Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have no declaration of having worked for any of the big oil or mining companies across this country. I'm just a humble teacher and a lecturer in education from the Central Coast, with a small-business family background. But, nonetheless, I understand what it means when you come into government to have a really good look at what's going on, get in the race early, not wait until the last minute, see what's going on and prevent the situation that we are coming in here to correct today. And make no mistake: this is a correction of a failure of government to see what was going on and to bring in a timely bill a long, long time before this day to prevent the matter that it's seeking to use as a historical moment for a change going forward.

There are lots of concerns about retrospective legislation. You can understand why there's pressure against that. But the only reason there would be pressure for this to be retrospective is that the government weren't on the job. Anything that really matters they don't do until it's too late, and then they do it in the most untidy way. So let's just have a look at this bill which does seek to do something good finally but is once again too little too late by a government who are obsessed with announcements over actually doing the day job of showing up properly, planning and delivering legislation in a timely way to benefit the people of Australia. The cost to the Australian people of this delay is $200 million. So it costs when you don't show up. It costs when you don't get to the starting line. It costs when you don't do your day job and you're the government.

So I rise today to speak on the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Amendment (Titles Administration and Other Measures) Bill 2021. It is, as I said, a reform in dealing with offshore equipment and infrastructure that helps prevent companies from dodging their corporate responsibility and to do what every kid learns even at preschool, to clean up after yourself, after they have extracted the nation's resource wealth. Even Senator Small in his contribution spoke about Australia being behind not just because our assets are a little younger than the assets of the UK, Norway, the US and Japan but because this government doesn't think it needs to do stuff to protect Australia. It thinks it just needs to show up, be in power, give itself a few little pockets of money that it can rort and send out and that will do. It thinks that's good enough. Well, it is not good enough.

This piece of legislation is particularly relevant when we consider the recent debacle surrounding the Northern Endeavour. This was an oil vessel that was anchored in the Timor Sea, a beautiful part of the country. But it's going to cost the taxpayers $200 million to clean up after its inexperienced owner purchased the platform from Woodside. That owner, Northern Oil & Gas Australia Pty Ltd, was then forced to close after the national offshore environment authority, known as NOPSEMA, found that there were a lot of significant environmental and safety concerns that were associated with the Northern Endeavour. What were those concerns? One was corrosion. Another was the ability to respond to an oil spill. Another was a faulty fire suppression system and a significant risk of a major incident occurring. Remember where this is. It's in the Timor Sea. You don't have to be a mining executive to have some sense of value not just of what's under the seabed but of the sea itself and its amazing environmental asset base.

The decision, unfortunately, forces the taxpayer to fund the cost of decommissioning and the environmental clean-up and it leads to calls for a change to the regime by which titles are transferred. So, essentially, the company, Woodside, that owned it and could have paid for a clean-up got rid of it just in the nick of time, according to its calculations, before it went to a smaller company that was unable to do the maintenance and the clean-up. What's the impact? Unfortunately, it forces the taxpayer to fund the cost of decommissioning and the environmental clean-up and it leads to calls to change the regime by which a title can be transferred from a big, smart company with a whole lot of lawyers and an awful lot of money to a smaller company with fewer assets and perhaps a lot of innovation, desire and enterprise but less capacity to do the job of cleaning up. And it's clear, retrospectively, that NOGA didn't have the experience or the capital necessary to effectively manage the title.

Clearly, the current legislative framework is totally insufficient, and sensible reform is needed. The bill establishes four key reforms to the current regime. It provides for oversight of changes that occur in control of titles, and now includes offshore projects being transferred by the sale of shares—so somebody is going to be watching. The bill also includes electronic lodgement of applications and provides for expanded information-gathering powers to assess the suitability of entities wishing to enter the title regime—so somebody is going to be watching; previously they weren't. Finally, and most importantly, it expands existing powers to recall previous titleholders and decommission infrastructure and remediate the marine environment if the current titleholder is unable to do so. So if you were responsible for it and somebody else gets it and it starts to fall apart you don't just hand over your responsibility; that's really what's going on with one of the core parts of this bill.

I'm hopeful that the last reform I mentioned there will change the industry attitude by increasing the due diligence that is required of companies when they decide that they are going to offload the title; they can't just dump the problem on the next person and run away with the profits. There is nothing wrong with profit-making from investment in oil and gas; there is innovation there, and there are resource needs in our communities. But people who are in those responsible roles as the leaders of these big companies, which too frequently are multinational companies not Australian owned companies, cannot 'cut and run' and leave the Australian people with a tax bill. We can't afford to be spending money to clean up for these big companies; they should be doing it themselves.

I also note that the federal government has proposed a levy on the industry to fund the decommissioning of the Northern Endeavour. This policy debacle that we are discussing here has led to a new tax on the industry due to the gap in the previous legislation and the fact that the government didn't show up to do its day job around this issue of protecting our environment from leaky assets that are past their use-by date.

The new legislation means that those industry players who are doing the right thing, who play by the rules, are not unnecessarily penalised by the short-sighted actions of the few—at least, that's the plan. According to the explanatory memorandum, the new regime will ensure trailing liability across the entire life of the lease and expands the remedial directions provision in the OPGGS Act to require any former titleholder or related person of a current or former titleholder to carry out decommissioning if the current or immediate former titleholder is unable to do so. Trailing liability will be a measure of last resort where all other regulatory options have been exhausted. It aims to ensure that the risks and liabilities of petroleum activities remain the responsibility of those who held title, or have the ability to influence operations under the title, and to change industry behaviour by increasing the due diligence undertaking by companies in regard to who they sell the assets to. I think it's altogether fair and reasonable for companies that have profited from the extraction of our petroleum wealth to make their contribution to remediating the site. In the case of Northern Endeavour, it extracted 200 million barrels of oil, nearly $15 billion of oil in today's prices. It's obscene that, after that lucrative cargo is collected, ordinary Australian families should have to fork out $200 million in taxes to remediate that site.

APPEA, the industry's peak body, believes that rehabilitating all former oil rigs in Australia would cost, as Senator Small indicated, about $60 billion by 2040. So we've got to get this right and it's got to be fixed quickly. This is in fact a ticking time bomb for Australian taxpayers. And this legislation goes only some way—not all the way—to ensuring that this burden doesn't fall on everyday Australians but, rather, on the entity responsible for the infrastructure and the associated works required for rehabilitation. Without effective action, we could potentially see the phenomenon I've just been discussing of the Northern Endeavour proliferating right across the sector—as many mining companies have done—where oil giants dump soon-to-be-decommissioned assets onto dollar companies and then abdicate all responsibility for remediation of sites, leaving taxpayers footing multimillion dollar invoices. In my home state of New South Wales alone, the Audit Office of New South Wales found in 2017 that security deposits of the state's 450 mines 'do not include sufficient contingency, given the substantial risks and uncertainties associated with mine rehabilitation and closure' to fill in their voids or maintain vegetation when operations cease. Current practices support endeavour, entrepreneurship and jobs, but when you've made your money and the clean-up needs to be done, it is entirely unreasonable to ask someone else to do the job unless you pay them to do so.

Labor will be supporting this bill, as tardily as it has arrived. We support it because we believe in corporate responsibility and we absolutely believe in the health of the marine environment. I want to shout out to people back home on the Central Coast, where I haven't been now for six weeks. I'm missing my community and I'm missing seeing that beautiful ocean, the great Pacific Ocean, every single day. One of the most wonderful things about Australia is our abundant flora and fauna both on the land and in the sea. An oil spill off the coast would absolutely jeopardise our beloved, pristine maritime and marine environment, as well as thousands of tourist jobs.

Fear of an oil spill is why my local community on the Central Coast is so afraid of the development of the PEP 11 exploration permit, which they fear will blot the landscape as well as put us at risk of an environmental disaster on the Central Coast, not far from Newcastle and Sydney. After years of delay, the local member for Robertson, Ms Wicks, and Mr Morrison finally got the message from the community and put a message out via the media that they personally oppose PEP 11. But the gap between what this government says and what it then actually does widens by the day. It's more of a chasm, really, than a gap. I do note, however, that neither Mr Morrison nor Ms Wicks have responsibility for making an announcement about PEP 11. That goes to Minister Pitt.

Minister Pitt's deafening silence on the matter of PEP 11 licence extensions is very troubling to the people of the Central Coast. As a true Central Coast resident, I call on Minister Pitt to come clean, issue a public statement and, once and for all, rule out PEP 11. The Central Coast needs to have this sword of Damocles removed from over our heads. Keep our breaches pristine and unpolluted. Tell the truth, Minister Pitt; put it on the record. Put it in writing so that the community can actually be confident that there's no gap between the weasel words of the Prime Minister and Ms Wicks and the action of the government that Mr Morrison leads.

Despite the PM's impressionistic effort to look like he's with the Central Coast community, this failure to direct Minister Pitt to end the PEP 11 oil threat is real. Minister Pitt has the power to cut PEP 11 out of our lives, out of our environment, out of our pristine coastal waters and out of our community. Like a cancer, PEP 11 needs to be cut out right now, no mucking about, no ifs, no buts, no hints, no maybes—just gone.

Once again, with the Morrison government it's a minute late and a dollar short. As always with this government, their lack of leadership, their poor management, always has a cost.

The Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Amendment (Titles Administration and Other Measures) Bill 2021 should not have been triggered by a potential catastrophe in the Timor Sea. But we do have this legislation. We do have it before us at last. Thankfully, the government—perhaps having listened to wise public servants, who they so often seem to ignore—have come to the table in an effort to prevent future disasters. It's still going to cost the Australian people $200 million to fix up the Northern Endeavour problem that happened on the watch of this government. Well, it was supposed to be on the watch of this government; they actually weren't watching.

I commend the bill to the floor of the house, but in doing so, I note that there was an announcement of an industry-wide levy of 48c a barrel, which I referred to in my previous remarks. To the best of my knowledge, there is no bill, which would be a Treasury bill, that has been brought to the parliament to actually do the next vital step of the parliament— (Time expired)