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

The member for Hinkler’s hearing is adequate, and obviously he will be able to stay in this environment for quite some time! I did mention, member for Hinkler, that in about 10 years time the technologies will quite possibly be available for interactive, real-time health care and participation in communication with relatives, and also this technology has the capacity to provide monitoring services within the home environment. What savings will be accrued from that sort of technology? No-one knows that, and the Productivity Commission can only guess at it, and there are any number of examples of that sort of thing. What will the savings be when GPs in country areas will be able to almost immediately contact specialist services, potentially in any part of the world, if they have issues? That sort of backup in providing some of those services is going to be extraordinary.

One thing I would like to speak about as well is the ongoing debate that is taking place in regional Australia, particularly in parts of the New England electorate, about the interface of coalmining methane gas extraction, groundwater systems, surface water systems and flood plain management. There have been a number of issues in Queensland recently where there are very real concerns about the lack of a policy platform to base future decisions on. And the people of the Liverpool Plains, for instance—there was another meeting held in Gunnedah only last week, and the Leader of the Australian Greens, Senator Bob Brown, attended, as did others—have very real concern with some of these extractive activities and even the exploratory activities that the state governments are allowing to proceed without any real knowledge of the potential impacts on the hydraulics of various groundwater systems and the long-term impacts on some of the most productive land in Australia.

In that case I was talking about the Liverpool Plains. In Queensland, in the Haystack Plain and in places like Felton and other parts of the Darling Downs, areas which have been very, very productive over the long term, some of the more profitable extractive activities are moving in. We really do not know the long-term impact of allowing those industries to go ahead. I am not arguing against those industries, but I have argued for some time that what we really need—and I will be moving this way next year when the parliament settles down—is legislation to put in place some form of bioregional assessment prior to the granting of exploration licences and the argy-bargy that goes on between the investment sector and government. In this case it is mostly state government but, with the Murray-Darling arrangements in place between the Commonwealth and the states, there is a role for the Commonwealth to play, and part of that role may well be through amendment to the Water Act 2007. Irrespective of how we do it, we need to put in place a clear policy platform for bioregional assessment to be done. If the bioregional assessment shows that there are risks if certain activities occur in certain areas—to the groundwater systems or whatever, depending on the nature of the land—then those activities would be prohibited.

These bioregional assessments could well involve putting lines on a map to show certain areas where exploratory activity and mining activity can occur and other areas where it cannot. It is a fairly simplistic way of looking at it. Some people say that it would be very difficult to do. Well, we do it in national parks now. We have passed a law to say that in certain areas of land you do not carry out certain activities. I suggest that we do the same for some of the very productive food-producing areas, particularly where there is an interconnect between the groundwater and surface water, and particularly when we are going through this process of trying to design an intervalley water budget. If extractive activities that could impact on groundwater and surface water flow were allowed to proceed, what would it do in the Murray-Darling, for instance, in terms of the whole water budget? I do not know the answer to that and neither do the mining companies and the state governments. Before we get too many cumulative impacts of some of these extractive activities, we really need to have a handle on what that means.

Normally an extractive industry will look after its area of land, but all it has to do through the EIS process is look after the area of land it is actually mining and make sure that nothing gets off it to pollute the neighbours. But, if you are invading groundwater systems, the impact could occur 10 or 100 kilometres away—nowhere near the actual activity itself. Proving in a court that the extractive activity, when it crossed a groundwater aquifer, for instance, caused a problem 10 or 15 kilometres away will be enormously difficult for a landholder to do. The case would be beaten to death in the courts. I think government has to put in place a policy. As I said, I will be moving to put in place some sort of legislative arrangement next year that will address that. There are others who are looking at it. I know Melanie Stutsel, the environmental officer for the Minerals Council of Australia, addressed a similar issue in a Senate inquiry a few years ago. The mining industry were suggesting that they were not opposed to something similar to a bioregional assessment. The question is: who does the assessment? I think it is the role of government. The Murray-Darling system, where we have come to special agreements between the states and the Commonwealth, would be a very good place to start.

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