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

I wanted to ask why it is necessary to have a situation where you can in fact prescribe oil exploration in certain areas, especially in relation to protected marine areas. It seems to me that this legislation is creating, if you like, new acreages where the petroleum industry will effectively have private property rights for a long period of time. There should be a process which should be gone through, which involves public notification of the proposed creation of new acreages for oil and gas exploration and the seeking of public comment on those, not just in petroleum magazines but also in daily newspapers relevant to the state, on the web, nationally and so on because, in frontier areas which are new to petroleum exploration and development, there may well be very significant environmental values and ecosystems which need protection. The Department of the Environment and Heritage and, in particular, the National Oceans Office should have veto rights if an area is too sensitive to sustain petroleum or any other exploration or if the environmental values are not yet known or fully understood. As I said before, very little of the oceans has been adequately explored, and we simply do not know what is there.

This legislation is effectively creating private property rights over the global commons which are the oceans and not providing a capacity to proscribe oil and gas exploration in areas. There is an assumption that there is no place where the oil and gas sector cannot go. For some reason or another, people think that it is perfectly fine to use the seabed in any place for this particular purpose. The fact that these new acreages are being created without the capacity to proscribe makes it even more important that we have in this legislation the amendment as proposed that, in considering an area for an oil or gas permit or licence, there should be the capacity to assess it as a marine protected area in full consultation with the Oceans Office and the Department of the Environment and Heritage and therefore proscribe oil exploration. At the moment, there is no provision anywhere. There just seems to be an assumption that the industry can operate sustainably anywhere; it is just a matter of the technology.

I would dispute that absolutely. I do not believe that that is the case. That is the point I was making earlier about the failure of this legislation to be integrated with environmental legislation and with the National Oceans Office. The failure to have an oceans policy backed by a legislative or statutory framework means we get into these situations where we are considering oil and gas exploration as if it were a single-user regime in complete isolation from any other marine use, let alone marine conservation. That is not the case.

The oceans are complex ecosystems, just as we find with terrestrial ecosystems, and you cannot bring in legislation that deals just with a single use without recognising the integrated nature of that. That is why it is imperative that we have a situation where, in marine protected areas, it is possible to prohibit exploration for oil, gas or petroleum exploration—any of that exploration and seismic testing et cetera—which would then allow the provision to prescribe areas in the first place rather than have as the basic assumption of this legislation that oil and gas exploration can go anywhere where there is not currently a marine protected area. I would like the minister to explain to me whether in fact this legislation is creating new acreages and why there is no provision for full public consultation and consultation with the Department of the Environment and Heritage and the National Oceans Office in order that there be consideration of veto rights on the basis of environmental values and the precautionary principle.