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

It is with pleasure that I speak to this piece of legislation, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Independent Expert Scientific Committee on Coal Seam Gas and Large Coal Mining Development) Bill 2012. This piece of legislation will have lasting significance environmentally and in the way that state and territory governments relate to the Commonwealth about water. This chamber is currently looking at the Murray-Darling issue and other water issues across the nation and this piece of legislation will have lasting significance.

This bill would not have happened had there not been a hung parliament. This is a piece of legislation which is bound to a national partnerships agreement that New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia—I am not quite sure at the moment whether Victoria—have signed. The independent scientific committee which we are debating today is part of that broader agreement. That national partnerships agreement will have lasting impact. It is part of the negotiations around the minerals resource rent tax that the member for Lyne and I had with the Prime Minister where $200 million was set aside for the national partnerships agreement; $150 million of it to go into the arrangement we are talking about tonight.

I will not spend a lot of time talking about the committee and its functions. I think they are fairly self-explanatory and most members have already spent time doing that. But it is interesting to see that for once we have unity across the chamber on what is potentially one of the most significant issues to face regional Australia—that is, the impact of coal seam gas and large coalmining developments on groundwater systems. One of the things that is critical to this debate, and to the independence of the scientific committee that this bill puts in place, is to recognise that in the past there have been state government failures in process. In New South Wales there are some former mining entities under investigation as we speak. I will explain for those who do not understand the process of what effectively happens now in a mining application. There are slight variations between coal seam gas and mining but New South Wales and Queensland have very similar processes. Essentially, a company makes application or applies for an exploration licence. It carries out a whole range of environmental and other assessments and gives the state government of the day some cash for doing that. It then relays that information and the environmental and other assessments back to the approving government, which is the same one that received the money. Then, traditionally, some codicils might be put on the mining application. I think only one application in New South Wales has been refused. So there has been a process whereby the mining sector has been able to virtually drive a bus through the allocation of an exploration licence, which eventually leads to the allocation of a production licence with, in some cases, a minor amendment.

That system has failed, particularly in New South Wales, and I think it is failing in parts of Queensland as we speak in that it has not taken into account the effect of these activities on groundwater systems, particularly in those circumstances where this parliament and the state parliaments within the Murray-Darling system are looking at trying to come to grips with a water-accounting process that crosses state borders and that has some impact on environmental flows and the management of the general river system. When we do not understand the groundwater issue it is impossible to develop appropriate 'accounting in the valley' processes without that knowledge.

Part of the reason for this scientific committee being put together is to get a more appropriate hold on the knowledge that we do have. I would imagine that, where we do not have sufficient knowledge, the people on this committee would make recommendations to the federal Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities, who, through the national partnership agreement—which is not being debated today but is the bigger part of the package of which the scientific committee is a smaller part—will have the capacity to go back to the state approval processes and have some real say as to whether those processes go forward. There will be transparency in what the independent scientific committee actually does in terms of the information that it relays.

We have had state planning failures in the past. In an independent sense, the scientific committee will be able to assess the potential impacts of some of these large coalmine developments, mining developments and particularly coal seam gas developments. This measure has grown out of concerns that were originally expressed by people on the Liverpool Plains, which is in my electorate and, to their credit, by people in Queensland, who have great concern not only about coal seam gas developments but also about large mining developments on the Darling Downs. Both of those sections are part of the Murray-Darling system. The Haystack Plain development on the Darling Downs, in a sense, became a lightning rod for the intersection between the mining sector and agriculture. Liverpool Plains are another area of concern. There is a big difference between Liverpool Plains and the Darling Downs. They do have similar soils and they are highly productive soils—they are some of the best soils in the world. But the Liverpool Plains—not all but quite large sections—have massive underground water resources. The knowledge of the Liverpool Plains underground water resources is probably one of the greatest that we have in this nation but it is still minute.

So, before many of these large-scale activities take place, there is a need to actually understand what is going on under the ground and how that could impact not only on the mine site but on the people who are nowhere near the mine site but who may be impacted by the groundwater systems that could be disrupted through some of these extractive activities.

Part of this committee's work is to establish a bioregional assessment process. In 2008, environmental spokeswoman for the Minerals Council, Melanie Stutsel, essentially made the point that, prior to the letting of exploration licences there should be a region-by-region assessment—a bioregional assessment—of particular landscapes so that mining companies did not apply for an exploration licence in an area where they may not have been granted success in the long term. I just instance, even though it is not incorporated in any of this legislation, that you cannot apply to mine in a national park. Governments of the day have made a decision that certain areas of the nation which may well have resources under them cannot be mined.

The bioregional assessment process is essentially about assessing risk. This committee will have the capacity to make reference to the minister; the capacity to do research; the capacity to make an independent reference back to the minister about a bioregional assessment process; the capacity to look at the cumulative impacts of a number of proposed mines and existing mines; and the capacity to look at how they will potentially impact on the groundwater systems and the landscape generally.

I thank the minister for being here and I thank him for his role in the broader part of what we are talking about today: the National Partnership Agreement on Coal Seam Gas and Large Coal Mining. We should have undertaken a bioregional process many years ago. If we had have done it years ago, we would not now be going through this convoluted Murray-Darling process, because a lot of the work on the impacts on water, our knowledge of risk and water and how it intersects with landscape and other issues, and how groundwater systems relate to surface water systems would have been done.

Today there was an announcement from the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. I heard the minister's press conference and I share his concern. There are new numbers, again, in relation to groundwater. Hence the general public and particularly those who live in the Murray-Darling system are legitimately asking the question: what does all this mean? How come we can get a variety of numbers about a particular issue when we really do not understand what is going on?

The independent scientific committee will work in priority areas which, I think, are nominated in the bill somewhere. The point of the independent scientific committee is to work through those priority areas. One of them, the Liverpool Plains, is in my electorate. There are a number of large coalmining developments there at the moment. There are a number under assessment, and people have very real concerns about them. There are also a number that people do not have many concerns about. There is also a proposal for very large gas fields to be explored and potentially developed. This committee can assess, instigate research and make recommendations by way of advice back to the minister about what it believes will be the risk profile—and very importantly the cumulative risk profile—on some of these developments.

I would like to thank the Namoi Catchment Management Authority for the role they have played. They have spent something like $6 million or $7 million in recent years developing a layered spatial approach to their landscape. The Commonwealth has been involved by way of the Namoi water study, which will provide another layer. In that particular catchment there is a lot of evidence. The independent scientific process will be able to gather that information and make recommendations, or show concerns, or assess risks or cumulative impacts in terms of the catchment, and it will be an invaluable objective way of assessing whether these projects should go ahead or not.

I am not anti or pro, but I am very pro that the decisions are made in an objective sense. The state based process that we have had for many years has not been objective. The mining companies, essentially, have paid for the licence, gone away and paid for the environmental assessments, then gone back to the government that they paid the money to and asked for approval. There has been a nice little club where approval is nearly always granted.

I think it is important, particularly with the vision to have the Murray-Darling across state boundaries, that we have an independent scientific process that is part of the National Partnership Agreement which looks at the broader impact of these developments across the catchment, the Murray-Darling where I live, and also across the independent subcatchments within the broader catchment. Once we get to that stage we can make objective assessments with long-term risk profiles, and those developments will not be allowed to go ahead if it is shown that there is a risk of impacting on the landscape.

See this speech in context