Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I appreciate Senator Joyce’s contribution. The motion calls for all feasible and prudent alternatives to be investigated. That would include, of course, the integrity of this proposal for a dam at Traveston Crossing. But the former environmental legislation required that in all cases like this the environmental assessment must include feasible and prudent alternatives. From what the government is saying here, it is leaving it to opponents to come up with those. That is simply not good enough. The proponent should have to come forward with prudent and feasible alternatives to the Traveston dam on the Mary River. That includes those that avoid the quite disturbing and destructive components, including the destruction of the last great nurseries for the Australian lungfish, the Mary River cod and the Mary River turtle—not to speak of thousands of hectares of prime food-producing farmland which would be inundated by this unnecessary and unreasonable dam.

The question here is: is the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Mr Garrett, going to insist on those prudent and feasible alternatives being fully discussed and costed—social cost, environmental cost, economic cost included, and the cost to Indigenous interests—before he makes a decision? That is not the job of the opponents; that ought to be a job of the proponents, and that includes the Queensland government.