Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

It was a decision for BHP! All these approvals were unlocked. It can be done if you properly fund the Public Service and if you have environment ministers who do their job. Instead, we have a government that guts the Public Service and says—surprise, surprise!—'The department's taking a long time to do its work.' Of course it is! It takes people to be employed to do the job to get approvals sorted through. Sometimes, when we hear the government talk about delays, those delays are where the department have in fact told the company, 'This is what we need,' and they're waiting for the information to come back. That is not the fault of whether it's dealt with at a federal or state level; that's simply waiting for the company to provide the information.

But if this government wants to say, 'Well, you just hand it to the states and it will be quicker,' my fear is that maybe it will be a hell of a lot quicker because a whole lot of standards just disappear. I would hate to think where we would have landed, if we hadn't introduced the water trigger, in terms of the treatment of underground water when you had major coalmines and major coal seam gas projects. I shudder to think what the states, left to their own devices, would have done on those projects, because the only reason there was an independent scientific committee was because it was in federal legislation. It wasn't something the states had ever established; it was something that was put there because this parliament made a decision that, if it is an international treaty that we have signed up to, it should be of national importance and this should be the place of government that deals with it.

This rush of just wanting to make environmental protection someone else's problem is something that, if they get this through, the government will regret. It will mean that, if you get an arcing up on an issue at an international level—like what's happened over the last couple of days with respect to potentially where the World Heritage Committee might land with the Great Barrier Reef—you can't really go there and say, 'Oh, look, we want you to say this is okay, but it wasn't really our responsibility; we'd already flick-passed it to another tier of government.' That's not going to help you. That's not going to help Australia. It doesn't help us to be the only country in the world that defers its treaty responsibilities to states and the signatory to the treaty just flick-passes it and takes no responsibility. But I guess it's no surprise that the government want this, because they have been willing to create the crisis by gutting the public service and going slow on approvals. They've done that. That's been eyes wide open from those opposite. But then the next thing they do is say: 'What a surprise. It's all taking too long; we'd better had it to the states.'

Every major environmental decision—every one of them—has come because of campaigns or governmental decisions from Labor. That is simply the history of it. When the Liberal government and Malcolm Fraser took credit for being responsible for the time when the Great Barrier Reef was put on the World Heritage List, they sort of omitted the fact that, until Gough Whitlam signed up to the World Heritage Convention, we couldn't put anything on the list. They sort of omitted that fact. There was a Labor campaign for it to go on the list. What was the Labor campaign about? It was about the fact that the other side of politics wanted to oil drilling in the Great Barrier Reef. So don't be too proud. Don't be too proud of something that you were shamed into. That's how the Great Barrier Reef ended up on the World Heritage List.

The two largest conservation decisions in the history of the planet both belong to Australia and to decisions of Labor governments. The largest conservation decision in the history of the planet was when Bob Hawke and Michel Rocard got together and turned around every other country in the Antarctic Treaty and made sure that the Antarctic would be a sanctuary for the environment and science. There was somebody on the other side of politics who said, 'That would be a great place for mining.' That person was made Deputy Prime Minister of Australia this week. Different members of parliament at different times have been sent there. There's some trip on the big orange ship, on the icebreaker, where they go down to Antarctica and they keep a diary and they take notes. No-one else has come back and said, 'Oh, that would be a great place to mine.' One member of this place has done it, and he just got elevated to the second-most important job that this place has to offer.

The second-largest conservation decision that's been made in the history of the planet was the marine parks. The response from this government was to cut them in half to make sure there was no longer a connection between the Coral Sea and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. They cut it in half. That's what they own. They resisted the protection of Kakadu. They resisted the protection of the Daintree. They resisted the Tasmanian dam's decision. They resisted the peace agreement and in fact came to office tearing up the forestry peace agreement. And we've seen the outcome of that now—that industry having missed out on the support it was meant to get from the peace agreement with markets. But, in terms of conservation, all the areas that weren't going to get logged didn't get logged anyway, so the only losers in tearing up that agreement were industry and exports. They were the only losers! That was the achievement! And why do they do it? Because they were hellbent on wanting to make sure that they could argue they were against any of this environmental rubbish.

Can I tell you that there are few things more conservative than saying, 'We probably shouldn't wreck the planet.' It's a relatively conservative sort of position to start with, but what's meant to be the conservative side of politics has always been troubled by it. And, as a result, we get to the situation that we're in today, where you have the 10-year review of the act and they decide to not implement it, because we cannot pretend that what's in front of us now is an implementation of the Samuel review. It is not. We can't take seriously what this government has said about foreign affairs, because, for all their claims that foreign affairs should be the preserve of this parliament, we have legislation now to hand over the responsibility for every treaty back to the states if it's about the environment.

Finally, the madness, which was the most recent addition to this act, was the water trigger—and the other side of politics voted for this—where we specifically said that it could not be deferred to the states. Why did the parliament do that? Because we had seen what the states were doing with respect to callous disregard for underground water. The Great Artesian Basin—there are a few conductivity points across state borders. The water doesn't actually freeze the moment you get to the Queensland, Victorian and South Australian border! But, having gone through the process of seeing how poorly the states handle this, having seen the need for federal oversight, they've decided we'll have the power but we'll let the states make the decision over it! What's in front of us is hypocritical for the arguments that the government has otherwise offered. But can I say that it's madness, in terms of implementing any of our obligations. What this will deliver is vandalism, because it will take away protections that have been put in place in every instance because Australia was concerned that state governments weren't actually reaching these standards. That was one of the reasons that we made sure we signed up to a whole series of these treaties—because there was a view that the federal oversight needed to occur. The parliament now is considering abandoning that, and I'm very pleased to stand against the madness of that idea.

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