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

I think that the hypocrisy of the Australian Labor Party on this is quite overwhelming. Senator Carr’s comrade in the Victorian government Mr Hulls knocked back a wind farm at Port Fairy and a wind farm at Ballan on the basis that they might kill 2.7 wedge-tailed eagles. This is a species that is not on a threatened species list, unlike the ones in Tasmania where we are down to 130 breeding pairs of wedge-tailed eagles, in northern Tasmania—and three have been killed in the last three months. The Labor Party is deeply embarrassed by the Victorian government’s duplicity and hypocrisy on this matter. This is a Labor Party that has hidden from the Australian people the truth about the impact of bird strike caused by wind farms. Mr Hulls’s and Senator Carr’s Labor Party comrades in Victoria refuse to supply to the Australian public or to the Australian government evidence that it had that the impacts on the orange-bellied parrot were potentially catastrophic. Senator Carr in his question continues to repeat what is clearly untrue in relation to the potential bird impacts. Yesterday in a debate he referred to a report given to me that said that the impact was one in a thousand years. That report nowhere says that. In fact, when the Victorian government wrote to the author of the report and asked them to confirm that their mathematics were correct on that, the response from the Biosis report author was, ‘No, that is not correct.’