Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

We have just heard from the member for Cook an entirely fanciful attack on the proposal for the desalination plant at Kurnell. The motion that the member for Cook was speaking to has three parts. The first part states obvious known values about Botany Bay such as that it is the landing site of Lieutenant James Cook on 29 April 1770, that the village of Kurnell is a strong local community and that Botany Bay is a valuable marine environment. All of that is stating the obvious—and that is pretty much all that was said by the member for Cook in his speech. But there is a false implication that these values are threatened by the pipeline of the desalination plant—when there is no evidence of any such threat. The second part of the motion makes several misleading statements about the system of environmental regulation in New South Wales, and I will say a few things about that in a moment. The third part of the motion ignores the history of this project, ignores in particular the role of the former Liberal government—about which the member for Cook has said nothing—and asks the federal environment minister to do something which he has no power to do.

We just had a bizarre statement by the member for Cook which went like this: ‘I wrote to the minister because this government wants to put an end to the blame game.’ The member for Cook then told us that the minister wrote back saying, entirely correctly—as had two previous Liberal environment ministers—that there was no power for the federal government to intervene. Yet the member for Cook said in the next sentence that this was an opportunity for the federal government to act and that the minister has remained ‘stonily silent’. How it can be said that the minister for the environment has remained stonily silent when he courteously and promptly wrote back to the letter from the member for Cook is a mystery perhaps the member for Cook can explain later.

It is simply not true, as was suggested by the member for Cook in his motion, that due to the use of the New South Wales Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 the risks from this project remain unknown. The member for Cook used a similar phrase in his speech when he said, ‘We simply do not know what the impact is’—that also is not true. Sydney Water published a 455-page environmental assessment in April 2007, which contained a very detailed examination and assessment of likely impacts. Before that—and this is the significant thing—Sydney Water had referred the project to the federal minister under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act of the Commonwealth with a very lengthy submission setting out the likely impacts of this project, which were regarded as negligible.

In that referral to the federal Minister for the Environment and Heritage on 26 September 2005, it was explained that the desalination plant was intended to assist the New South Wales government’s strategy of drought-proofing Sydney’s water supply over the next 25 years. At the time there were suggestions made that the proposal should be a controlled action because of potential significant impacts on the Kurnell Peninsula national heritage place, the Towra Point Ramsar site and listed threatened and migratory species. There were 1,470 submissions in respect of this referral and, as the referral document made clear, the two relevant listed threatened species present on the site were not thought to be at risk from this project because—

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