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

I think it is extraordinarily naive to say that the minister has to be certain that it will not leak before he signs the certificate. How on earth will a minister satisfy himself or herself of that, when the people telling them it will not leak are the proponents of the injection proposal? We have seen endless examples of ministers signing off all sorts of projects—on all sorts of conditions that have yet to be proven, yet to be assessed and so on—and later being proven to be wrong. In many cases they can be remediated. In this case, they will not be able to be remediated, and that is the difference.

I would hate to be a minister taking personal responsibility for signing off, saying, ‘This will not leak,’ because no minister could possibly make that judgement. Yet they will be making that judgement on an environmental impact assessment paid for by the proponents, and we all know that he who pays the piper calls the tune on environmental impact assessment. We have just had, in the last week, the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Mr Garrett, saying that it would be possible to approve the Gunns pulp mill in Tasmania and have the hydrodynamic modelling of the effluent done later. I have zero confidence in a minister signing a closure certificate because they are fully satisfied. He or she may well be fully satisfied, but it depends on the intelligence of the person concerned and the evidence before them; it does not actually bear any relation to the reality of whether or not that storage site will leak.