Ian Campbell (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you for the reminder, Mr President. What Senator O’Brien is clearly ignorant of is that, as part of the approvals process, we rely on an enormous number of reports. One of them was the Biosis report. Let us put the myth to bed. Senator O’Brien is obviously very keen to know the truth about this. The Biosis report did not say that at all. The Biosis report came to one conclusion. It said that if you build this wind farm it will have an impact on orange-bellied parrots. It will have an impact on wedge-tailed eagles, white-bellied sea eagles and swift parrots but, in relation to orange-bellied parrots, it would hasten their extinction. That is what the report said. Nowhere in that report did it say that the potential risk was one in 1,000. That is a statement that was put out by Mr Hulls. That was a statement put out by Senator Carr’s Labor Party comrade for political purposes. It is untrue, it is not based on that report and the people who wrote the report have said so.

All we do know is that Labor has no cohesive climate change policy except that they have hung onto Senator Faulkner’s idea from back in 1995. Faced with what we now know was a significant challenge to the global and Australian environment from climate change, what was the one idea Senator Faulkner came up with as environment minister? His response to climate change was to bring in a carbon tax. Ten years later, 10 years in opposition, probably half-a-dozen shadow ministers for the environment since, what is Mr Beazley’s policy? A new carbon tax. The Labor Party has not moved from there, whereas the coalition has brought in a comprehensive environmental protection regime, a comprehensive climate change action program and billions of dollars of investment to support solar, wind power, geothermal and the sequestration of carbon, the capture of carbon. We have a comprehensive climate change program and also the most comprehensive protection regime under a very strong environment law which is aimed not only to protect threatened species—like parrots, like wedge-tailed eagles—but also to invest in their recovery. Over $1 million has been spent just on the orange-bellied parrot in the last 10 years, protecting its habitat and trying to build its resilience. What Labor would tell you is that you can continue to build five wind turbines for every two we build down in Gippsland and hang the impact on the environment. You should be able to do both. That is what we are trying to do.