Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

In exactly one month's time from tomorrow, the World Heritage Committee will begin a 10-day meeting in Doha that will decide whether the Great Barrier Reef's world heritage status will remain intact. It has now been 11 months since the World Heritage Committee gave the Australian and Queensland governments a strong, unprecedented warning: 'Pick up your act or, in a year's time, the reef's World Heritage status will be downgraded to "in danger"'. That year's grace has almost past, and it follows an initial warning the year before that. Just last month, a draft decision was released ahead of that June meeting, which was yet another warning—and perhaps it is the final warning that we will get after years of narrow escapes.

And yet, when we look back over those almost three years we see that the Australian and Queensland governments have failed, month after month, to act on the World Heritage Committee's recommendations to save the reef. In fact, they have blocked their ears to this international concern from the UN's leading experts on environmental and cultural heritage and instead have directly contravened the committee's recommendations. We have seen the Abbott government approve more destructive development in Gladstone Harbour by ticking off on the final liquefied natural gas plant on the world heritage listed Curtis Island, the Arrow LNG plant. The Abbott government has also approved what would be the world's largest coal port, at Abbot Point, near the Whitsundays, allowing three million cubic metres of dredge spoil to be dumped into the reef's world heritage waters.

The science shows the dredge sludge will not just stay put where it is dumped, but can spread many kilometres to smother corals and seagrass beds—breeding and feeding grounds for dugongs and turtles. The Abbott government's tick-off came despite the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority's internal findings that dumping all of that sludge into the reef would create significant and irreparable damage. Those findings were only exposed publicly as a result of a freedom of information request. After they came to light, the Senate supported a Greens motion calling on Environment Minister Hunt to revoke his approval of the Abbot Point coal port. The documents released under FOI put the lie to the minister's claims that the damage of dumping millions of tonnes of sludge into this delicate World Heritage Area would be able to be offset, be compensated for, and in fact would somehow improve water quality by 150 per cent.

Whether the minister knew about the internal warnings by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park's scientists is still a mystery because the government still has not revealed the documents that the Greens sought through an order for production of documents. If the minister did not see those internal scientific warnings, he should now reconsider that approval for Abbot Point and revoke it. If the minister did know about these documents but ignored the science saying the reef damage could not be offset, it shows he is unfit to be the environment minister.

Minister Hunt's claim that the damage of dumping three million cubic metres of dredge spoil can be offset is simply ludicrous. Over five years, with $200 million of funding and with the cooperation of two levels of government—Queensland and the Commonwealth—we have managed to avert one-twentieth of the sediment that Minister Hunt has now approved to be dumped offshore to make Abbot Point the world's largest coal port. That, of course, undermines the good work the farmers have done to avert that sediment—somehow the coalminers and the ports corp can be 20 times more efficient than two levels of government, over five years, with $200 million.

We know that dredging and dumping creates far more damage than could ever feasibly be offset because we have seen it all happen before at Gladstone Harbour. The shores of Gladstone Harbour were littered with fish kills and dolphin and dugong carcasses following the dredging and dumping program there. Last week a report into the Gladstone Harbour disaster, which Minister Hunt himself commissioned, found poor environmental management contributed to that. It found that compliance monitoring was inadequate, that records were not kept and that multiple complaints about breaches of environmental conditions—those ;stringent environmental conditions' that the government always champions—were not even followed up. The report recommended an increase in compliance monitoring. Despite this, the Abbott government's budget cuts compliance and enforcement staff numbers at the environment department and cuts funding for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. These cuts are leaving the door wide open for the disaster at Gladstone to be repeated throughout the reef.

The environmental destruction at Gladstone was so severe that it was what first prompted the World Heritage Committee to visit the reef and develop those recommendations to stop the disaster at Gladstone being repeated elsewhere on the reef. Those recommendations included a pause on new development while a long-term plan for the reef was completed—sadly, pause was not pressed. The recommendations also included that there be no new ports in pristine areas and no port expansions that would damage the overall universal value of the reef. And yet, the Newman and Abbott governments have continued to approve mega industrial ports along the reef, including what will become the world's largest coal port at Abbot Point.

This blatant disregard for the World Heritage Committee's recommendations led the committee to release a draft decision just last month confirming that the reef's World Heritage status is still in jeopardy at the upcoming meeting in just over a month. A World Heritage 'in danger' listing for the Great Barrier Reef would devastate the $5 billion a year tourism industry, which employs 63,000 people, and go down in history as an environmental tragedy. How would we be able to explain to our grandchildren that in 2014, with full knowledge, the Australian and Queensland governments let our precious reef end up on the World Heritage list of sites in danger? An 'in danger' listing would show the world that our governments are putting the interests of the big mining companies ahead of their stewardship of this international icon, putting its future in doubt. I cannot bear to think of my daughter and future grandchildren not being able to visit and appreciate this incredible natural wonder, as I did as a child. I saw that raw beauty and that colourful complexity and felt that awe which I would like everyone to be able to experience.

For Mother's Day this year, my now five-year-old gave me a lump of plasticine, which she said was a coral bommie to help me save the reef. My darling girl, I will keep trying. Like so many Australians, I am committed to protecting that icon and to being able to sit with my future grandchildren, talk of the old days when the world was dominated by coal and gas interests and tell them the great story of what we did as a community to win—what we did to fight for and win what we hold precious—and how we did in fact save the reef. A similar story has been told in the past, most compellingly by Judith Wright, who famously led a strong community campaign in the seventies to save the reef from limestone mining and oil drilling. In her book The Coral Battleground, Judith Wright wrote:

As the battle for the Reef progressed, all of us who were fighting to keep those crystal waters from sacrilege became welded in a very deep companionship, and that in itself helped to keep us at work.

Today, I can feel that same community spirit in our generation's fight to save the reef from the disregard and the destruction of the big mining companies.

Across the country, thousands of Australians rallied together at community events against the Abbott government's abhorrent approval of the world's largest coal port, in this World Heritage Area, at Abbot Point. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been donated to fund community court cases against the Abbot Point approval. Newspapers have been flooded with countless letters to the editor expressing disgust over the Abbott government's treatment of our precious reef. Countless Australians have shown their support for the reef through social media and by signing petitions. The fishing industry, tourism operators, community groups and environmentalists have formed strong alliances with the shared goal of protecting our precious reef and the 63,000 jobs it provides. We even have ice-cream on our side, with Ben & Jerry's getting behind the cause—