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

Last night I was speaking about the Greens’ series of amendments, amendments (1) to (7), to the Offshore Petroleum Bill 2005. These amendments essentially incorporate an object of the bill—that object being to ensure that offshore activities relating to petroleum exploration, recovery, storage and transport are carried out in a way that is consistent with the principles of ecologically sustainable development. The amendments then go on to incorporate those principles of ecologically sustainable development into the act. The amendments also require that activities comply with the environmental plan, with penalty units for failing to do so.

Finally, the amendments also require that an operation must not continue when a new environmental risk is identified. In other words, a person carrying out a petroleum activity for which there is an approved environmental plan must not carry out the activity after the identification of any significant new environmental effect or risk, or a significant increase in an existing environmental effect or risk arising from the activity, unless a new or increased effect or risk is provided for in the environmental plan.

As I was indicating last night, the reasons for these amendments include, firstly, that there is no object to this act. Ecologically sustainable development is incorporated into the regulations which underpin the act, but there is no actual object for the act. I think it is entirely reasonable that we incorporate ecologically sustainable development as an object of the act. I would like Senator Colbeck to respond as to why a 600-page act has no object and what the government’s response is to incorporating ESD into the act.

Secondly, this legislation refers only to the resources of the sea and the seabed. I would like to ask Senator Colbeck whether, for example, whales are covered in a definition of ‘resources of the sea and the seabed’ and I would specifically like to know why there is not a broader reference to the marine environment.

Finally, the issue that is incorporated in the final amendment—that is, operations not being able to continue where a new environmental risk is identified—is a way of incorporating the precautionary principle into this act. The reason we need the precautionary principle in this act is that this act is being brought in as a single-user use. It is not in the context of regional marine planning and it is not in the context of broader use activities. Therefore, we have to have a mechanism to be able to stop these activities if later science reveals that a disaster is being caused.

We also need the precautionary principle because of the presumption of the act that all ocean and sea areas are available for offshore petroleum activities—seismic surveys, drilling, construction of installations, pipelines and so on. The presumption under this act is that everywhere offshore is available to the petroleum industry and associated industries and, as I said yesterday, that they even be given tax exemptions for going into frontier areas. So the presumption is that the whole ocean is available to the offshore petroleum industry. By having these reports every year, industry will be virtually invited to go out and explore and to get tax breaks for exploring. As I said yesterday, I would like Senator Colbeck to indicate whether companies can get 26 years worth of virtual sovereignty over a particular area and, if it is not 26, exactly how many years a company can put down its claim over a particular area of ocean. Further, we need this amendment to the act to prevent those companies seeking compensation if they are not able to proceed.

We have already had this in Tasmania, where resource security legislation was brought in to transfer a public good—the Tasmanian forests—to private corporations. Now, if the community want to save their own forests, they have to compensate the companies for not logging them. It is the most outrageous presumption in that legislation, and it is precisely the same presumption in this legislation: that the global commons—the oceans and seas—are a free good over which oil companies can be given licences or permits and tax breaks to assist them. The assumption is then that there is no way to get those back—for example, if they have an environmental plan when there is no requirement by the designated authority when assessing environmental plans to consider ecologically sustainable development.

So we have to have some way to claw this back on the basis of the future. You might say that that is not necessary, but the fact that it is necessary is demonstrated by you coming in here with legislation which is underpinned by principles 40 years old and no attempt whatsoever has been made to update the principles or assumptions of the act to take into account its context in regional marine planning. I would like some specific responses to those issues.