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

I will speak briefly to the amendment and the previous amendment, moved by the member for Kennedy, which did not get through the House. Whilst I have great sympathy for the sentiment being expressed by the Greens—and I thank the member for Melbourne for his complimentary remarks—I am not sure that this is the vehicle to drive a moratorium process. There may well be other vehicles within the parliament that could do that. This legislation is essentially about objectivity. It is not picking one side of the debate or the other; it is establishing an independent scientific process that is locked into a national partnerships agreement, which broadens the area.

The suggestion that we have some sort of absolute moratorium until we get the science right does, I think, apply in some areas. If the independent scientific committee and the national partnerships agreement are actually working successfully, that will in fact happen. It will go to risk, particularly in relation to water resources. It will go to the cumulative impact of large coal developments plus others in some catchments—the catchment of the Namoi, for instance. Large developments are being proposed there; there are large developments there now; there are large coal-seam gas companies interested in another layer of extractive activities, all around quite massive areas. It is not in the Great Artesian Basin, as the member for Kennedy kept referring to. The artesian basin does not exist there, but there are quite large groundwater supplies that we do not fully comprehend either for the Murray-Darling plan that is in the parliament at the moment or for the extraction of coal-seam gas. In those cases, if the scientific committee is working effectively, it will delay some of these large developments until effective and fully objective knowledge exists about those catchments.

There are other catchments where we do have a relatively full scientific knowledge and where the water resources are not of the magnitude of either the artesian basin or areas on the Liverpool Plains, for instance. The member for Groom would be well aware of some of the irrigation areas on the Darling Downs. There are other electorates in Queensland where there is a degree of knowledge about the scientific impact on water resources.

For that reason I will not support the amendment. There may well be other vehicles in the parliament by which these issues can be driven, but I do not think this is the right bill for it. Bear in mind that a lot of work has gone into plugging together the national partnerships agreement with the states. If this amendment were passed, we would run the risk of the whole process fracturing and undoing a lot of good work that has been done by a lot of people over a number of years.

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