Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I am not going to go back over the argument, but, from an environmental perspective, the Offshore Petroleum Bill 2005 is not just a farce, it is a tragedy. It is a tragedy that this wonderful nation of ours in the year 2006 has a government which believes the environment counts for so little, that it has a government which uses the words ‘intergenerational equity’ but does not care at all about the environmental inheritance of the next generation, the generation after that or the numberless Australians without the vote whose interests we are dealing with here and now. What is on the table here is a go-ahead to corporations—and they will usually be multinational corporations—to extract what they can from the seabed. That includes invading marine protected areas. This is a go-ahead for that process in Australia, where we should be protecting more, not less, of the marine ecosystems.

There is no doubt that the marine commons, as Senator Christine Milne has described them this morning, are now up for grabs. But a little further down the line it will be adjacent planets and space territory that the rush will be on for. We do not have the technology for that yet. Written into this bill is the potential for revoking the protection that is there for Antarctica at the moment. They will do it ecologically sustainably, but, if we accede to this legislation as it is written, we are acceding to the government and opposition who see nothing getting in the way—no probity, no environmental care and sensitivity and no equality for environmental considerations when it comes to Australia’s natural heritage.

We are the country amongst the rich nations with the greatest number of species that have been made extinct in the last two centuries and the largest number of creatures, so far as we know, on the edge of extinction. We are rapidly, almost day by day, discovering new and amazing creatures in our marine territories. Science simply does not know how those ecosystems work, and we are giving the go-ahead to the oil industry to get in there—into marine protected areas, for goodness sake; that small percentage that is protected—to do as it will in the interests of extracting profits. There is no boundary for this government—there is no limit. Nothing is sacrosanct. We believe a line should be drawn. We believe that probity is in the ultimate long-term interest of stability, both social and economic as well as environmental. This is not good sense, it is not good planning, it is disastrous policy and we cannot support it.