Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too wish to speak on the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Independent Expert Scientific Committee on Coal Seam Gas and Large Coal Mining Development) Bill 2012. I applaud the notion of introducing an independent expert scientific committee. We should have had such a committee looking at coal seam gas and large coal mining developments quite some time ago. The foreshadowed amendment to this bill coming from the coalition is that each member of the committee, except the chair, be appointed on the basis that they possess scientific qualifications that are relevant to this issue, including ecology, geology, hydrology, hydrogeology, natural resource management and health. This is just plain common sense.

Quite self-evidently, coal seam gas extraction is a very new industry. There was zero production in 1995—a very short time ago. Today, there seems to be a gas rush. When we were doing the inquiry as the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Regional Australia in May 2011 we were in fact looking at the impacts of the guide to the Murray-Darling Basin plan, and we were so often asked by Queensland and northern New South Wales submitters to consider the impacts of coal seam gas exploration and mining on the groundwater systems and the agribusiness viability in those parts of the country. The submitters were very concerned about the environmental impacts of CSG, including the contamination of aquifers through leeching of wastewater, changes in aquifer pressure and potential destruction of aquifers, contamination of the land, reduction to surface flows of interconnected systems and the intensive use of basin water by coal seam gas operations. We took a lot of evidence about all of those matters.

There seemed to be, in particular, a concern that the coal seam gas rush was proceeding with very limited research and understanding of the long-term or even short-term consequences. There was some reference to what had happened in the United States, but often this was related to shale rather than to coal seam gas extraction. But, quite clearly, there have been horror stories in the USA about risks to health, damage to aquifers, surface water pollution and the like. So we need to learn from other countries, and this independent expert scientific committee will be one step towards making sure that we do not allow our country to become another in the long list of mining disasters.

Today there are more than 4,000 kilometres of gas transmission pipelines related to the coal seam gas industry. In Queensland the number of coal seam gas wells has increased from just 10 per year in the early 1990s to over 735 in 2008-09. So this is a massively increasing industry. The coal basin of Queensland and New South Wales covers extensive areas of eastern Queensland and northern New South Wales, but unfortunately those same areas coincide with some of our richest soils and some of our highest producing agricultural lands. They also coincide with the Great Artesian Basin, in many areas, and other major aquifers. Coal seam gas can help to lower greenhouse gas emissions—if the gas is, for example, methane and it is replacing the burning of coal or oil—but there are other gases associated with the coal seams which are not so wonderful. We have to make sure that what we are doing is going to improve our situation in the long run. Of course, water is a by-product of the gas extraction and the quality of this water varies from place to place, but too often it needs treatment if it is not to become a contaminant in storage ponds that lie awaiting evaporation or seepage into the landscape. Problems in the USA with water extracted from shale gas production have now led the Queensland government to amend the Environmental Protection Act 1994 to limit the construction of these evaporative storages on the surface. That is a good move, but there are already many in existence and I am concerned about their leakage and seepage, not to mention the impact on the landscape values.

There are also concerns about the use of the so-called fracking fluids. The Australian industry claims that fracking fluids used in Australia are safe and do not contain carcinogens such as the BTEX group that led to the disasters in the United States. New South Wales and Queensland have now banned the use of BTEX in coal seam gas extraction in their states, and the chemicals used in fracking fluids are required to be listed in the national chemical inventory. However most of these chemicals have not been assessed by the National Industrial Chemicals Notification and Assessment Scheme. This is a problem. Those various chemicals need to be assessed urgently. That is why this expert committee is very much needed. The committee will need to look at the human health issues, the water issues and the issues associated with hydrology and geology, but it will also need to look at issues related to our food production in Australia and how we can ensure that we do not have a short-term gas rush at the long-term expense of our own national food security.

I am most concerned that, at a time when we are identifying a growing global demand for high-value food production, and the Australian Prime Minister recently identified as one of her goals taking advantage of the growing market very close to us in nearby regions for foods, we have virtually no protection for our fertile soils and water supplies from mining. We are a geologically ancient, eroded and leached continent. Our groundwater systems, such as the Great Artesian Basin, are ancient: they are hundreds of thousands of years old. We still do not know about their recharge rates, and we have many bores from the earliest days left uncapped with the water flowing free. Therefore there are substantial drops in the pressure or the groundwater levels in a lot of those aquifers are already well advanced. We need national land protection guidelines that coincide with the publishing of Australia's first national food plan. We have to address issues of encroaching urbanisation, forestry and mining on what are some of our best-producing, most valuable food growing regions. The latest Murray-Darling Basin proposal was released just yesterday—and more of it today .That proposal identifies that there will be further restriction of the water available for irrigated agriculture. The Murray-Darling Basin Authority has assessed that across the basin its plan will lead to only one per cent reduction in productivity. But in areas of, for example, intensive dairying or other food production, it is understood that the impacts, in terms of reduced productivity, will be similar to what is now called the 'millennium drought'. We therefore have many threats to food security and food production in Australia. We are already a net importer of processed food in this country. We have very little understanding of the levels of investment of foreign businesses—or, indeed, national companies—when it comes to parts of our food value chains or indeed the land and its productive base. We do not know at this point, for example, how much of our current food producing enterprise is in the hands of foreign nationals and what the implications of this are for our own future innovation, research and development opportunities and, indeed, our food security itself.

When you add those dilemmas together—the lack of a national policy in relation to protecting our agribusiness and our agricultural lands, the fact that we do not have an abundance of fertile soils, the fact that water is one of our most scarce resources limiting agricultural development—and the coal seam gas rush, where those explorations do coincide with some of our best agricultural land, then you realise that we are a nation that needs to do some heavy-duty new thinking.

The committee that is being proposed is, as I said at the beginning, an important additional safeguard; but in itself it will not be sufficient. We need regulation and legislation to protect our agricultural resources, including our water resources, our soils and our biodiversity. This amendment from the coalition will add to the value of this expert scientific committee if it is adopted in due course.

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