Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There are some 8,000 wells that have already been agreed to by the government. We are informed there are some 13,000 applications that almost certainly will be agreed to. I emphasise 'we are informed'. The register is anything but up to date in Queensland. Recent media articles have said that the three liquefaction plants in Gladstone will not operate a surplus at that level of operation, of 20,000 or 30,000 wells or whatever it is. They may need to go up to 45,000 or 60,000 wells to ensure that the three liquefaction plants are able to operate and not go broke. If you want to be technical I think it works out to something like a well every five square kilometres in Queensland, over the entire surface area of the state.

The Queensland land mass probably has one-tenth of its surface area underlaid by coal. That coal is not in the way-out-west outback, where it never rains and there is not much happening on the ground in the near desert conditions. It is right along the coastline of Queensland, some 40 or 50 kilometres away from the massive rainfall and the huge sugarcane and banana industries of Australia. It is not far away at all. Then we have the massive Galilee Basin reserves, which are further back but are still not out in the dryland. The point I am making is that all of these wells are going down in the very productive agricultural areas of Queensland. They are not going out in the bad-land areas where no one is going to give a damn whether there is a well or not.

The other little geography lesson that the House obviously needs—because they would not have passed such ridiculous legislation to allow this coal-seam gas to go ahead if they knew this fact—is that the cattle and sheep industries of Australia produce about one-third of our agricultural export earnings. That is about $10,000 million and maybe as much as $12,000 million a year. They create some 40,000 or 50,000 jobs, particularly in the beef industry where the processing side of the industry is huge. It is dependent upon an underground aquifer. All of inland Queensland is flat as a billiard table. There was nothing there before settlement because there was no surface water. It is flat. It is the never-ending sameness of the never-ending plane.

If you drive through my old state electorate, west of the Great Dividing Range, there is not much variation at all in the topography, so we have to get our water from underground. That underground aquifer, the Great Artesian aquifer, could become contaminated or run down to a point where we could not economically extract the water. The kangaroo industry employs many people in inland Queensland and kangaroo numbers now are probably 100 or 1,000 times higher than they were in the days before settlement and before water was made available throughout this area.

Another geography lesson is that it is about every seven kilometres between watering points. If you want to run a station property you will put a watering point where your cattle can get water about every seven kilometres. The kangaroos reckon this is terrific. They can range over an area one thousand times more than they were ranging over before.

The previous speaker quite rightly said that the gas industry is 83 per cent foreign owned. The latest figures I saw said it was 87 per cent foreign owned with a further seven per cent being negotiated away. This is going to be our second- or third-biggest export item. What will Australia get out of it? We are told there might be 2,000 jobs in the three liquefaction plants in Gladstone. The media report that there are two in Western Australia and that one is proposed for the Northern Territory. That would be another 2,000 jobs there. So yes, we do get 4,000 jobs out of it. It is not huge but there is a little bit of benefit there. The royalties are almost negligible, as the previous speaker outlined. What does Australia get out of it? If there are no jobs, all the income goes overseas to the owners of the gas wells. Clearly, one of the things we are going to get out of it is contaminated aquifers.

I am probably the strongest pro-mining man in this parliament. I think I am the only one who has a background in mining. I worked as a labourer, I worked my own mines and I floated my own company, so I know the industry very much from the coalface all the way up to the top. When the government fell in Queensland I was the mines and energy minister. I know every aspect of this industry intimately. I have spent a fair proportion of my life down shafts and down in the centre of the earth, analysing, assessing and being worried for cave-ins or other potential disasters. We get a bit carried away with these things, saying things like, 'Oh, this may contaminate.' A quarter of the entire surface area of the city of Charters Towers—which at one time was bigger than Brisbane—was once cyanide heaps. They were wind carved and barren and, because they looked so weird and wonderful, they appeared on postcards. Sadly, they have since been removed. There is not a single case in the 130 or 140 year history of that town of any one suffering from cyanide poisoning. I can speak with authority, because my family was there before the town; we were there on the fields.

We can get carried away with this. As a miner, I know that when we look for copper we are looking for copper sulphate; where you have copper sulphate it is a rich zone. It is in the below-the-water-table zone; and in that zone copper sulphate is a poison. It is used in a large number of commercial poisons. Copper sulphate is a poison, but that is what we are actually looking for. Of course, it can contaminate water. Some of us attempted to get the water out of these areas because they were so high in copper sulphate—so high that we could extract the copper and make some money.

The coal-seam gas people have been given the extremely critical resource—water. Trevor Lee, with one of the most successful meat-processing operations in Australia—it supplies meat to Coles supermarkets—had an application for water knocked back. That company produces a thousand jobs, directly and indirectly. Those jobs will be around for a thousand years, but the coal-seam gas is going to be here for 10 minutes. In 40 or 50 years' time it will be gone. (Time expired)

Bill read a first time.

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In accordance with standing order 41, the second reading will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.