Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

I want to comment briefly on the Offshore Petroleum Amendment (Greenhouse Gas Storage) Bill 2008. This legislation provides a framework for pumping liquefied carbon dioxide into storages under the sea, obviously—it is the offshore petroleum bill. The main issue here and the critical issue to consider is liability. This is where the government and the industry are failing the community in coming out and telling us straight what is going to happen in terms of liability. It is very clear that carbon capture and storage is experimental technology. It is the same as landfill. It is the same as waste dumps. It means finding enough holes in the ground around the planet to pump liquid carbon dioxide into and hoping that it stays there permanently into the future.

You cannot guarantee permanence. Certainly you might be able to get some ideal geological structures in the first instance, but we are talking about huge volumes being needed to be piped very long distances in many cases, and as those storages which may have the perfect geological structures fill up they will go to riskier and riskier sites with a high likelihood that that carbon dioxide will start to leak. When that occurs, who will be liable?

Under this legislation the government says that the minister may give a closure certificate so that the companies can walk away scot free. That is clearly what the companies want to do. They know this technology is risky; that is why they want that liability passed on to the taxpayer and the community of Australia. I say that if they are so confident about their technology, so confident that it is so great, then let them accept the liability into the longer term. Why should the community? We have seen what happened with BHP at Ok Tedi. They walked away and left the community with the appalling result of their pollution over many years. Now we have exactly the same thing with carbon capture and storage. There is no guarantee of permanence, that this will not come to the surface, that this will not erode some of the structures that it is in, leak into groundwater and so on. The issue here is this: if the coal industry wants to maintain social legitimacy into the future it should pay for its own research, it should pay for the storage of its own waste because it is a waste dump that we are talking about. This is legislation to enable the setting up of numerous waste dumps under the sea around Australia’s coastline in order to give ongoing legitimacy to the coal industry.

What the Greens proposed in relation to this legislation is that it should be very explicit in saying that the liability rests 100 per cent with the companies concerned and, secondly, because companies may become deregistered, be taken over or change over time, that they should be required to put upfront a bond adequate to the price of making right, if you like, any rehabilitation works that might need to be done. Also, the community will have to buy back that carbon dioxide because as it leaks then we are likely to have deeper targets and we are going to have to buy offsets or do something else to make up for the loss of carbon dioxide from those storages under any kind of global arrangement. So why should the community accept liability? This is exactly what the nuclear industry tried to do for many years—to get the community to take on responsibility for nuclear waste so they could walk away scot free. That is exactly what the coal industry now wants and it is clear that that is what the Minister for Resources and Energy, Mr Martin Ferguson, wants to do. He wants to hand over the liability to the people of Australia.

I am pleased that the committee recognised in its deliberations that this idea of shifting the liability onto the people of Australia and away from the coal industry was not a good idea. But it has not been explicit in what it is saying in terms of this liability issue. Let me tell you that the companies are unlikely to invest unless there is an explicit guarantee from government that the liability shifts to the taxpayer the minute the closure certificate is signed off by the minister. So they will take it to the courts to try to get a verdict on this before they move any further. Already we have had the government putting $500 million into a low-emissions technology fund, $75 million of which went to this so-called carbon capture and storage facility near Roma in Queensland. On the very day that the Prime Minister announced his $100 million each year for the next four years for a carbon capture and storage research centre, a centre of excellence for the world, the Roma project fell over. After being allocated $75 million, having made a big splash about this as the way of the future, it fell over. It fell over in the wake of a huge proposal in the US which fell over. The one off the Western Australian coast has fallen over.

This is not an industry which has any confidence that this technology is going to work. It is simply the cover they need to keep on mining coal, burning coal and exporting coal. That is what all this is about and I do not see why taxpayers should bear the burden. We are in here this week debating pensions, public health, public hospitals and the whole lot, and every $100 million spent on the coal industry, when the coal industry has made mega-profits during the resources boom, is $100 million that we have not got for pensions, public hospitals and public health. I have yet to hear an argument mounted anywhere as to why, for an industry which has benefited so much from the resources boom, an industry which has made its profits for 100 years by polluting the atmosphere and delivering climate change to us, we should turn around and take on the long-term liability for that industry. It makes no sense and the Greens are not going to stand for the community being left with the bill, the mess and the worry when we can leapfrog that technology right now and move to renewables.

I think it interesting that that $500 million for the low-emissions fund, which is code for clean coal—$400 million now over the next four years for a research centre on the day it fell over in Queensland—was announced the week before the Prime Minister went to New York. Whatever else he said about his intentions at the UN, he has one main reason for being there and that is to stand up and tell the world that Australia wants to lead on climate change by leg-roping the planet to the coal and industrial age. The whole focus of his speech will be Australia wanting to be a global centre and running a global plan on coal, which is even more ambitious than former Prime Minister John Howard’s plan of AP6. That was his fabulous idea, which was the Asia-Pacific partnership for the advancement of coal and uranium sales.

Now the Prime Minister is heading off to the United Nations to announce that that is his intention in the lead-up to Poznan, where, in the UNFCCC talks, the people of Australia thought that Australia might be going to do something on climate change. Wrong. They are going to Poznan to try to come home with an announcement of a global coal pact to pour billions of public funds from right around the world into a fund to keep the coal producers of the planet happy—from South Africa to Poland, to the US, to Australia. If the Prime Minister wanted to take a leadership role, instead of legitimising trying to use holes in the ground and filling them up with liquefied carbon dioxide and starting our 21st century version of landfill, what we should be doing is taking to the UN a proposal that Australia leads the world in a global push for renewable energy. That would be global leadership with some sort of vision, instead of saying that Australia wants to cover itself and needs to keep going with its coal exports. It has become totally dependent on coal and therefore we want some cover, and other people around the planet can pay for our polluting ways.

That is what this strategy is about and I think it is incumbent on the government in this legislation to make an explicit statement saying: ‘We will not accept liability. All liability is with the coal companies and those who wish to exploit a waste dump strategy for liquid carbon dioxide. And all costs of infrastructure, all costs of pipes and all cost of research: over to the coal industry—you like it; you have confidence in it; you pay for it.’ That is what I say to the coal industry. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.