Justine Elliot (Richmond, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to commend the Victorian government for their recent moves to ban fracking. The Andrews Labor government recently announced a permanent ban on the exploration and development of all onshore, unconventional gas in Victoria, including hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and also coal seam gas. The permanent legislative ban to be introduced by the Victorian parliament later this year will protect the clean, green reputation of Victoria's agricultural sector. This will provide much needed certainty to those regional communities. Also, yesterday, we saw the Northern Territory government announcing that it is fulfilling its election commitment to implement a moratorium on fracking across the Territory.

Both of these moves have been very well received in my electorate of Richmond, as stopping CSG mining in our region is a major issue for our community. All the surveys, the petitions and the feedback from the people of the North Coast of New South Wales consistently show in overwhelming numbers that we do not want harmful CSG mining in our region, because it will be detrimental to your environment and detrimental to our community.

New South Wales Labor took a policy to the last state election to legislate to ensure the North Coast would be gas field free. In contrast to all of that, we have the National Party whose actions consistently show that they support this harmful industry. Even their recent North Coast Regional Plan promotes this. The fact is that only Labor can protect the New South Wales North Coast from harmful coal seam gas mining.