Barnaby Joyce: How the nation will get through the drought

Drought affected Tamworth in NSW. Picture: Brent Winstone

Recently I was in Launceston on the Tamar River and was happy to be informed on reading a plaque on the river that because of sea level rises over the past five to ten thousand years that the water level has risen over 50 metres. This is further confirmed by the fact that Tasmania itself was once a peninsula of what is now the Australian mainland. The Aboriginal people had walked to Tasmania and like the Hebrews escaping the pharaoh. The sea had closed the peninsula behind them.

In the Antarctic is the fossilised remains of the recently rediscovered Wollemi Pine as there was a time of a supersaturated atmosphere of carbon dioxide of about 1500 parts per million.

The environment is a dynamic, ever-changing system and part of that dynamic is unfortunately drought.

Civilisation and the assistance of a dynamic modern economy allows us to mollify the most extreme financial effects on the people for whom this drought has been devastating. We cannot bring a policy that removes the effect or risk of drought but we can use our experience and intellect to mitigate the effects.

The reality is that if we did not have an irrigated cotton industry we would not have cotton seed, one of the major protein sources for stock in drought. If we did not have irrigated lucerne, we would not have one of the major fodder components of stock feed in drought. If we had not increased the size of dams, cities such as Tamworth would have run out of water with not only the massive domestic household problems but all industry and services would also have closed. When I was first elected to the Senate the expansion of Cotter Dam from 4,000 to 80,000 megalitres had not been constructed. The solution was severe water restrictions including an empathetic move to close public fountains at Parliament. The Leader of the Opposition at the time, Tony Abbott, told the Coalition leadership group that it was a sign of the collapse of civilisation. Deliberately dramatic but with a real element of truth. If we did not expand Cotter Dam then nature would have taken its course over and over again in increasingly more profound ways for our nation’s capital.

The drought forum in Canberra tomorrow is not going to bring a solution to drought but it will add to a suite of issues that will assist this nation to get through the drought and grow the wealth of our agricultural sector, a sector that has given and will give further into the future.