Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I particularly would like to address my comments to amendment (12), which the shadow minister has just referred to, in terms of the mitigation of unintended diversions. For the benefit of the House, I will be opposing that particular amendment. I would like to explain a little bit of the history in relation to this particular issue. I understand that the shadow minister is trying to save the scalp of one of his people, and that is okay in this place but it is not okay out there; people know exactly what is going on here.

I would like to go back a year, if I could, and reflect on a study that was put to the previous Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, Malcolm Turnbull, where he publicly agreed to fund a study that looked at these very issues: the potential impact of mining on groundwater resources and the lack of scientific knowledge about the interconnectivity of those groundwater systems and their relationship to river water. Here we have a piece of legislation that is about a basin plan for the Murray-Darling and we have all these unknowns in terms of these interconnectivity issues.

Over and above that, we have the potential for mining in some of those areas and the interface of this plan, which is a Commonwealth initiated process through COAG, and a state based planning process which determines the granting of exploration licences and, eventually, mining licenses. The difficulty there is that the planning process at the state level is flawed in that it allows for the normal environmental impact statement process but does not allow for the downstream impacts that this particular activity could have if, in fact, some of those potential dangers were put in place.

So we fast-forward to 15 October 2008, when I moved an amendment in here which mentioned the word ‘exploration’. The coalition supported it. I do not think the member for Parkes even spoke on it but others did and supported it. It went to the Senate, where Senator Bob Brown moved a similar amendment; the coalition supported it and lauded themselves—particularly in the National Party—for how great they were for saving the Liverpool Plains. All they had done in fact was recreate the problem. The problem has always been that the state based planning process for the granting of exploration licences is flawed in that it only looks at localised impact and not downstream impact. It does not have to look at downstream impact.

What the National Party has done—and rather than them laud the member of Parkes, he should be ashamed of himself for actually supporting this particular removal of the word ‘exploration’—is recreate the problem, that problem being a flawed state based planning process. There is an issue here, and I will be reintroducing that amendment. Many of the National Party members have said, ‘Oh, we did not understand it.’ Even the member for Calare rang me after Mitch Hooke and the Minerals Council of Australia—through the member for Groom—had got to some of these vagrants in the National Party

See this speech in context