Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This evening I want to join with local residents in the Werriwa electorate in relation to the proposal for coal seam gas exploration and fracking in my electorate. Werriwa is on the urban fringe of Sydney. It has some rural aspects. Last week AGL suspended an application for exploration in that area. At first residents greeted this with great joy, thinking that it was a victory for residents. However, one must be cynical that perhaps there are other reasons for this withdrawal. It has been claimed that the initial application was really lacking in substance—there was the company's attempt to justify it on economic and employment grounds. Another possibility is that they wish to see this go off the agenda for some time and a downturn in activity by the community and then perhaps relaunch it when it gets a bit quieter. Thirdly, of course, there could be the fact of the federal election.

Last week Minister Burke made the following comments:

Now I have very deep concerns.

He is talking about this particular industry:

One, about that principal itself but secondly, I've got concerns about what does that say about the New South Wales Government's attitude to this issue? We are not only talking about the sort of land that, for example, with the Darling Downs in Queensland with all the controversy that that involved, we're not just talking about land like that.

We have acreage that goes right into residential areas and I know the attention has been on the New England area but this goes all the way up the north coast of New South Wales, this goes to the Hunter and this goes in Western Sydney and I am deeply concerned …

As I say, that could be one of the reasons for the suspension of the application.

I have to say I have grave concerns. A few local Liberal MPs are saying they are against this proposal. They have joined with Campbelltown and Liverpool councils. However, the state minister seems to be a major booster for the industry. Perhaps this is where he is going to parachute to after his political career. Because in response to one of his Liberal colleagues some months ago—and that colleague was writing on behalf of Campbelltown council—Minister Hartcher said:

Council's proposal for provision to be made to 'appeal determinations made for all coal seam gas extraction activity proposals' is a matter that would be best put to the Minister for Planning ... I do not support such a position in relation to exploration as I believe it would add an unnecessary burden on industry and prevent exploration.

In the aftermath of the withdrawal of the application last week he was again up in the media circle with further comments on this issue. This is a man that is part of the state government, supposed be giving some rights to residents with regard to these developments. He said:

(Coal seam gas) is no good to us still in the ground …

You have to take it where it is, you can't say you don't want to develop it here.

So Minister Hartcher is certainly making his views clear from a government position, which might be in contrast to a few state MPs running around the place seemingly against it. We have a situation, as I said, in New South Wales where there must be grave concerns about the government's attitudes.

I notice the daughter of the former minister for immigration, Phillip Ruddock, has certainly been very active around this issue. What was interesting was the state government's decision to de-fund the organisation which she heads, the Environmental Defender's Office. People in that state might be aware that this withdrawal of funding to the organisation came after complaints from the coal industry to the Premier that they were causing too much trouble for the industry, that they were actually representing residents, giving them information, providing expertise et cetera. So what we have seen in New South Wales is the closure of that organisation.

I have a quote here from the Sydney Morning Herald:

The mining industry urged the Premier, Barry O'Farrell, to scrap funding to the Environmental Defenders Office—and months later the state government did just that.

I have to say that this organisation is valuable. It has produced booklets that have certainly been circulated widely in the state. I have urged the federal minister—I am not putting too many dollars on this at the TAB—to try and give some funding to make sure this organisation does continue to do its work.

This industry, of course, is widely discredited. A year ago they tried to allege in the public domain that the CSIRO had endorsed their analysis of the industry and its problems. In contrast, the CSIRO, in the Sydney Morning Herald of 11 January this year, was forced to actually go on the public record. A reputable, respected government organisation had to actually repudiate the industry in public because of misleading claims. This article in the Herald states the CSIRO rejects claims made by APPEA regarding groundwater and coal seam gas. The CSIRO rejects the claim made in a television commercial aired on 2 September that:

CSIRO [and government studies] have shown that groundwater is safe with coal seam gas.

Those are the kinds of lengths to which this industry will go.

I referred earlier to local opposition. I put out 22,000 cards in my electorate in the last two to three weeks, and I am pleased to say that in excess of 800 of them have been returned to the office, which is indicative of a very strong groundswell of opposition to this proposal. This proposal is in a pristine, long-treasured area called the Scenic Hills. It is in close proximity to residential areas. There is grave concern about property values in the area and of course about issues such as groundwater and seismic movements. We know that in the United Kingdom internal documents from one of the companies indicated their own concerns about their responsibility for possible seismic movements.

It is interesting to note that there has been firm opposition by the industry to regulation and controls. The Chief Operating Officer of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, Rick Wilkinson, said the industry in New South Wales and Queensland 'is arguably the most heavily regulated in Australia and any proposal from Canberra to duplicate strict state-based regulation is wasteful and inefficient'. So there you go, the industry is very concerned with the federal government's attempts to give the community some rights to join with local councils—Liberal and independent controlled—in opposing these measures.

There are grave concerns about this internationally. Bill McKibben's article in the New York Review of Books on 8 March 2012 was the first article that alerted me to developments in the United States, particularly in the state of Pennsylvania. He said:

December, then, was a tough month for the fracking industry, and it ended on a particularly low note—on New Year’s Eve a magnitude 4.0 earthquake in Youngstown, Ohio, was blamed on the injection of high-pressure fracking water along a seismic fault, a phenomenon also documented in Arkansas and Oklahoma.

A second concern has to do with the damage being done to rivers and streams—and the water supply for homes and industries—by the briny soup that pours out of the fracking wells in large volume. Most of the chemical-laced slick water injected down the well will stay belowground, but for every million gallons, 200,000 to 400,000 gallons will be regurgitated back to the surface, bringing with it, McGraw writes, not only the chemicals it included in the first place, but traces of the oil-laced drilling mud, and all the other noxious stuff that was already trapped down there in the rock: iron and chromium, radium and salt—lots of salt.

In September 2009, however, pretty much everything died in the course of a few days—everything except an invasive microscopic algae that normally lives in estuaries along the Texas coast. This bloom of “golden algae” that killed everything else was a mystery—how could a species that usually lives in brackish water on the ocean’s edge have survived in a freshwater Appalachian creek? The answer emerged swiftly: drilling companies had been illegally dumping wastewater in the region, turning it into brine.

This is a matter of concern not only in my urban electorate but throughout the state. There have been 1,000 submissions to the state inquiry. The local Liberal MPs in my region are going through the motions. We are talking about four people in the state government—that is enough people to cause an impact on government policy. Yet for every effort they make to supposedly oppose these kinds of measures, we see Minister Hartcher essentially saying that we've got to promote this industry and make sure it gets up and operates. He is saying that the dollar counts more.

Internationally there is a big trend towards this because of concern about the mounting question of energy sources. This is supposedly a cleaner version than coal. But there is evidence around the world that, when all the additions and subtractions are done, the change on the climate front is marginal. I commend residents for firmly opposing this measure. We must be vigilant that AGL will possibly launch another case and we have to be very forthright and strong with the state government in opposing these measures.