Senator HEFFERNAN (New South Wales) (16:39): I rise to speak on this MPI. I was fascinated by Senator McLucas's remarks that Northern Australia does not have much agricultural potential. She was shaking her head when Senator Eggleston was referring to the food bowl. She obviously does not know what she is talking about but is also ignoring the facts. Since the Northern Development Task Force changed hands, from the coalition government to the Labor government, they have shut it down. They have found a whole lot of people who can find reasons why we should not develop Northern Australia for agriculture. I would like to focus on agriculture against the background of what the world faces in the next 50 years—and Mr Acting Deputy President Edwards, you are aware of that because you are on the committee—that is, the doubling of the food task by 2050. Places like China will have to feed half of its population, estimated, barring a human catastrophe, to be two billion people by 2070, from somewhere else other than China. Of course, there is the consideration by the wider public in Australia that agriculture is somehow a mature industry and that we should rest on our laurels, think of the past and retire to the coast. I do not think so. An incoming coalition government will take a completely different attitude, with fire in the belly—firstly, from the people themselves and people like Senator Eggleston and Senator Macdonald—to find ways to get things done. The challenge for the world is doubling the food task by 2050, in a world that is going to see 30 per cent of the productive land of Asia go out of production, while two-thirds of the world's population live there. The land that we are talking about is closer to two-thirds of the world's population than that of Sydney, but it is Australia. We should be giving hope to the next generation of Australia's farmers and we should be doing the things that do not necessarily have great political clout but have great vision for Australia and Australia's participation in the contribution of the global food task. I heard comments earlier about Cape York Peninsula. There is a plan by some people in this place to shut down the productive capacity of Cape York Peninsula. Senator McLucas: You have no idea what you are talking about. Senator HEFFERNAN: We will try that out, Senator McLucas, Thank you for telling me I do not know what I am talking about. Cape York Peninsula is 17.5 million hectares. It is the same size as Victoria. I presume you knew that. Senator McLucas: Yes. Senator HEFFERNAN: It has an estimated 800,000 feral pigs. It has about 30,000 untagged feral cattle. It has about 14,000 people who live off the coast—12,000 of them Indigenous. It has about 17 pastoral stations. The rest of it is either sit-down blackfella country or national park. And they want to turn it all into a World Heritage area. They want to lock up the first kilometre from all the rivers there, which are as good as the Murrumbidgee Flats. Sure we need new agricultural technologies. Sure we need GM production. See that against the background, Senator McLucas—you say I do not know what I am talking about—of a place like Bangladesh. The DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator Heffernan, you address your comments through the chair. Senator HEFFERNAN: Through you, Mr Chair, I am terribly sorry. Bangladesh is half the size of Cape York Peninsula and if the science is half right—it might be half wrong—it will have to find somewhere else to go because, by 2050, there could be 1.6 billion people on the planet displaced. I could go through that, only I do not have time. Bangladesh is half the size of Cape York Peninsula and 160 million people live there. Fifty-four of their 57 rivers flow in out of India. India is mining those rivers. If the sea rises to half the level predicted by the scientists, by 2050, they are going to lose where they live. They are going to have to find somewhere else to live. The UN will not fix that. The UN are the largest, most corrupt bureaucracy on the planet—most definitely. I have been there and told them to their own face and they just sat there with a glum look. The UN will not fix this issue. People will make their own arrangements. And do you think we should lock up the capabilities of Cape York Peninsula and prevent any commercial agricultural production which will take some research and work? Do you think we should say to the Indigenous people up there, 'Look, mate, if you just get your photo taken on a spear for the next 50 years, that's a great commercial opportunity for tourism.' Senator McLucas: That is offensive. Senator HEFFERNAN: It's not; it is what is proposed and I have been talking to them. It is a disgrace. There are still 5,000 kids in the north there who do not have a high school to go to and we do not give a rats! The Northern Development Taskforce commissioned the CSIRO to do a study of the water resources of the north. Just so you know that I do not know what I am talking about, Senator McLucas, there are 78,000 gigs of run-off in the Timor catchment, there are 98,000 gigs of run-off in the gulf catchment and there are 85,000 gigs of run-off in the eastern catchment, which has the complication of the run-off into the Great Barrier Reef. So we have said to the CSIRO, 'Can you study the water resources of the north?' As you would be aware, because I do not know, but you will know and you can work that out for yourself, the most northern aquifers up there are annual recharge. By the time you get down to Alice Springs, it is very old water. We said to the CSIRO, 'Give us a study on what we can do and what the potential is.' The government changed and you said to the same mob that we instructed to do that, 'Still do it, but don't have dams in your terms of reference', because the Northern Territory and the Western Australian governments at the time opposed new dams. You said to the CSIRO, 'Do this study of the water capabilities of the North, but don't consider storing the water or damming the water.' What a stupid bloody proposition. That is your mob. Do not tell me I don't know what I am talking about! The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Senator Heffernan, can you please address your comments through the chair. Senator HEFFERNAN: Sorry, Mr Acting Deputy President. I get pretty stirred up about this stuff. What we should be doing is considering ways of value-adding, as Senator Eggleston and Senator Macdonald said, not only to agriculture but also to complement downstream value-adding to the mining industry. Why haven't we got a urea plant coming out of the gas industry in Northern Australia? I don't know. Why haven't we got a phosphate plant? Why haven't we joined up Mount Isa to the north-south railway line to make that happen? Senator McLucas: Because we killed Townsville, that's why! Senator HEFFERNAN: Excuse me, if I had time I would take you through it and you would learn something. But why haven't we done this stuff? Do you know what Clare Martin said to me as the task force chairman? I am sure she will not mind me saying, so I can tell you what she said—and what Beattie told me too. She said, 'We're not interested in developing Ord stage 3 because we haven't got the wherewithal.' That is what Clare Martin said to me. And so Ord stage 2, which is being developed, was part of a deal for Ord stage 3. Poor old Eric Ripper did not even know when he was trying to do Ord stage 2 expressions of interest—that would have been a white shoe brigade operation—and there was still a ban on GM farming, which means it would not have worked, that the drainage had to go out through the Keep River. He had no understanding that they would have had to deal with the lead mine there, because that is a serious problem for the development of the Ord. Clare Martin was not interested, but we are. We need infrastructure that will value-add at the same time to the mining industry, to the tourism industry and to the agriculture industry. The great opportunity in the north is for our Indigenous people because they own most of the country. This is silly stuff, to put people on the Northern Development Taskforce to find ways to shut it down. They have shut the cattle industry down. The 'don't ask, don't tell' issues with the live export trade is that we do not have the culture that some of these Asian countries have where you have to pay for every signature you require on a piece of paper with what they call 'facilitation money', which is code for bribing. These are serious issues. We have a vision for the north. It will be real and it will include—if there is no development opportunity for the north and north-west of Australia, why is a Chinese company at the present time negotiating to buy ten 10,000-hectare parcels of land up the coast there to create a series of fish farms? The reason they are doing that against the background of problems with the fishing industry in Asia, which is completely contaminated, is that they want to have a secure supply of farmed fish for the future. There are umpteen ways that we can value-add to them. We should take the politics out of this because if you did it on the politics, because there are not very many votes up there, we would all sit down here and tell the next generation of farmers to go jump. (Time expired)