Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

At the present time, Queensland is confronted with what could be one of the greatest environmental disasters—for wildlife, for sea life and for the tourism and fishing industries—that our state has ever seen. It is a very serious matter and I am very pleased that Senator Brown has raised this. I agree with most of what Senator Brown said in his speech.

I cannot agree with the previous speaker, who gave a very eloquent political speech that was devoid of any fact. It is typical of the Labor Party these days to be all spin and no substance, and the speech from the Western Australian senator on this very important issue should just be disregarded in this debate. I would have thought that this issue was of such significance to Queensland that the Labor Party would have included all Queensland speakers on their list. A senator from Western Australia has, I am sure, a great interest in union matters and all the other things that are really quite irrelevant to this issue.

I am not blaming government. What I am absolutely concerned and angry about is how long it took to recognise the significance of this disaster and for something positive to be done. As soon as those containers went overboard we should have had a minesweeper up there looking for them—at the very moment that it happened. Yet I understand that the Attorney-General has announced, only in the last 10 minutes, that he is going to send a boat up there to look for those containers full of ammonium nitrate. This exemplifies my concern: it is too little and far too late.

Let us have a look at some of the facts. As previous speakers have said, this incident occurred at 3.12 am on Wednesday, 11 March. That was five days ago. At 5.15 on that day there was a report of the ship losing oil. The ABC reported it at 8.00 am. At 9.41 an officer of the Brisbane City Council—not the state government or the federal government—spoke to the state authorities about a ship that was leaking and losing containers. No request was made to the Brisbane City Council for any help. At 10 o’clock that day Maritime Safety Queensland, when meeting with the Brisbane City Council, advised that Queensland’s marine services were looking after the oil. At five o’clock that afternoon, Queensland’s emergency management advised the Brisbane City Council that the ship had struck a sandbar and that there was an oil slick from the ship to Caloundra. It took until four o’clock that afternoon for the Queensland government to even recognise that something had happened.

At six o’clock that night the Brisbane Lord Mayor, thankfully, contacted the Deputy Premier and the Premier to ask if he could do anything to help. He offered 300 Brisbane City Council workers who could get going immediately. He was told that they were not needed and that the Queensland government had everything under control—this was late on Wednesday afternoon. There is no evidence that the state government had at that time considered bringing in the specialist planes that are available on four hours notice under the relevant plan, which I will refer to later, to do something about the oil before it hit the beaches.

During the day we all thought that a recovery operation was underway, but it was not until five o’clock that night that the Queensland government released a statement saying that the oil had reached Moreton Island and had covered about 10 kilometres of coastline. An inquiry was made about how the clean-up operation was going and there was no indication that anything was happening—this was a day and a half later. In the evening, telephone calls were made to Maritime Safety Queensland confirming the extent of the spill, and then late on Thursday afternoon—a full one and a half days after the incident—the Queensland Premier eventually got around to making a disaster declaration. Did the state government then contact the Army to have them help? No, they did not. But, fortuitously, Brisbane City Council Mayor, Campbell Newman, did do that.

But it gets worse. A whole series of incidents happened throughout the next two days. The Brisbane City Council was there—and this is all on public record—with trained workers ready to move machinery. They kept offering help to the state government but were told: ‘Oh, it’s okay. Don’t bother about it; we’ve got it under control.’ Bob Abbot, Mayor of Maroochy council, having seen that there was a serious disaster in the making, put his big machinery onto the beach but was told by the state government to get it off because they would clean it up with buckets and spades! Do you believe it! Fortunately, Mayor Abbot, who is not known for taking a step back when it comes to any state government, put his machinery through and did something that may have helped. And so it goes on. Naturally, when I asked the government about this at question time I got no response from them because they are hiding something. It has been a stuff-up so far by the Queensland government and now it is a cover-up in which both the Queensland and Commonwealth governments are complicit.

The National Marine Oil Spill Contingency Plan, which I have here, is available on the internet. It sets out in detail what should be done and what the responsibilities are, and it was clearly a responsibility of the Queensland government to do something before this many days had elapsed. Senator Sterle tried to make a political case over this. I do not want to talk politics. I am just angry as a Queenslander that my state government took a day and a half to even get going and since then has fumbled away. Senator Brown in his contribution in this debate highlighted some of the deficiencies. He was careful not to criticise the Queensland government too much—and I can understand why, because it is a bit like the situation with the Traveston Crossing Dam. Senator Brown’s party is giving the Labor Party in Queensland—the current Queensland government—preferences in 12 crucial marginal state electorates which will mean that the Labor Party will be returned to government in Queensland and that the sort of environmental vandalism that the state government has been part of in this particular incident will continue into the future. And while Senator Brown has been canoeing down the Mary River telling all the people in that area that he is against the dam, giving preferences to the Labor Party in Queensland to assure their re-election next Saturday will mean the Traveston Crossing Dam will be built.