Bill Heffernan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have got to say, Senator Conroy, for someone who knows nothing about it, you do bluff your way through well. My sincere congratulations on that. But you know nothing about what this bill is all about. To put it into plain language, as your minister said to me, 'Bill, we have got to be seen to be doing something when we are doing nothing, and this bill achieves that.' This Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Independent Expert Scientific Committee on Coal Seam Gas and Large Coal Mining Development) Bill 2012 compels the government to set up a committee because of a deal done with Mr Windsor for $150 million worth of expenditure on we are not too sure what, to get advice from an expert panel made up of we do not know really who or what qualifications they have. The advice does not have to be used by anyone; it just has to be provided. So for you to say that somehow this puts the states in a difficult position because of recommendations on the impact of agriculture's most toxic substance, which is salt, should not be in the legislation because in some way it endangers the states is, I am afraid, flawed, because as you know—you probably do not know because you do not know anything about the bill, but somebody's got to do the job—the advice of this committee does not have to be taken by anyone. It can be absolutely ignored or it can be taken up if they want to, but there is no compulsion at all. But at least that way the government of the day is seen to be doing something about coal seam gas extraction and some of the environmental issues associated with it. Some of these environmental issues have come back to haunt parts of the world to the point where in Bakersfield County in the United States, for example, they are suing a miner for $2 billion for water contamination, and do not ask me how you decontaminate a water aquifer with a cheque in the mail.

I have to say, Senator Conroy, though you have probably heard me say this before, that the average extraction for the coal seam gas industry in the known tenements with the known three major licences in Queensland, in the Surat and Bowen basins, are going to develop between 600,000 and 700,000 tonnes of granulated medium-grain salt per annum. As you would know, Senator Conroy, salt stacks in coarse grain form—please note I am not using any notes—at 806 kilograms per cubic metre and it has a gravity stack at 32 degrees. That means if you stack the per annum extraction of granulated salt for the three main tenements in Queensland, you will have a stack that is 10 metres high, 32 metres wide and a little over five kilometres long. The industry have said, 'We are going to store that salt in an approved storage.' The salt that results from the processing of salty water that is extracted was originally stored in evaporation storages, but they did not like the sound of the name 'evaporation storages' so they have changed them to 'storages'—they still evaporate. The outcome is 700,000 tonnes of salt per annum, for which at the present time there is no known commercial use and no known safe storage.

The report from the committee that I chaired said there is no safe storage for that salt—and Senator Conroy, for your information, the government members unanimously signed up to the report. They got into a bit of trouble, I think, for signing up to that, but they had a bit of guts because on the evidence we received you could not come to any other conclusion. The industry has said, 'Maybe we could pipe it to the sea.' We do know, Senator Conroy, that there are approximately—in the scientific vagaries of estimation—200 TCFs in Central Australia. You probably do not know what a TCF is, but it is a trillion cubic feet measurement in gas, in the scientific vagary of estimation. The North West Shelf has one-fifth of that capacity, so about 40 TCFs. The difficulty with coal seam gas extraction is that the industry considers that too far from the market and the port so they are going to ignore that, take it up in all the prime agricultural land and store the 700,000 tonnes per annum or 20 million tonnes over the 35-year life of the mining from the known tenements. Somehow, that is going to be safely stored. You've got to be pulling my leg!

I talked to the government, on background. I asked what we are going to do about it. 'Well, Bill, the thing that you've got to understand is that we don't want to own the problem, we want the states to own the problem.' The reference committee reported on the risks that have not been assessed by the Queensland government—Premier Bligh was the premier at the time. Their own scientific advice said, 'Do not proceed with these mining licences till you have come to an environmental solution.' They have now got environmental tick-offs without an environmental solution. There is no solution on the salt. There is no known reliable information on the low geological fault lines in the aquifers. As I have said many times, Senator Conroy, if you put the two big fat blokes up against a thin wall and one walks away, the other bloke falls through the wall. The same thing happens when you depressurise Mother Nature's naturally balanced aquifers under the ground. If you depressurise one aquifer you absolutely alter the behaviour of other aquifers, which have fine, low geological fault lines which are naturally pressure balanced so they do not leak from one to the other. That is the proposition that has been put by the scientists as to why the Walloon Coal Measures and the Springbok aquifer have contaminated one another, and that is also precisely what happened in the United States. But in terms of the legal obligation on liability, under the rush to get the employment and investment and the royalties for a financially stressed Queensland government—and the New South Wales government is in the same position—they decided to proceed without an environmental solution. Anna Bligh, to her credit, rang me up and said, 'Bill, what the hell do you think you're doing?'—or words to that effect. I said, 'We are just putting the facts on the record, because what you have not done, Premier, is read your own scientific precautionary advice, which also talked about the cumulative impact of coal seam gas.'

I have to say that Santos have been a pretty responsible in their response to it. James Baulderstone did tell the inquiry, putting his own job on the line, that they would not go where they were not invited; he did actually say, 'If we're told where we can't go we won't go there.' But Senator Conroy—through you, Madam Acting Chair; I am not too sure of the right title there—the scientific advice said, 'Please take the precautionary principle first and consider the cumulative impact.' Some of these areas like Roma have had a few hundred wells for 20 or 30 years and are about to have 8,000 or 9,000 wells. We already have a bore drain, south of Mount Isa, from the Great Artesian Basin that is running blue water through contamination, though not from coal seam gas but from another contamination. So how in God's name can we have a scientific committee on which we are going to spend $150 million, because the political imperative at the time was to be seen to be doing something even though it was not known what they were going to do, and the let-out clause is that, whatever they do, no-one has to take any notice of it? And that is a fact, that the advice they give no-one has to give a rat's about. Maybe it will be that stunning that they will feel compelled to do something about some of it.

But, Senator Conroy, the reason I originally put the land in is that is where the salt does the damage. Salt water is salt water. You would know through your great knowledge of agriculture, where you go to Woolies or Coles and get a loaf of bread and that is the end of it, that salt is the most toxic substance to agriculture. While there are some scientists and commercialists looking to find a commercial use for the salt, at the present time they do not have one, so they are going to have to store it. Twenty million tonnes of salt is something like 100 metres wide, 50 metres high and 25 kilometres long; it is a bloody big stack of salt. I am damned if I know why any responsible government or minister of a government would think that it is a fair thing for Australia's agriculturists and farmers to store that salt in the Murray-Darling Basin. A lot of that country up there can get six or eight inches of rain overnight and all of a sudden you have a salt surge which absolutely sterilises the land for hundreds of years. We have seen an example just in the cowboy attitude of Eastern Star Gas in the Pilliga Scrub up there where they thought that in test bores they would get away with just a few ponds of a few hundred metres, which overflowed in a storm event and then for the next few hundred yards all around every living plant and tree was killed. The committee I was on and I think Senator Nash was on—