Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I am not going to drag this out. With all due respect and without intending to be rude, I do not think that the government’s approach is adequate. I will not call it a ‘response’, because the minister is trying to give me an understanding of the government’s approach, but I do not think the government’s approach is adequate.

I think that it would be much better to have an inquiry which had the power to review all of these issues rather than the not quite so strong powers the commission will have under this act to look at only some issues relating to oil spills. I find it quite difficult, to tell you the truth, to think of an oil spill that would not have some potential impact on the environment. I am all for covering resource management implications across government jurisdictions and for looking at the effectiveness of the response of those jurisdictions. I find it hard to think of any offshore incident that would not need to look at those issues.

I am not satisfied with the government’s response. The government are obviously taking a very strong view on the seriousness of some of the implications of an oil spill, and I congratulate them for that, but I am particularly concerned that they are not taking that same seriousness of approach to looking at the impacts—the environmental implications, the resource management implications and the other things that we have included in our amendment. There seem to be two different emphases here and I find that unsatisfactory. You are going to have a mishmash of investigations and inquiries into these incidents, which I do not think is satisfactory. If the government is not going to refer a complete investigation to the commissioner, I have very strong concerns about the way we will be investigating future spills because we will have a disjointed approach.