Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Ryan, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion. This flawed bill, the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Legislation Amendment (Safety and Other Measures) Bill 2024, cannot be fixed by amendments. We need to put it to a Senate inquiry. The Labor government and the Minister for the Environment and Water have absolutely failed to deliver on their promises to overhaul our broken environment laws, to make them stronger and to truly protect our environment.

It's pretty clear that the government is siding with the gas cartels, making it easier for them to continue destroying our precious environment. We shouldn't be voting on this bill until we have a Senate inquiry. What's the government actually doing in the face of this crisis? It's shamelessly attempting to ram legislation through, handing the Minister for Resources unprecedented authority to fast-track new coal and gas projects—completely undermining the environment minister. We should not be voting on this bill until we have a Senate inquiry. It's pretty amazing stuff, really. The government is essentially trying to pass legislation written by the gas industry for the gas industry. Some wag said to me that it could be called the 'Santos bill'! The government gets a letter from a few gas company execs, and a few months later they cough up a bit of legislation that removes all of the headaches of the environmental approvals processes. Evidently that's what you get when you give big political donations to the Labor Party. It's a pretty good return on investment for those big political donations.

The fact that the resources minister can make changes to regulation and not have to consider the environmental laws is absolutely reckless in an age where we all know the absolute urgency of the climate crisis, and many here in this House have spoken about it. That's why this bill must be voted on after a Senate inquiry. The Greens, environment groups and First Nations groups have been campaigning for a decade to expand the environmental laws to include a water trigger which effectively closed the loophole that gives gas fracking corporations a licence to drill without any federal environmental water assessment.

On the back of this, the government is now effectively trying to legislate another loophole back in for gas companies to get the green light on environment-destroying projects. Basically, the government is allowing companies like Santos or Woodside to get around complying with the current requirements of environmental laws for gas projects. We simply cannot let this bill proceed without a Senate inquiry. With these provisions, gas companies will essentially be exempt from complying with certain environmental regulations under even the new amendments. This is why these amendments are not going to fix this flawed bill.

The independent regulator, NOPSEMA, has an endorsed program for the requirements of any gas project, and the government is giving gas companies more powers than they've had to date to bypass this process or to rush it through altogether. Just at the moment, Santos has six approvals through NOPSEMA for the Barossa project, and they could all be exempt from any environmental approvals process in the next 12 months. The Barossa project, which would emit 401 million tonnes of CO2 pollution in its lifetime—that's the equivalent of 80 per cent of Australia's total emissions in 2020—that's the project they're trying to push through.

The Australian population has gone through endless pain this summer—through multiple flooding events, a sweltering summer, outrageous humidity, heatwaves and fires—and we know this is only going to get worse as the planet gets warmer. We're in a climate crisis right now. We cannot afford to pay the price of any new coal and gas projects, yet this is what this legislation is setting up for our country. The government must not give fossil fuel companies any more power than they already have—and they already have an outrageous amount of power within this system.

This bill must be considered after the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act reforms have come into place. It needs to go to a Senate inquiry. These amendments will not fix this flawed legislation.

See this speech in context