Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm so pleased to be given this opportunity today to rise to speak to this urgency motion because if there is one thing that I'm incredibly passionate about it is the environment and biodiversity. I just don't talk the talk; I walk the walk. When I was a young lad I quit my job at 23, got on a plane and went overseas. I had six months in Africa. I went to see the gorillas in the mist, I climbed Kilimanjaro and I went to see the Serengeti. Likewise, I spent another seven years overseas where I climbed Mont Blanc and Annapurna. I went to those places and saw lots of wildlife across the world.

I am very passionate about protecting our biodiversity, especially here in Australia where we do have a lot of marginal country. I grew up on a property in western Queensland. Ironically I have actually seen the mulga wipe out the mitchell grass. I know what feral pests do to this country. I know that you can have too many wild cats and pigs, for example. I don't have a gun licence anymore, but when I was a young lad we used to go and shoot the pigs because they used to create wallows. Feral cats are a real problem in this country. I can assure you that it's very difficult to keep control of that if you let the mulga run wild in western Queensland.

There are photos of our property back in the early 1950s and 1960s, and it was all open grassland. Today, because we're not allowed to push, the mulga has taken off. One of these days they will drop a match in there and the place will just burn. If you're worried about protecting koalas and things like that, you don't want bushfires going on out there. It won't take off like the gum trees and the eucalyptus will, because it's acacia, but fires have happened out there in the past.

I'm glad Senator Hanson-Young raised the issue of koalas. To sit here and talk about the impact that coalmines and logging will have and not talk about the destruction of renewables is completely one-sided and hypocritical. Our koalas will be under threat from the construction of up to 28,000 kilometres of transmission lines that have to be built to connect the power from all of these isolated remote renewable energy projects. I should say that that property in western Queensland had solar panels in the late 1980s, so I'm not anti using solar panels or whatever at the end of the grid, but I can assure you that it will never work on an industrial scale.

Then we should talk about the sea lions. We have just seen seismic testing in the ocean off New Jersey and a lot of beached whales as a result of that seismic testing. Only the Greens and Labor could come up with some sort of mechanical energy instrument that will kill above the water bats and birds, especially bats, which are one of our key pollinators, and will be a threat to sea life in the water. And it's not just the actual wind turbines that are going to cause problems, these wind turbines are coated in bisphenol A. One litre of that will pollute up to 50 million litres of water. So we don't know what the impact of this stuff is going to be. They're going to have to make sure that there are proper regulations when they put these wind turbines out in the ocean, that this bisphenol doesn't melt or decay away and end up polluting our oceans. So in terms of renewables, they're a serious threat to our biodiversity.

Then of course we come back to the batteries. These are built from rare earth metals. Technically speaking, they're not that rare in the earth's crust but they are very, very fine in the sense that you've got to actually mine so many tonnes of ore just to get one tonne of metal. With lithium, for example, on average that grades between one to two per cent of ore. So you've got to mine 100 tonnes of ore just to get one or two tonnes of lithium. Then, on top of that, you've then got the stripping ratio, where you have to go around and around and around to get to the ore; you don't just drive those big trucks down at a very steep angle. So the footprint of solar panels and rare earth mining on our biodiversity is going to have a massive impact on potential animals going forward. That's not to mention the actual CO2 emissions that are going to come in actually getting this stuff out of the ground.

So I think that before we start turning off our coal-fired power stations—and, by the way, the CO2 that comes from those is actually plant food. What better way to recycle energy than through the natural process of photosynthesis? That's something that I would have thought most of you would have understood because it was taught in grade 8 science. So I say, let's back coal—