Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

Victoria's Otway Basin is a 500-kilometre-long stretch of sea floor that is, in places, 5,000 metres deep. In recent years the Otway Basin has repeatedly been subjected to seismic blasting—a significant environmental insult which has been insufficiently regulated and monitored by successive federal governments. This private member's bill aims to halt the issuing of special prospecting authorities, or SPAs. These are licences issued at nominal cost to overseas companies to enable their repeated, uncontrolled and essentially unsupervised seismic blasting of our unique and irreplaceable marine environment.

Seismic blasting blasts the sea floor with high-powered air guns every 10 to 15 seconds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for weeks or months at a time, to map offshore oil and gas reserves and to identify sites for carbon capture and storage. These blasts reach more than 250 decibels. They can be louder than the detonations of atomic bombs. They injure and kill marine wildlife.

At the northern end of the Otway Basin, the Bonney Upwelling pushes cold water onto the coastal fringe. This attracts an extraordinary variety of sealife: blue whales, southern right whales and humpbacks, pigmy whales, orcas, dolphins and porpoises. All are sonar dependent cetaceans which can be rendered helpless by the violent sound pollution of seismic blasting.

Blasting also destroys zooplankton and phytoplankton. It endangers food sources for the whole marine ecosystem. The fishing industry is vital for the Colac Otway community. It reliably sees decreased catch rates of commercially fished species, including rock lobster, crab and tuna, after blasting has occurred in the area. On one occasion whiting catch rates at Lakes Entrance during local seismic testing fell 99.5 per cent, while the flathead catch declined at the same time by 71 per cent.

Community members from Kooyong—and beyond—have come to me with their concerns over the extent and repetition of ongoing fossil fuel exploration off our coast. In recent years, tens of thousands of Australians have rallied, petitioned and made submissions regarding their opposition to repeated seismic blasting of our oceans. In Victoria, communities have been concerned about two particularly egregious proposals for seismic blasting in the Otway Basin. One from TGS/SLB Schlumberger involved over 77,000 square metres and two Commonwealth marine parks. It was the subject of more than 30,000 complaints to the toothless offshore regulator, NOPSEMA. Almost 20,000 of those complaints were from supporters of the Australian Marine Conservation Society. Thanks to concerted campaigning by AMCS and by other community groups, that proposal was recently cancelled, but CGG is now seeking an SPA permit for blasting just off the coast of Warrnambool. This is a southern right whale migration route zone. It's a zone for Australian sea lion feeding grounds, and it's where little penguins forage.

SPAs are additional to the usual government releases of coastal seawaters for oil and gas exploration. They bypass the government scrutiny and the community consultation which is required for offshore title releases. For the derisory fee of $8,250, companies can gain approval to blast a seabed site for up to 180 days at a time. There is little, if any, supervision of their activities. The permits can be renewed multiple times within a single exploration project. When it considers SPA applications, NOPSEMA doesn't have to look at the past conduct of the proponents (including any of their possible criminal breaches). It doesn't have to look at their financial capacity or their experience. Every application is assessed in isolation. The past or cumulative effect on ocean health of blasting projects is not considered at the time of permit approvals. Also excluded from consideration is the effect on Aboriginal cultural heritage sites—on sea country. This approach is negligent of ecological, environmental and cultural concerns.

Seismic blasting is undertaken for three reasons: to find oil and gas under the seabed, to identify potential sites for carbon capture and storage, and to assess the effectiveness of any carbon capture and storage projects.

Oil and gas developments produce harmful emissions. They have the potential for catastrophic blowout or spill. They employ few locals and they send our profits—and our energy—overseas. This government should commit to no new oil and gas projects. It should not permit speculative exploration for them, with its concomitant ecological and environmental costs.

Carbon capture and storage remains an illusory means of offsetting carbon emissions. It has never achieved its target at scale. It is a risky technology, firstly, because of its false proposition of emissions reduction, which is used as a justification for locking in the continued extraction of fossil fuels, but also because there are risks from carbon capture and storage itself. In a marine setting, dissolved carbon dioxide leaking from sub-seabed sites acidifies water. This asphyxiates marine life. Aquatic ecosystems are also threatened by the physical disturbance of drilling, of laying pipelines and of seismic events, subsidence and displacement of aquifers during or after CO2 injection. Sea dumping is aquatic vandalism. It is the more shameful for its secrecy.

Our environmental protections are grossly inadequate when, for a derisory fee, an area of seabed the size of Tasmania can be made available to overseas firms for a speculative form of environmental vandalism. This is a process which inflicts auditory violence on our marine life.

The people of Australia want no new fossil fuel projects off our beautiful coastlines. We implore the government to accept this bill to abolish Special Prospecting Authority permits. It would be an important step towards protecting our marine life, our coastal communities, our fishing industries and the health of our oceans. I commend it to the House.

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Bridget Archer (Bass, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion. Seismic testing is not new, but its application in the marine environment is increasingly controversial and disputed. As is often the case, in recent years more research has been undertaken to more closely examine its effects, and I acknowledge that still more research is needed. However, evidence is now emerging that seismic surveys are having a damaging effect on marine life, with recent studies by IMAS in the Bass Strait north of my electorate showing severe impacts on scallops, with up to four times higher death rates and a range of other sublethal effects, including altered behaviour, impaired physiology and a disrupted immune system. Likewise, research by IMAS has shown that seismic blasting is having seriously damaging impacts on rock lobster populations both in the Bass Strait and in Western Australia, and on krill populations.

Much of the opposition to the practice is now coming from the fishing industry, who are joining community and conservation organisations, which have shown there is a declining social licence for more social blasting—and the SPA permits that are attached to them—in our ocean, and that it is time for reform.

As we've heard, special prospecting authorities are a quick and cheap way of bypassing the usual annual permit, and they don't consider that cumulative impact of multiple projects on ocean ecosystems and marine life. Companies are not assessed as to their fitness and proper standing, or their criminal history, as part of the decision-making process, because of exemptions under section 695YB of the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Act. This means also that companies who are being investigated for breaching the conditions of a previous SPA aren't excluded from applying the new permits.

Data collection companies can sell the survey data they collect from seismic blasting conducted under an SPA permit on the open market to anyone prepared to purchase the data, and the information is held by the company owning the data for up to 15 years as commercial in confidence, which is one of the reasons why we see so many companies bidding to conduct seismic blasting over the same areas within a year or two of each other, double dipping on profits by collecting the same mapping of what lies below the sea floor, at the expense of marine life.

A moratorium on seismic blasting in our oceans, in keeping with the recommendation of the 2022 Making waves Senate inquiry report, is needed, and urgent action should be undertaken to reform this system to remove the 15-year commercial-in-confidence clause and make all seismic data available to be reprocessed and available on the Geoscience Australia site, removing the need for more seismic blasting exploration projects in our oceans. It is time to press pause and take another look. I commend the bill to the House.

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time allocated for this debate has now expired. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.