Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I know everyone has been waiting with bated breath for the answer to the question that I asked the Minister for Transport and Regional Services. To remind people who were not here yesterday, I let the Senate know about a series of questions I asked the Minister for Transport and Regional Services about the Perth brickworks. The minister has ended up as the de facto regulator for the brickworks. The answer I got to these questions was that the airports branch of the aviation and airports division of the Department of Transport and Regional Services will monitor compliance with all conditions of approval.

With all due respect to the people who work at DOTARS, this branch has not been set up to evaluate matters such as Aboriginal heritage values on airport land, nor was it established to safeguard the biodiversity values of this area, nor does it have the ability to analyse airshed modelling to protect residents from acid gas fallout. None of these things is in its purview and I would say that there are other agencies, particularly state ones, that are much better qualified to do this. Nor do I believe that it has the necessary planning expertise to ensure that these developments are compatible with surrounding land uses. Again, it is not what the department was set up to do.

This bill continues a trend of allowing incompatible land uses on important areas of urban and peri-urban bushland—areas that I remind you are in very short supply in most of our capital cities these days. Without the kind of regulatory oversight that state governments have spent years struggling to develop—and this oversight is absolutely necessary for these areas of bushland—this bill will make a bad situation worse.

The Greens will be moving an amendment. Senator Milne has already highlighted that she will be moving an amendment that allows better state evaluation of these important bushlands and the developments that affect them. We commend that amendment to the Senate to enable these important areas of bushland in our capital cities to be protected. As I highlighted yesterday, in some instances these are part of the last remnants of important biodiversity in our capital cities. The Perth airport bushland contains values that are found nowhere else on the Swan coastal plain. They should be protected and they should not be subjected to the ad hoc developments that are being allowed to occur at present. We would have liked to have seen this bill deal with this by tightening up these sorts of controls so that development on these areas can be either properly controlled or not allowed in cases where they are incompatible with the biodiversity of these areas or with the flight paths—which is what I thought airports were there for in the first place.