Kerry O'Brien (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Transport) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Faulkner earlier talked about this sort of puerile behaviour—this infantile behaviour by this minister. We are seeing another example of it today; he cannot contain himself. He was heard by me in silence, but of course he is not prepared to do that when he is being shown up in public. He is prepared to engage in this kind of theatrics. Senator Ian Campbell continued with his version of the dead parrot sketch for about another week, and then he had to capitulate. And that capitulation was very public. The capitulation is to settle the case on terms which the applicant says were ‘the most we could have received from this application’, and that is: forcing the minister to say that he would actually consider the application according to law. What a concession to make! He makes the concession that, on this occasion, he will consider the application in accordance with the law. At the same time, he will commit the Commonwealth, the taxpayer, to paying the legal costs of the applicant—costs which have been incurred because of the improper actions of this minister in consistently pursuing a political objective rather than the objective which is laid down in the legislation, which is a proper environmental approach to the problem.

I asked the minister a question in question time, and he assiduously avoided answering it, because it is true that wind farms have been approved by this minister even though they pose a greater risk to the orange-bellied parrot than Bald Hills would. There is nothing worse for a minister than to be exposed on arrogant inconsistency in the pursuit of so-called ministerial duties. The minister has been exposed on the basis that there was a political objective which had to be achieved, and the minister cast around and found the flimsiest of excuses to give effect to it.

It is, of course, true—and again the minister would not own up to this fact—that the very report he relied upon noted that it had intentionally overestimated the risks posed by wind farms and therefore overstated the likelihood of collisions. Did the minister tell that to the public when he made his announcements about the orange-bellied parrot? Of course not. He wanted the public to believe that he was the minister in shining armour defending the orange-bellied parrot from a risk which, frankly—as Senator Carr has demonstrated—would arise once in a thousand years—