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

Tonight I would like to put on the agenda for all Australians—and begin the debate that will lead to the protection of Australia’s sovereignty and food security, both for our country, the world’s luckiest continent, and our role in supporting the global food task—the urgent need to put our agricultural land and water resources on the radar of the Foreign Investment Review Board. I will give the Senate a snapshot of the future. By 2050, the world will have a population of 9 billion. According to the science—all science has vagaries though—50 per cent of the world’s population could be poor for water; one billion people could be unable to feed themselves; 30 per cent of the productive land in Asia, where two thirds of the world’s population will live, could be out of production due to urbanisation and climate change; the food task will double and possibly up to 1.6 billion people out of 9 billion on the planet will be displaced. If you extrapolate the science out to 2070, you will see that the world will have just on 12 billion people—this was evidence provided to the Senate Select Committee on Agriculture and Related Industries last week. China will have just on two billion people, but it will only have the capacity to feed a third of its population from its own agriculture resources with the known advance of science. Ninety-seven per cent of the world’s water is salt water and three per cent is fresh water, two-thirds of which is tied up permanently in snow and ice so that only 1/250th of the world’s water is available in our rivers and streams. Indeed, there is more water tied up in the clouds than there is in our rivers and streams.

We face the situation where agricultural land is not on the radar. The Foreign Investment Review Board, which gave evidence to my committee last week, says:

The legislated requirements for the notification and screening of land acquisitions only apply to urban land. Acquisitions of rural land are generally exempt from the foreign investment review except where they occur through an acquisition of an interest in a company that owns rural land or the acquisition is otherwise subject to notification under the foreign investment review.

Agricultural land except in urban areas is exempt unless it hits the trigger of $230 million. The Foreign Investment Review Board last week confirmed to me and to the committee that it is indeed possible to go down the Murrumbidgee River today and buy every property—a foreign entity could go down the river and buy every property and not trigger the interest of the Foreign Investment Review Board. Given the future of the global food task I think that, as part of protecting Australia’s sovereignty, we should have some sort of oversight of who is buying and acquiring our agricultural and water resources. I would like to table a letter from a constituent, which I have shown to the opposition, to back up my argument.

Leave granted.

We take it for granted when we go to Coles, Woolies and Aldi that the tucker is down that aisle, the veggies are down there and the meat is down there. But by 2050, and certainly by 2070, what is in the fridge will be far more important than what is in the garage. China is through the denial phase. By 2050 they will have 400 million people living off the Great Northern Aquifer, which is being irretrievably mined. They will have to engineer a water solution for that. India is still in denial. India has a huge water problem which will exacerbate the problem in Bangladesh. India is mining the groundwater that becomes the river water for Bangladesh.

At the present time on the African continent there are Arab states with sovereign backed funds—the same money trail that is now trying to acquire Cubbie Station on the lower Balonne. One of those companies is a Cayman Islands based company—we know what happens with companies in the Cayman Islands—and the other is sovereign backed by Arab states. Australia is fortunate that it is an island continent. With the climate change that is predicted for the world, Australia will gain potential in the north and lose potential in the south—and I will not go into the technical details of that because I do not have time tonight. On the African continent at the present time, major players from the Arab states, China and India are going into some of the poorer countries and buying some of the better agricultural land—not to feed the poorer countries but to export the production from that land back to their countries to feed themselves.

That is fair enough. But we need to put that on our radar in Australia. We need to know who owns our agricultural land. China will have the capacity to feed only one-third of its population by 2070, so obviously they will be on the march around the world. What has made Australia the best place in the world to raise a family, breathe fresh air and drink clean water is the environment in which we live. Water is the world’s most precious resource, and our most precious human resource is our children—and our children will have to face up to this problem. We could endanger all that today by worrying about where we are going to be at the next election, not where we are going to be in the next 50 years. This should not be a political issue. It is in the national interests of Australia and it is a sovereign issue for Australia.

The alarm bells are already ringing in places like New Zealand. I have a press release here from a South Australian source which says the New Zealand equivalent of our Foreign Investment Review Board is investigating a Chinese consortium’s attempt to buy 8,000 hectares and 17,000 cows. Professor Zhou, from James Cook University, says the push to buy international land is coming from the Chinese government, which wants to ensure the country has food security for the future. That is fair enough. But at the same time we need to protect our own security, so we need to have some oversight of who is acquiring and buying our land and water. There was recently a purchase in one of those dodgy managed investment schemes, the Timbercorp one, where the resources and some of the water have gone off to a company in Singapore. We absolutely need to put this on the radar. This is not about farmers getting the best price for their land, which is the opposite argument being put by people who doubt the wisdom of protecting our sovereignty through controlling and having knowledge of who is acquiring our agricultural resources.

The southern Murray-Darling Basin has 23,400 gigalitres of mean run-off. It is presently running at about 25 per cent of that figure at the end of the system. If the science on Australia’s weather is 40 per cent correct then we will absolutely have to reconfigure the way we have settled and the way we do our business in regional and rural Australia. There is a proposition that we should lock up Northern Australia. If you think the people coming in on boats now are a problem, if the science is 10 per cent correct then there will be 160 million people on the planet who are displaced and looking for somewhere else to live. So we ought to occupy and make the best use of the resources that mother nature is providing to us. Instead of locking up Cape York Peninsula and the first kilometre of land along all those rivers up there from any commercial use, especially for the Indigenous people, we ought to be into it and developing it. If we do not, I think someone else eventually will.

Unfortunately I have only 10 minutes tonight—this could take two hours. I want to give an example of what I am talking about for farming land and the capacity of farmers to get a decent return on their land. At the present time globally we have $40 billion of research into agriculture for the food task. It is estimated that we need $160 billion worth of research. To put that into context, at the present time, as Senator Faulkner would know, there is about $1.8 trillion being spent annually on defence around the globe. So we are all worrying about defence but not about how we are going to feed ourselves. And the distortion that has occurred in the Sydney home market because of it being off the FIRB’s radar—that has now been altered; gladly, the government has twigged to it and we are changing the rules—could happen with agricultural land. I think this is a serious issue for Australia. I would like to put it firmly on the radar and get ordinary Australians to think about this. This is not about banning foreign sales or stopping the Vesteys. The other weakness in the system is that there is self-reporting of the involvement of foreign sovereign funds. It should not be self-reporting; it should be compulsory reporting.