Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to say how absolutely shocked I am that in a supposedly comprehensive rewrite of a piece of legislation, the Offshore Petroleum Bill 2005 and related bills, at this period in our history the environment is practically ignored. For all the talk about ecologically sustainable development, for all the talk about triple bottom-line accounting and for all the public awareness that goes on in relation to whale strandings, seismic testing and the ecosystem approach, neither the word ‘marine’ nor ‘ocean’ appears in the bills. Can you believe that? In 2006, neither the word ‘marine’ nor ‘ocean’ appears in the offshore petroleum bills. Where is offshore? Offshore is the marine environment. I find it absolutely disgusting that these bills have been written with, effectively, a prehistoric approach to our oceans.

Australia has been running around the world in international fora talking up its oceans policy. Australia has an oceans policy, but it writes offshore petroleum legislation that fails to mention the oceans and the marine environment and uses the sea only in jurisdictional reference—as in territorial sea. The generic term ‘environment’ is used but only in a very short section on restoration of the environment—that is a matter of a couple of pages in a massive bill. Even then, it only goes to minimal restoration of the ecosystem and environment.

This legislation should have been framed in the context of Australia’s oceans policy, which was introduced in 1998, and in the context of ecosystem based management—environmentally sustainable development, multiple-use management and regional marine planning. And yet it is not framed that way, not at all. It makes some fundamental assumptions that the marine environment is a free good; that it is there for the sole purpose of providing resources to humankind. So the marine environment only exists as long as it can provide oil, gas, fishing and whatever else humans decide they want to use the marine environment for—and use it for as long as it takes to destroy it without even understanding the complexity of it.

At the World Parks Congress in Durban a couple of years ago, it was recognised that 10 per cent of the world’s terrestrial area is in national parks protected areas of some kind but that less than one per cent of the world’s oceans have the same level of protection. It was moved in Durban that we should aim in the next decade for 10 per cent of the world’s terrestrial environment to be put into protected areas. It has long been understood that if you make marine parks then you not only protect ecosystems but you actually support fisheries, because those marine parks act as breeding grounds. They are protected areas for the fisheries to maintain resilience, breed up fish stocks and so on and maintain the wild fisheries outside those marine protected areas.