Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak to the private member's bill that I put forward in 2016 but which is now absolutely essential. When I first introduced the Great Australian Bight Environment Protection Bill in 2016 the company that wanted to drill for oil in the Great Australian Bight was BP. It then moved on to Chevron, and now it is Equinor, formerly known as Statoil, the Norwegian company that wants to drill for oil in the Great Australian Bight and put at risk our wonderful, unique and precious marine ecosystem, and our tourism and fishing industries in South Australia. If there were a spill, it would not just have a devastating effect on my home state of South Australia; it would devastate coastlines and beaches right up to Port Macquarie, including Bondi Beach, and as far west as Albany in Western Australia.

The local communities and the fishing and tourism industries that rely on a healthy and pristine Great Australian Bight are very concerned that this could happen to our precious marine ecosystem. The debate around the risk of drilling in the Great Australian Bight is reaching fever point. The reason that I'm bringing forward this bill for debate today in this place is that Equinor, the latest big foreign company that wants to drill for oil, wants to do so as early as next year. Hot on its heels are a number of other companies. NOPSEMA, the agency responsible for ticking off on these types of operations, might give the tick of approval for seismic testing as early as a fortnight's time, meaning seismic testing would start as early as March next year some 90 kilometre off Kangaroo Island. That is why the debate today on this issue is so important. It's important for South Australia—it's absolutely essential for our tourism and fishing industries—but it's also important for the rest of the country.

Let me outline a number of the key reasons that make the Great Australian Bight so special. The bight includes the calving sanctuary for the southern right whales. During the months of July through to October we have dozens and dozens of southern right whales calving and feeding their young calves right at the head of the bight. It's a special place. It's such a special place that from the mainland, from standing on the shoreline, you can see dozens of whales and their calves in that pristine and protected area. After the calving season, those whales swim south, right down to the bottom of the Southern Ocean. It is a whale sanctuary for a reason. It is one of the unique places in the world where this activity happens and where these whales swim, raise their babies and look after them ready for the trip south. We know that it is a feeding ground for threatened sea lions, sharks, tuna and migratory sperm whales. In fact, 85 per cent of the species in the bight are found nowhere else in the world. That is how unique the Great Australian Bight is in terms of being a marine sanctuary, a special place for many species that live nowhere else in the world.

Why we would put that at risk is beyond me. We need to be protecting these areas, not putting them at further risk of either extinction or damage. The idea of throwing away what we have in terms of having a unique and special place, just because a foreign company wants to come in and drill for oil, is simply madness. It is, of course, part of the most iconic aspects of Australia's coastline. It is part of our identity. In South Australia, Kangaroo Island is resting right there in the Great Australian Bight. Kangaroo Island is the jewel in our tourism crown. For those who haven't visited Kangaroo Island, you're missing out. It is one of the most special places on earth. It is lucky to have gorgeous coastlines, beautiful beaches and a unique tourism industry. You can catch the ferry over to Kangaroo Island and stay for a night or two, or even longer if you like. You can see the kangaroos and the koalas. You can see the sea lions right there on the beach. You can witness nature as it's meant to be. There are not many places in the world that remain as untouched as the Great Australian Bight, the coastline and our beaches in Kangaroo Island.

The primary industries in regional South Australia, fishing and tourism, are very concerned at what drilling in the bight would mean for them. They are worried about the impacts of seismic testing, which is the first threat before drilling occurs. They are absolutely terrified that, if the government agency and the federal government allow drilling to continue and to take hold in the bight, if there were a spill that entire area would be decimated. Our industries would never recover. The wild coastline in the Great Australian Bight, particularly along the head of the bight and throughout the beautiful little islands that sit offshore and Kangaroo Island, are so hard to reach that it would never be properly cleaned up. No matter how much money was spent, no matter how many hundreds and hundreds of hours the workers spent out there trying to clean it up, there are places that would never be reached. So they would remain full of sludge. The fish, the birds and the marine life would simply suffocate and die. No wonder there is no social licence in my home state, in South Australia, to allow drilling to occur.

We know that traditional owners don't support drilling in the bight; in fact, they are horrified that their special place is under threat. We know that the environmental experts and scientists have been warning for quite some time that this is a risk we should not take. Rather than putting at risk the Great Australian Bight, rather than impacting on the migratory path of the southern right whales, sperm whales or New Zealand fur seals, we should in fact be protecting this special place properly, giving it World Heritage protection and celebrating that it is a most unique marine wonderland. But this government, sadly backed by the Labor opposition to date, is willing to put all of that at risk for the sake of letting a handful of multinational oil and gas companies come in and drill.

There is no social licence for this activity in my home state, in South Australia. Thirteen local councils have all voted in opposition to allowing this to happen. Kangaroo Island was the first local council to formally express their opposition, and since then many more councils have joined them. Even people in the more metro areas in Adelaide, our metro beaches—Glenelg, Semaphore, Brighton, Grange, Kingston—are extremely concerned about what it would mean for them if they had oil lapping up onto the sands in their communities.

We know that this risk is real. Both BP and Equinor, the companies asking to be allowed to do this, have been forced to release their own modelling. They had to do a risk assessment of what their activities would mean for the area. Both of those models from the companies themselves show that the risk of an oil spill is just too great to take. They show that the worst-case scenario, which would be the worst in history, is that it would never recover. But, even less than that, below the worst-case scenario, South Australia's coastline would be decimated and oil would wash up right past Victoria to Tasmania, Bondi Beach and Port Macquarie. This is an issue that affects Australians across the board. Any Australian who relies on our healthy coastline and beaches and any Australian who enjoys visiting and spending time at our coast should be very, very concerned about what will happen if these big multinational companies get the tick from the government, allowing them to drill for oil in the coming year.

We know already that our fishing and tourism industries would be decimated. And many of them would just never recover. In the worst-case scenario, half of the oil and all of the natural gas from the deepwater release would remain in the water column. It would literally suffocate and kill the animals living in that ocean. The official modelling from these companies indicates that a spill would impact many matters of national environmental significance, including up to 177 marine species, 47 species classified as vulnerable, endangered and critically endangered, and 50 coastal wetlands. Thirty-eight marine reserves would be covered in sludge. This would result in the mortality of hundreds of thousands of seabirds, thousands of marine animals, including endangered southern right whales, blue whales, killer whales, dolphins, endemic and endangered Australian sea lions and New Zealand fur seals. Hundreds of sea turtles would be dead. Hundreds—potentially thousands—of kilometres of shoreline would be covered in oil, causing extreme harm to both the birds that live on the coast and those that visit nearby. The significant injury is expected to be exceptionally diverse and unique, and, as I've said previously, cleaning this mess up would be virtually impossible.

This is not a risk worth taking. We don't need a multinational or foreign company to come and drill for oil in our Great Australian Bight only to send that oil offshore, along with their profits, with very little benefit to the local economy and, indeed, Australia. We know some of the oil from the bight will not be burnt in Australia—in fact, most of it won't be. That is why it makes Minister Canavan's statement—and I see he's sitting in the chamber today—that we need this oil drilling to occur in order to lower petrol prices in Australia simply ludicrous. Even if they started to drill for oil next year, if the Labor and the Liberal parties allowed Equinor to go ahead with this, it wouldn't be at a commercially viable point for at least a decade. And, even then, that oil would be shipped offshore. The profits would be shipped offshore. Australians would see none of those.

In terms of local jobs: well, there aren't any—the companies have said that themselves. Maybe, there would be five or six—very, very few jobs. The companies have said themselves that they will be flying in the skilled workers that they need. Why would we risk the jobs in our tourism and fishing industries to let a foreign company drill for oil when all the money is simply going offshore?

If this weren't bad enough, let me just draw your attention to the impact that this oil will have on climate change. We are living in an era of global warming as we speak. There is no future on a dead planet. And, if we were to allow this extraction of oil to occur at the volumes being proposed, we would never arrest climate change—not here in Australia and not around the rest of the world. Just a fraction of the oil reserves in the Great Australian Bight would amount to three gigatonnes of CO2. This is almost equivalent to one-third of our entire carbon budget between now and 2050.

If we are to keep temperature rise at two degrees—and we've been told by scientists that we have to do more than that—the IPCC report says we have to phase out fossil fuels. We can't keep playing games with our environment and the climate. It is time to get serious about what needs to be done. We have to reduce our carbon emissions and we have to stop the further extraction of fossil fuels that are only going to make climate change worse and more dangerous. If we are to do what the scientists say is required—and that is to keep temperature rise to 1.5 degrees or below—there is absolutely no way we can allow the extraction of fossil fuels from the Great Australian Bight.

I am of the generation which has already seen the effects of climate change. Many of us in this chamber are collectively responsible for this. We can see the effects of climate change already. But we are also the last generation of policymakers and decision-makers who can do anything about it. It is up to us to make the hard decisions to reduce dangerous global warming. And the more we twiddle our thumbs and the more we deny this, the harder and harder it becomes—and near impossible.

I want to protect the Great Australian Bight because I know that the marine life there is precious and that it is not worth putting at risk our local industries in South Australia. As a South Australian, I am proud and very protective of our beautiful Kangaroo Island. But, as a mother, I have a responsibility to do everything I can to help stop dangerous global warming. And that means standing up to these big fossil-fuel companies and their spruikers and puppets—some of whom are here in the chamber today—from blindly dragging Australia into a climate emergency that we won't be able to reverse out of. If we are to tackle climate change, we can have no drilling for oil and gas in the Great Australian Bight. We may as well tell the international community that Australia is prepared to fry. Our oceans will be decimated, our animals killed and our planet will die unless we do something about it, and the time to do something about it is now. If we continue to wait, if we continue to delay, not only will the whales lose but the whole planet will start to choke. We have to stand up strongly and say no—no drilling in the Great Australian Bight.