Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As I was saying before I was rudely interrupted, according to Minister Campbell, it would terrible if the Victorian state Labor government built a wind farm that reduced pollution if local people were opposed to it. But it is wonderful for BGC to build a brickworks that increases pollution, because all of those local people who oppose it, including the local Liberal member of parliament, do not matter. Minister Campbell does not give a fat rat’s what they think, because he has decided that the issue is non-controversial. The fact is that nobody, except for the Minister for the Environment and Heritage, the Minister for Transport and Regional Services and their buddy Mr Len Buckeridge, thinks it is right to build a brickworks less than 400 metres away from a residential area when there are plenty of alternative sites available.

You only have to read the environmental assessment report on the BGC Brickworks proposal by the Minister for the Environment and Heritage’s own department to gain the clear understanding that the Department of the Environment and Heritage did not like the proposal one bit. On page 10, under the heading ‘Departmental view’, the report states:

The proposal to build a brickworks within 155m of the ‘boundaries’ of the proposed brickworks site and the residential areas is inconsistent with the EPA Guidance Statement for Separation Distances between Industrial and Sensitive Land Uses.

The report goes on to state:

The Department also notes that the Western Australian Department of the Environment developed the Brickworks Licensing Policy 2003 to address the adverse environmental impacts of existing and future brickworks, and the Western Australian Government claims that the proposal is inconsistent with its planning policies. Given those factors and the public concern about the proposal, the technical studies provided to date are not considered adequate to address potential impacts.

Of course, such prudent expert advice from the minister’s own department did not deter the minister one bit from throwing his full support behind the BGC brickworks proposal. That brings me to my biggest concern with this bill. There are a number of amending provisions in this bill which remove the right of appeal to have ministerial decisions reviewed by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. We have a minister who has a track record of bizarre and incomprehensible decisions, who was humiliated in court over the shoddy way he went about the orange-bellied parrot wind farm fiasco and whose response is to stamp his feet like a petulant brat and say: ‘Well, stuff you. I’ll just make it illegal to appeal my decisions.’