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

I understand that, Senator Colbeck. What I am asking is: what is that process? You say it takes it into account. From my reading of the legislation, there is only one person involved—that is, the joint authority. There is no collaborative decision making or involvement with anyone with expertise in ecology. In fact, the designated authority alone makes a decision on a permit or licence. I want to know whether the environment department can come in and veto a further expansion of the retention licence and, if they can, what the situation is as far as compensation goes. I want a specific answer to that question.

I also want to return to the issue of the object of the bill. Senator Colbeck’s excuse for there being no object is that the object of a bill allows for the specific interpretation of the act and that, if a specific interpretation of the act is that it complies with ecologically sustainable development, you would need other objects of the act—the senator said a ‘balanced’ interpretation—other things that are equally important. There is no balance as it currently stands because the environment is not mentioned at all. So the assumptions in this bill are that oil companies are free to put in their pipelines, to drill, to mine and to put in their seismic testing and so on. There is no balanced interpretation at the moment; there is a bias towards a recognition of the commons as being freely available to the oil companies.

I would prefer that you spell out the objects of this bill and incorporate whatever other objects you have, along with the incorporation of a definition of ecologically sustainable development as being one of the objects of the bill. It is an object of the EPBC Act; it is an object of several other acts. I cannot see why it should not be an object of the Offshore Petroleum Bill.

The other matters I would like you to address are the issue of the precautionary principle and the issue, which I have already raised, of compensation. Additionally, there is the issue of whether the resources of the sea and the seabed incorporate whales, for example, and why that has not been changed to what would be a much more appropriate reference—that is, marine environment.