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

I point out that paragraph (d) says in relation to the minister and the expert advisory committee:

Where there is a significant risk that any of the operations that are being or could be carried out under a greenhouse gas injection licence will have a significant adverse impact on operations to recover petroleum or the commercial viability of the recovery of petroleum or whether a serious situation exists in relation to an identified greenhouse gas storage formation specified in a greenhouse injection licence …

It then goes on:

… matters related to the exercise of any of the following powers and in relation to the Commonwealth.

It does not actually talk about the environment—so, you are quite right to say that it does not talk about the environment, even though that is not what you said earlier, but you have now. It should be in here and not just left to the EPBC as some kind of thing over there. Everything else is spelled out in this legislation except the responsibility of the minister to set up the expert advisory panel so that they advise on the environment.

I accept that the government and the opposition are not going to support this, but it is absolutely irresponsible to be setting out conditions the minister must look at it if it is going to have any impact on the operations to recover petroleum, or the commercial viability of the recovery of petroleum, but does not actually look at the adverse impacts on the environment, the monitoring and so on. Where under the EPBC Act does it tell me about monitoring for carbon dioxide leakage? It is just not going to happen. We are realists here; it is not going to happen. Are we pretending that the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act exists for the benefit of the environmental law centre in Bonn, which will be reading this transcript? We are just referring to the fact that Australia happens to have environmental protection legislation and therefore, through some sort of osmosis, it will automatically be triggered in the mind of the Commonwealth minister and his advisory committees.

What this says to me is that the Commonwealth is more interested in making sure that the Commonwealth has an expert advisory committee so that the petroleum or the coal industries do not get themselves upset or the Commonwealth does not get caught between a fight between the petroleum industry and the coal industry as to who has precedence over the injection sites that they intend to use. The community is not part of this in terms of these expert advisory panels, and I feel very strongly that the EPBC Act is totally inadequate and almost irrelevant to this. If we are going to have expert advisory panels, let us have a panel that is there in the community interest, acting for the community, for the environment and for the bigger picture on greenhouse and not just to sort out the Commonwealth’s role in the potential litigation between the petroleum industry and the coal industry as they come to fight over precedence in the future.