Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Change, Environment and Urban Water) Share this | Hansard source

It is with great pleasure that I rise to support this motion from the member for Cook. The reason I do so is very simple. Both he and I in our respective maiden speeches set out a very clear principle: our task, our responsibility, in our own electorates was to protect our coasts and work towards clean coasts. In each of our situations, there is a threat which is fundamental, and each has been brought about by, in his case, the action and inaction of the New South Wales government and, in the case of the Mornington Peninsula and the Gunnamatta outfall, the inaction of the Victorian government.

Turning specifically to this motion, we want to address it in two parts. My learned colleague the member for Cook set out the physical risks associated with the desalination plant. I want to deal with the second element: the opportunity cost of pursuing a $2 billion project which soaks up that capital, which would otherwise be available and should otherwise be applied to the process of cleaning up our coasts. The problem that we face here is that, on the edge of Botany Bay, 166 billion litres of high-rate primary sewage is discharged every year. It is discharged from Malabar Headland. I would note that the site of Malabar Headland is within the electorate of the current minister for the environment. So let me repeat that, to the best of my knowledge—and this is an opinion, not a categorical statement—the current minister for the environment has, at no stage, raised the desperate need to end this practice of dumping 166 billion litres of waste water every year off the Malabar Headland.

Why is this a problem? It is a problem for two reasons. Firstly: it is a fouling of our ocean. It is high-rate primary sewage which, as the member for Wentworth has famously said, simply represents the removal of sandshoes from our waste products. We are using the ocean as a dumping ground. Secondly: this waste of water, as well as pollution of our ocean, is likely to be in place for another generation. This motion goes to the heart of that problem. By taking $2 billion which could be used to clean up most of the almost 400 billion litres of waste water which comes from the Malabar Headland, from the Bondi ocean outfall and from the North Sydney ocean outfall, we are seeing a grand opportunity cost.

The member for Banks represents a Sydney seat and I cannot believe that he would condone the dumping of 166 billion litres of waste water—primary treated, barely treated, effluent—off the coast of Malabar Headland. And then, when you take on board Bondi and North Head near Manly, that is 350 billion litres of primary treated waste water. The rest of the country treats their water to a secondary or tertiary standard. This is water which, at a time of national need, should be recycled for industry and agriculture. Yet at this moment, at the very time we should be adopting a 21st-century approach to cleaning up these 19th-century avenues for dumping our sewage off our coasts, the New South Wales government has come along and embedded this practice for another generation. This capital resource can and should be used, as the rest of the country has done, for cleaning up our coasts. I know that honourable members on the opposite side believe this. They cannot sit there and condone the dumping of primary sewage on a monumental basis every year off our coast. But that is what this decision will do—it will use $2 billion of scarce capital resource on a desalination plant. Desalination may have a role, but our view in the Liberal Party is that it is the last resort, not the first resort. Our task is very simple: clean up our coasts by recycling our waste water for industry and agriculture. It is what the rest of the world does; it is what the rest of Australia is going to do; it is what Sydney Water must do. And the priority must be recycling rather than desalination, because that is the way of the 21st century.

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