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

I also rise to say how disappointed I am with the government’s response to the amendments I have put forward in relation to the Offshore Petroleum Bill 2005. I think Australians will be shocked to know that the oceans and the marine environment hardly get a mention at all in this bill. In fact, I think people would be horrified to learn that the words ‘marine’ and ‘ocean’ do not appear in the bill at all.

This legislation should have been framed in the context of Australia’s oceans policy. It should have been framed in the context of ecosystem based management, ecologically sustainable development, multiple user management and regional marine planning, and it is not. We have a situation where all of those things are left simply to policy or to regulations. That is why oceans policy implementation is problematic—it has no legislative backing. The government should have taken this opportunity to better integrate one of the major marine resource statutes and it has not. There is a need for formal recognition of oceans policy principles in the bill and a major oceans policy structure—for example, regional marine planning—so that it becomes more consistent with supposedly major government policy governing our oceans.

It is with deep regret that I note what we are seeing here is only an editorial rewrite of legislation that is more than 40 years old. As a result, we are seeing just a naked statement of an Australian government giving resource security to the oil and gas companies in 2006 when the imperative of looking after the ocean is so great and so much before us. It is also tragic that we now have a situation where the Australian community will have to go to the courts to get back its own marine commons. That is an appalling situation—understandable 40 years ago, understandable even a decade ago, but certainly not understandable now.

I find it appalling that, throughout this debate, the government refused to say whether whales or cetaceans are included in the only reference to conservation in this document—which is when they talk about the ‘resources of the sea and seabed’. There is no reference to the marine environment. I asked repeatedly throughout the debate whether ‘resources of the sea and seabed’ include whales and cetaceans, and there was no answer. So I am assuming that ‘sea and seabed’ are simply jurisdictional matters referring to the territorial sea and the bed of that sea, and that is why the reference to the marine environment does not appear—this act does not cover the complexity of the marine ecosystem and the marine environment. What we have got is an offshore petroleum bill which is giving the mining, petroleum, oil and gas industries access to the territorial sea, which that act says includes everything there, including the seabed. There is no veto for the Department of Environment and Heritage. There is no reference to oceans policy. It is an absolute disgrace that we are in this situation with a 600-page rewrite of 1960s legislation and the government seems to think that it is adequate, and the Labor Party is supporting it.

People around the world will be horrified at just how far behind Australia is getting. The one thing Australia could hold its head up about in recent years was oceans. Australia is a disgrace on refugees, it is a disgrace on climate change and it has undermined the UN processes in relation to the war in Iraq. Whenever it has turned up at environment conferences the only thing it could be proud of was the marine environment, because of the Great Barrier Reef, the planning that has gone into that and the fantastic work that has been done up there to get the zoning sorted out and so on. That is something to be proud of. But, instead of learning from what has gone on with the Great Barrier Reef, we are now just entrenching all of the bad processes that led to that horrendous, long, drawn-out conflictive situation that finally got to a good outcome. We could be pre-empting that by setting up appropriate regional marine planning, and we are not. I think the Howard government has now undermined itself in relation to yet another global focus, and that is the marine environment.

As I said, in Durban in 2003 at the World Parks Congress, Australia, like everybody else, stood up and signed on to the prospect of 10 per cent of the world’s marine area being in protected areas within the next decade to catch up with the terrestrial environment. And here we have legislation which just does not even consider that context. It is not only a lost opportunity in terms of making a step forward, it is an insult to the National Oceans Office, it is an insult to those in the Department of the Environment and Heritage and it is an insult to all of the people in the non-government organisations and communities that have been working for years to get recognition of conservation of marine ecosystems and of the marine environment. All they have ended up with is a reference to conservation of the sea and the seabed in a territorial jurisdictional sense and not the marine environment. That is why I will be voting against this bill.

I find it utterly shameful that the government has refused to incorporate a definition of ‘ecologically sustainable development’ as an object of the act and that it has refused to incorporate the precautionary principle in terms of the environment plans that have already been approved for the oil industry. Those plans will not be able to be revoked if new and significant information comes forward in terms of the environment.