6 billion people on the planet displaced—that is by 2050. By 2070, unless there is a catastrophe, approximately 12 billion people. A place like China will have to feed half its population from someone else's resources by 2050 if India does not wake up to itself because they have not so far, China has and it is trying to engineer a solution to the North China Plain. There are 57 rivers that flow into Bangladesh and 54 of those rivers flow in from India which mines next to the groundwater which becomes the river water. There are 160 million people in Bangladesh who are going to have to move as part of the 1.6 billion displaced. They live in an area half the size of Cape York Peninsula.

Cape York Peninsula is 17½ million hectares—please note I am not reading a speech—which is the same size as Victoria. If you take out the coastal towns, the 800,000 to a million feral pigs, the 30,000, approximately, wild cattle not tagged and the 14 to 17 pastoral stations, there are approximately 14,000 people. Bangladesh has 160 million people in half that area. The UN are not going to be able to sort this. Australia has to listen to Mother Nature. Mother Nature is saying—all science has vagaries; all human endeavour has failures—and if the science is half right in what it is saying we have a serious global food task problem. Science says that it is going to dry up in the south and I will not go through that. It says that the weather is going to move in an anticlockwise direction and there are going to be opportunities in the north.

Senator Macdonald and I went to Georgetown. As he said, this Wild Rivers stuff is going to be a cancer that spreads. It was pegged out in 1957 for irrigation but that has never been done. To put this into proper context I am going to fine it down. When I was chairman of the Northern Australia Land and Water Taskforce we took evidence in Cairns and the chairman of the Cape York Peninsula Land Council came in. I said to him, 'Mate, where do you live?' and he told me. I said, 'How big's the joint you're on—an ex-pastoral station?' He said, 'Mate, I don't know but its 90 kilometres from the mailbox to the house.' I said, 'What do you do there?' He said, 'Oh, we catch a few wild cattle.' I said, 'What' s the house like?' He said, 'The white ants have eaten it.' 'What are the fences like?' 'They've all fallen down.' It is because this is sit-down country.

This is not a fair go for our Indigenous people. So what do we do then? I actually chaired the Traveston Dam inquiry—get the facts of this. I negotiated with Peter Beattie, who was the then premier, to allow the public servants to come and give evidence to the Traveston Dam inquiry, which I chaired. I had a good relationship with Peter Beattie, who is now out of the game. He knew that I knew that the Traveston Dam proposal was a politically driven imperative because, under an arrangement made by Beattie and Goss, they sold the right dam site. Of course, eventually, we said it was a shit of a site, a shocking site, sorry.