Lee Rhiannon (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I note that Senator Cameron said there was no duplication here. But there is a real problem if section 255AA is removed. The senator—often we have to be outside the chamber—may have missed that there is a real problem. If that section is removed and then replaced with what is being proposed, which is an independent expert scientific committee, it only covers coal seam gas and large coal mining developments. That is set out in the explanatory memorandum of this bill. The minister has failed. He has not answered my colleague Senator Waters's question, who set it out very clearly and requested that he detail how the government is proposing to handle this.

We have mining around this country and in New South Wales, which has the largest part of the Murray-Darling Basin, with silver, gold, copper, lead, zinc and, possibly, uranium mining. The minister came to a point. It was like something dawned on him, 'Wow, we have actually been caught out here.' But he would not explain what they are going to do because he has got no explanation, clearly. They have gone from what was a reasonable part of the bill. As I said in my second reading speech, section 255AA of the Water Act does require an independent expert impact study into the effects of mining subsidence on the Murray-Darling groundwater system.

We are going backwards. Maybe Labor and the coalition have not been briefed properly. Maybe they are not sure but, at the moment, what it is looking like is another leg-up to the mining industry. We see it time and time again in state and federal parliaments around this country, where the mining industry gets what the mining industry wants. Right now, it looks very much like that. You cannot just say, 'It is not a duplication,' or say, 'We just have another way of doing it. Because we have got the EPBC Act, we have got a water trigger.' No, there is something that is going to be lost here that is very important—that is, requiring the studies when mining that is not just coal seam gas and coal mining is undertaken.

Minister, if another large-scale copper mine in the Murray-Darling Basin system was proposed that would result in subsidence, what studies would be undertaken and what aspects of these changes would be significant for that development?