Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate censures the Minister for the Environment and Heritage (Senator Ian Campbell) for:

(a)

abusing his powers under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999;

(b)

undermining the administration of the Act; and

(c)

exposing the Commonwealth to legal and financial risk.

In doing so, I indicate that Labor have rarely moved censure motions against ministers in this chamber. I think this is the first one we have moved following the last federal election. I regard it as a very serious charge and a very serious resolution. While government senators may not like the Senate seeking to hold ministers accountable, I would argue this is one of our core functions.

What we have seen over the last few weeks is confirmation that the process of approval of the Bald Hills project was politically corrupted. The minister did not exercise his judgement and his responsibilities according to the law; he exercised them according to the political needs of the Liberal Party. This is a classic case, a terrible case, of an abuse of the minister’s function and an abuse of his ministerial responsibilities, and the minister stands condemned for it.

Day after day the minister has been given the opportunity to defend himself. The minister was given an opportunity in question time yesterday and he could come up with no defence. He was given the opportunity to defend himself on an urgency motion yesterday, and it was the most pathetic attempt at a defence for a decision by a minister seen in this parliament. It was absolutely pathetic. He sought to discuss Senator Kim Carr, the Victorian Labor Party and a whole range of matters but he offered not one iota, not one shred, of defence for his decision-making process. Again in question time today the minister ignored every question, refused to answer and instead talked at length about a former Labor member of the House of Representatives and his activities, not once trying to deal with the issues.

The issues are clear and obvious to all. The minister failed to do his duty as minister. He is no longer able to hold this important office, he ought to be sacked and he ought to be censured by this chamber because he failed to exercise his duties as he should have. It is an open-and-shut case to which the minister has no defence.

I invite people to have a look at his 10-minute contribution yesterday. It was pathetic. It had no basis for a defence at all. He even admitted that today by complimenting Senator Brandis for his defence of him. I thought Senator Brandis’s defence, a typical lawyer’s effort, was not bad given the material he had. But quite frankly it was outstanding compared to Senator Campbell’s effort. He fumbled around with no idea how to defend his decision because it is absolutely indefensible.

We know what is at the heart of this decision. We only have to go back to his letter to the residents of McMillan which was put out just before the last federal election—a letter from Senator Ian Campbell on official letterhead in his capacity as minister. We still do not know who paid for this campaign letter. We have not been able to ascertain from Senator Campbell how this was funded and I hope he might, during this debate, let us know. But Senator Campbell wrote a totally political letter which starts off discussing the election, makes a cursory reference to mandatory renewable energy targets and then he is into it by the third paragraph:

Labor’s Christian Zahra is sworn to support Mark Latham’s policy and that means many more wind farms in South Gippsland.

The minister sets himself up as the opponent of wind farms in South Gippsland. He goes on to say that unless you vote for us these developments will pick up. He goes on further to say:

... that when the Howard government is returned to office I will also ensure that the funding of any future renewable energy programs are contingent upon community involvement and support.

That is a direct message to those campaigning against wind farms in the seat of McMillan. Further, he goes on to say:

... should Christian Zahra, the Labor candidate, be elected that will be a sign that you are happy to play host to increasing numbers of wind turbines in your region.

In other words, ‘Vote for the Liberal candidate and I will make sure they don’t happen. I will put in the political fix.’ The now member for McMillan, Russell Broadbent, went around the electorate saying, ‘I’ve got a promise from Senator Campbell. He’s assured me the Bald Hills project will get knocked off if we get returned to government.’ The minister for the environment, in his capacity, wrote to everyone saying that he would be making sure that these developments did not occur. The Liberal candidate campaigned on it, it was reported in the press and the community members were all advised.

So you have the minister already committed to a course of action in relation to this project. When it comes before him, does he declare his interest? Does he make it clear that he is in no position to make an independent decision because he has already committed himself to a course of action? No. He abuses his position, does not stand aside and he sets himself up to make a decision on a proposition that he has already campaigned against. He has already promised the electors of McMillan that he will not be supporting propositions like this.

We have a minister who should have stood aside from making that decision in accordance with proper processes but he did not. What he did was wait 450 days when he was required to act within 30. What happened in that 450 days? He went in search of a dead parrot, something that would allow him to hang a defence around. Why did it take him 450 days? Because there was not a defence; he could not find one. For 450 days he tried to avoid making the decision. He commissioned report after report after report. They all said to him, ‘There is no basis for that decision. You ought to approve it.’ Report after report, advice after advice. Why did he keep looking? The advice was not inconclusive; the advice was very conclusive. The advice said, ‘Approve the project.’ The advice said, ‘You have no basis for knocking it back.’ So what did he do? He said he needed another report. That report came back with no basis for knocking it off. He said he needed another report and said, ‘I will keep looking for 450 days until they force me into the courts before I make a decision.’

Finally he was dragged into the courts because he had failed to exercise his duties as minister. He had deferred making a decision. Finally he was called in and forced to come to a decision. His last roll of the dice was the Biosis report which we have obviously heard a lot about in recent times. The Biosis report again does not support the minister’s decision. Constantly he has misrepresented the report in this chamber and outside by selectively quoting. He could not even bring himself to finish the paragraph that he uses in his defence. Why? Because it undermines his whole case.

For the record, the remainder of the Biosis paragraph is this:

Our analysis suggests that such action—

that is, blocking wind farms—

will have extremely limited beneficial value to the conservation of the parrot without addressing the very much greater adverse effects that are currently operating against it.

In other words, knocking this wind farm over will do nothing to save the parrot. There are a whole range of measures that could be implemented but they do nothing to save the parrots, and this is the basis upon which he knocked off a $220 million project. This is the minister who is entrusted by parliament and entrusted in law to exercise his discretion according to law. He did not do that. He exercised it according to his desperate search for an excuse to defend his exercise of another science—not science as we understand it, not environmental science and not the science pertaining to the threat to endangered species, but political science: the political science of winning McMillan. That was the only science that underpinned this decision and the only thing that motivated the minister.

So, after 450 days and being dragged into court, he hangs on to one paragraph of a report that clearly says there is no defence for his decision. When that comes to a head he finds that only one parrot will die in 1,000 years. I suspect quite a few more will die of old age in that period. There is a 0.001 chance that, of the 15 parrots that might fly into the area each year, one may be killed in a collision with a turbine. The risk is minuscule. There are threats to the parrot but this is not one of them. The minister had very clear advice about that.

The thing that really condemns the minister is his own department’s advice, because they were very concerned about the path he was going down. They urged him time and time again not to go down that path because they knew that this would be subject to legal challenge, that it would be exposed for a rort and that the Commonwealth would be liable to be sued for damages. They gave him advice all right—senior advice signed off by a senior departmental officer in March this year. It recommended that the project should be approved. The senior officer, Gerard Early, advised that there was no evidence of any direct impact on the parrot and under the act there were no grounds to oppose the project.

That is not equivocal. That is not: ‘Minister, you can choose one path or the other.’ There are no grounds to oppose the project; there is just clear unequivocal advice from his department. It was not some mad left-wing scientist or someone with a vested interest in the issue but his own department exercising its responsibilities under the act. Mr Early’s advice specifically noted the significant consequences of using the Biosis report to block the project. To do so would cause serious uncertainty for coastal development along thousands of kilometres of coastline. It would dramatically lower the threshold of ‘significant impact’ under the environmental act—a case that Senator Brandis tried to argue yesterday, which was specifically rejected by the department. It was made very clear that by taking this action the minister undermined the operations of the act, undermined the threshold for ‘significant impact’, was putting at risk the department’s role in a whole range of other applications and was making its position totally inconsistent with other decisions it had made. For those reasons, the department strongly recommended that the project be allowed to proceed.

But the minister knows better. He says, ‘I am no Yes Minister.’ That may be true; he is no minister at all. No minister could act in the way he has. All the advice and all the reports said that this project ought to proceed. He had obligations to the Australian taxpayer and to this parliament under the act. All of those were swept away as he pursued his narrow political interests and those of the Liberal Party. When did it come to a head? It only came to a head because the proponents were again forced to go to court to get him to do his job and to seek to overturn his decision. What happened? Just as the case was starting the minister signed up to a deal that said he would reconsider the proposal. If you were so confident in your position and your processes and if you had the swagger and the global responsibilities and vision that the minister has, why would you fold at the first grapeshot? Because you did not have a case. The minister’s legal advice was that he had done the wrong thing, that he was going to cost taxpayers millions of dollars and that he ought to get out of it before it got so damaging that he was forced to resign.

So he got out of it. He did a deal with the company, which was obviously keen to pursue its claims. It just wants to get ahead and do business, so it settled on the basis that the minister would reconsider the decision on the basis of the law—the thing that he should have applied in the first place; the sort of advice that was provided by the department. They acted according to the law and they said that there was no basis whatsoever for the minister to proceed as he did. They knew the law; they knew the propriety; they knew what was expected of them in exercising their obligations under the act. But this minister did not exercise his obligations under the act; he sought to pursue the narrow political interests of the political party at the expense of doing his job. This is clearly established and on the record.

The pathetic defence that the minister has offered this week confirms that there is no defence. It is why he ran up the white flag at court on the first day and agreed to pay costs. He agreed on behalf of the taxpayers of Australia to pay for his arrogance, for his contempt and for his abuse of process. Every taxpayer listening to this ought to know that they are going to be digging into their pockets to pay to get this bloke out of trouble because of him putting in the political fix. We are all going to pay for it and, if he does not approve it next time, we will be paying damages. I have a funny feeling that at some stage the minister will find that the parrot has been saved by some other method. Perhaps mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by the minister will solve the problem and the wind farm can go ahead. I may be wrong, but I suspect that the legal advice is that he has to approve it this time or otherwise the damages claim will be so large that investment in this country will be threatened for a long time. The minister does not have one shred of a defence, other than to misquote and selectively quote a report that recommended he approve the project. He ignored advice after advice and report after report. For 450 days—a year and a half—he searched around, and the best he could come up with is that one parrot might get killed in 1,000 years.

I am an environmentalist. I do not pursue global quests quite as often as the minister does, and I do not big-note myself quite as much about that, but quietly, in my own way, I want to see species protected, apart from Liberal Party ministers. They are the only species that I think ought to be made extinct. Being an environmentalist is one thing, but it does not mean knocking back $220 million of investment on the possibility that one parrot every 1,000 years might fly into a rotor blade. It is complete nonsense! I know we should not go down the Monty Python road, and I will not, because the Long John Silver jokes, the dead parrot jokes and the cartoons have been done before. I could do it but it would just be mean, and it would distract from the fact that this is important. This is a very serious abuse of ministerial power and a very serious issue. The Commonwealth government and the taxpayers of Australia have been exposed to serious financial and legal risk. The proponents have twice had to go to court to get fair treatment. They have been denied natural justice time and time again by this minister because he does not want to have to give in on his political promise. I pay due credit to Senator Campbell. The one thing that he has been consistent on is that he is going to honour the political fix; he puts that above all else. He will not renege, until the next decision he has to make. Until the last ditch, he has been unprepared to ditch the political promise that he made. It is arrogance, it is an abuse of his power and he ought to be censured by this Senate.

Senator Campbell has abused his responsibilities under the act. He has abused the administration of the act. What credibility can the environment minister and the department have after this decision? If you are looking to get a decision out of this minister, the first thing you do is look up the electorate map of Australia and see where you might put something and whether it suits Senator Campbell’s interests. He is pro wind farms in certain seats, and he is very anti them in the other. He makes a big man of himself down in Denmark, in the south-west of WA, when it suits his political interests, but when it suits other interests he is all for wind turbines. The inconsistency of the decision making is just amazing. He says in his defence, ‘Labor would put more wind farms in McMillan than we would, but I have approved 600 in the last few months.’ Is he for wind farms or is he against? Are there going to be more under us or more under him? He is just totally selective. The only criterion he applies to applications for wind farms is politics. Political science is the only basis for the decisions he has taken.

Now the minister is going to reconsider his decision. The bloke that delayed for 450 days, who put the fix in and who refused to apply the act, is now, under the Howard government, going to be asked to make a fair decision according to law. You would have a lot of confidence in that, wouldn’t you? Will he stand aside this time? I guess not. This is the clearest example of a minister failing the parliament. (Time expired)