Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for the Environment and Heritage (Senator Ian Campbell) to a question without notice asked by Senator Bob Brown today relating to the Macquarie Marshes, New South Wales.

I begin by saying that the first six or seven years of my life were spent in the headwaters region of the Macquarie River at Oberon and Trunkey Creek. Amongst my earliest recollections are picnicking by a crystal clear Macquarie River at Bathurst. I have heard a lot about the Macquarie Marshes—not just the explorations of John Oxley and the ancient history of the Indigenous people related to these marshes but also the importance they have globally as a waterbird breeding site. On the weekend I had the enormous privilege to be at the Macquarie Marshes with locals, including people who have a phenomenal knowledge of the marshes going back not just decades but generations. The ineluctable fact is that the marshes are being destroyed at a prodigious rate and there is still a failure of government action at the state and federal level. That action is needed to turn around that rate of destruction and to bring about the dream that the Minister for the Environment and Heritage spoke about, in stronger terms than I could, of restoring the marshes. The fact is that over 80 per cent of the marshes are either dead or facing destruction in the coming years.

There can be no more poignant comment on that than from the expert ornithologist who gave me an account of the egrets, those fantastic white birds that all of us see which, so far as he knew, do not have a connection to the coastal egrets we see right up the coast of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. They are a population which has a major breeding site on the marshes. Tens of thousands have bred there for thousands and thousands of years. These birds live maybe 10 or 11 years. In the last six to seven years there has been not one successful bird breeding. An effort by the birds in one part of the marsh to breed a couple of years ago failed when the water that was percolating into the marsh was stopped just as they were fledging—that is, getting feathers to fly—and they fell out on to dry land and died. So here is a bird with a lifespan of about a decade and we are six years into a decade in which there has been zero breeding. All of us know what that means and all of us have a responsibility for the consequences.

The minister said in his answer that drought was the reason for the marshes’ misfortune. That is not the case. Not one person—not the local graziers, not the local tourism operators, not the local conservation experts—would agree with that statement. All of them agree that the Burrendong dam upstream has caused the problem and that the siphoning off of water by the major cotton combines—mostly foreign owned—is draining the marshes to death.

These are globally listed Ramsar marshes. There is a great range of ducks, swans, egrets, ibis and heron. But they are not just bird-breeding sites. As well as all the raptors, there are native fish—it is interesting that one man who caught lots of catfish as a youngster there now cannot find one—native insects, frogs and bats. All are headed for a massive crash.

This is just the start of an appeal to the Howard government to take up its responsibility—along with the Iemma government of New South Wales—to reverse this ecological tragedy at Macquarie Marshes for the benefit of the locals, New South Wales, Australia and the planet. It is a disaster zone. I would ask the Prime Minister to go and see it. The marshes’ condition has got manifestly worse over the 10 years that he has been in office. His seeing that might help turn the marshes’ fortunes around. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.