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

We know that you get upset, Senator Carr. But you have got away now for about three years with having no policy on greenhouse except signing Kyoto—when the whole world is moving beyond Kyoto—and having a national emissions trading scheme to which the two big growth states in Australia have said, ‘No; we are not going to be part of it.’

So you have actually got to do some hard work. You have got to come up with some practical policies which will actually reduce greenhouse gases. Even putting a trigger into the EPBC is irrelevant unless you answer the question that the Greens have answered honestly. And the Greens and the coalition, from different perspectives, are sick and tired of the Labor Party getting a free ride on the environment. You cannot send Peter Garrett off to the Greens to say, ‘We’re anti coal,’ and then send Martin Ferguson off to say, ‘We’re pro coal.’ You can’t have Martin Ferguson going off to the uranium mining industry and saying, ‘We’re pro uranium,’ and then have Peter Garrett saying, ‘We’re anti it.’ You cannot get away with that for very long. The Greens are shining a light on your hypocrisy and your duplicity and so am I.

I have answered Senator Siewert’s question. I will get an assessment about mining on Christmas Island, I will look at that assessment, I will make a decision based on the science in the assessment and I will say yea or nay to mining on Christmas Island. I may say no, or I may say, ‘Yes, subject to a whole load of different changes.’ They are the sorts of parameters I would have on any environmental assessment.

Labor are proposing an amendment. They want to put a new assessment requirement on every coalmine—in fact, every industrial facility—in Australia. If a Rudd government gets an assessment on a coalmine in Queensland or the Hunter Valley—a Sonoma mine or an Anvil mine—and it tells them it is going to produce millions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions when they burn that coal overseas, will the environment minister, be it Peter Garrett or Kim Carr—