Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank everybody who has contributed to what has been an extremely good and a very constructive debate here in the chamber. I have not been able to hear all of it, but I have probably heard close to half of the contributions, either here within the chamber or from my office. There has been a really strong message from this chamber to industry generally and to the public—and this will not be lost on anyone—that the bill before us does not say that nothing should go ahead, but it does say that all decisions should be made on the best possible scientific information and that information should be available independently.

When I was dealing with some of the environmental decisions on projects in the Darling Downs—the Surat Basin—I felt there was a need for ongoing adaptive management of some of these mechanisms and I established an independent scientific committee that would overlook them. When the mining tax was being discussed, the member for New England and the member for Lyne both argued the case strongly, asking, 'Why can't we provide the best possible information in advance of decisions? Why do we have to wait for the process of decisions having been made and get into adaptive management?' They came up with the suggestion to government that we have an independent scientific committee on an ongoing basis and we provide serious dollars to fund the best possible information. It is one of the best ways of dealing with the obligations that we find we have in our interactions with the states. In this bill we are not telling the states to change their standards. We are not telling them to change their timelines or their laws, but we are saying: 'If we're putting together a framework with the best possible scientific information, then please use it. Use it to inform your decisions, because no-one should be afraid of applying the best quality scientific information to environmental decisions.'

We also need to face the fact that we are dealing with an area that is unbelievably complex and where a lot is not fully known. I have had a number of discussions where I have been told that individual aquifers have no connection to other areas of underground water and then I get told by another set of scientists that they think they might be connected and others who say they definitely are. There is a high degree of uncertainty and a lot of information only becomes available as further research is done. By putting the serious dollars that are on the table attached to this bill and having—

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