Ian Macfarlane (Groom, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

The purpose of the Offshore Petroleum Amendment (Datum) Bill 2008 is to make a minor technical amendment to the datum provisions included in the Offshore Petroleum Act 2006. To my understanding and the understanding of the opposition, there is no policy change attached to this amendment. Although the advent of global positioning systems justifies the adoption of an international geocentric datum, the OPA still needs to refer to the AGD66 for the purposes of determining the position of graticular sections or blocks and refer to the GDA94 for certain other purposes, including description of coordinates of a point in the title. Madam Deputy Speaker, isn’t it lucky that I am the grandson of a geologist, a very good geologist?

If graticular sections or blocks are determined by reference to GDA94, as the amended Offshore Petroleum Act currently states, the grid used to determine the position of the titles will be moved approximately 200 metres in a north-easterly direction from a grid that refers to AGD66. This is not the policy intention and would cause concern and uncertainty for the petroleum industry if not corrected. Certainty is a fundamental component of the resource sector, as I noted in a speech in this place earlier this year. Without that certainty, we risk undermining one of the most critical contributions to our economy, a part of our economy that generates not only thousands of jobs but literally billions of dollars of exports. Of course, any industry that currently generates jobs is incredibly important to Australia—doubly so since the advent of the Rudd government and a new phenomenon in the 21st century: rising unemployment.

The resource industry in Australia, despite what is being done to it by the Rudd government, is an industry that is investing tens of billions of dollars to secure not only the future of Australia in terms of jobs and exports but also the future of this planet by ensuring that we produce a clean energy product—a product that can be used instead of coal in countries all over the world. In fact, the history of the petroleum and LNG industries in Australia shows that they are leading innovators in terms of the efficiency gains that they are making—for instance, in the North West Shelf between trains 1 and 2 and trains 3, 4 and 5. It also needs to be highlighted that LNG has greenhouse gas emissions with about half the life cycle of those of traditional fossil fuels; it also has very low levels of particulate and sulfur emissions. If the potential of the LNG industry in Australia were fully realised, it would save the globe around 200 million tonnes per annum, according to ABARE.

Whilst this amendment to the legislation is important with regard to giving the petroleum industry certainty in relation to the leases it holds, it is minute in comparison to the uncertainty that is currently being created by the Rudd Labor government, and I will speak of two areas. The first and most concerning area is the way in which the LNG industry in Australia will be treated under the proposals put forward by Senator Wong and the Prime Minister. In that green paper on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the LNG industry—despite the fact, and almost in spite of the fact, that they have lowered their emissions in producing what, as I have just stated, is an incredibly friendlier fuel in terms of greenhouse gas emissions—have been caught by an arbitrary threshold that means, had they not made those gains in lowering greenhouse gas emissions in the production of LNG, they would be eligible for compensation. But, under the misguided plan that has been put forward by the Rudd government, that industry is going to be penalised for its good work and its efficiency and the greenhouse gases it has already saved.

There is no logic in what is being proposed under the green paper. It penalises those industries that have made savings, whether it is the LNG industry and the savings it has made, whether it is the cement industry and the savings it has made, whether it is the aluminium industry and the 40 per cent savings it has made or whether it is the ethane industry, which in producing plastics has made some enormous savings in emissions of some 40 per cent. The LNG industry—

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