Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

You know you're in trouble when the coalition is thanking the Labor government for bringing forward some legislation in this parliament! I'm just going to name it up. The Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) Bill 2023 is a naked and shameless attempt to facilitate the dirtiest fossil fuel project in our nation's history—the Barossa offshore gas project in the Timor Sea.

I want to talk about both the politics and the policy of this. The politics is simple. This is state capture at its finest. This is the Labor Party and the Liberal Party coming together to do a favour for Santos, one of Australia's biggest polluters. They've come together to do a favour for some of our foreign-nation partners, in particular the large multinationals out of Japan and Korea that are in a joint venture with Santos on this project. If anyone has any doubts about that, go to the submissions in the House inquiry, supposedly on the London protocol, and have a look at them for yourself. Look at the influence of DFAT on this.

This is my 12th year in this place, in the Australian Senate, and I can't even begin to express how frustrated and saddened I am that we are still putting up and passing legislation—because, let's be clear, this will pass today with the duopoly of Australian politics getting together—to support the fossil fuel industry. I can't begin to express my sadness and frustration that after all this time, with everything that's been going on in the world, with all the clear signs that we're at a climate tipping point and that we're living in a climate emergency, we are still facilitating fossil fuel projects.

This particular project will also risk turning our oceans into a dumping ground for pollution. Have a look at the name of the bill, 'Sea Dumping'. Does that sound good to you? No; we're dumping gases back into exhausted reservoirs to support the profits of fossil fuel companies and risking our oceans.

There are a couple of points I want to make on the policy on this. This technology, carbon capture and storage, has not worked at any commercial scale around the world in our oceans. We saw lots of statistics from government departments—four of them, if I remember correctly; not just DFAT, Geoscience Australia, CSIRO but others—out there egging on this legislation. We saw information that there's a large number of carbon capture and storage projects around the world under development. Under development—unproven! There's only been one long-term carbon capture and storage project in the ocean off Norway, and I'll get to that in a minute. It's failed to achieve its objectives. What we've learnt from that project is that carbon dioxide leaks from reservoirs and that these reservoirs require significant seismic testing, constant blasting of our oceans with the loudest noises produced by human beings, a process we now know impacts marine life, threatens our commercial fisheries and threatens the basis of the food chain in our oceans, plankton. And, all around the country, people are coming together to say no to more seismic testing, yet here we have a project that is designed to breathe life into the fossil fuel industry, to allow for the development of more big carbon bombs in our oceans. And, if it breathes life into more fossil fuel development, it is a kiss of death to our oceans and our precious marine life and our commercial fisheries.

Right now, we are preparing for an El Nino summer. Scientists last week—and I've been looking at the language of climate scientists for many years, and they're not political and they're very cautious and very conservative—have described what we've got coming for us this year off Australia's coastlines as an 'underwater bushfire'. We've already seen devastating mass coral bleachings on the Great Barrier Reef—record coral bleachings; unprecedented, back-to-back coral bleachings—that have had devastating impacts on the ecosystem of the Great Barrier Reef and on our northern and north-western Australian coral reefs. We've seen the same marine heat waves destroy 95 per cent of Tasmania's giant kelp forests and all their marine life has disappeared with them. We've seen the march of invasive species on the back of these warmer currents, colonising our inshore and offshore reefs, completely turning them into underwater moonscapes because of warming oceans, flowing through to our commercial fisheries and our local communities and our First Nations communities.

When do we stop and think? Surely we've seen enough, and we need to take action. Yet, here we are today about to pass a bill specifically designed to facilitate the Barossa Gas Project. Given the government, through NOPSEMA, have put up regulatory framework through regulations to approve at least another—potentially another nine—offshore carbon capture and storage projects, when are we going to learn enough is enough?

This gas, if it's extracted, is only going to be exported overseas. It's not going to be for our domestic market. It's not going to be for our energy security. These companies, we can almost certainly say, will pay no tax on the profits they're going to make, so they're risking our oceans but they're not going to pay any tax. And even if this technology works, and that is a very, very big 'if' given it hasn't worked commercially anywhere else—we'll get into that detail in the committee stage by looking, for example, at the Gorgan project, a $3 billion project that so far has failed to capture carbon and emissions and which is not even operating at one-third of its capacity after multiple problems—the best we can expect is that these projects will store scope 1 emissions at the site. What about scope 2 emissions when this gas and these fossil fuels are burnt in our power stations? What about scope 3 emissions when all this gas, this LNG, is exported and burnt overseas? That doesn't even come into the equation.

And what about the CO2 when it leaks? The Australian Marine Conservation Society put a very detailed Senate submission into the process around this legislation, talking about the impacts that leaking CO2 has on the marine life around these structures. By the way, that's why the two structures in Norway, and I'll make sure I pronounce their names correctly, the Sleipner structure and the Snohvit structure, are the most blasted and seismically tested geological structures on the planet: because it's so dangerous to pump CO2 into these reservoirs, because it's largely unproven, because every geological structure is different. There's no cookie cutter option saying: 'This is the way we do it. Go out there and do it.' We are going to see relentless seismic testing around these fields once they're approved without any evidence they're going to work.

This raises the spectre that this is, very conveniently, a red herring for the fossil fuel industry and for a government that seemingly doesn't care about climate action or protecting our oceans. 'Look over there. We're going to store this stuff in the ground. We're going to build these massive carbon bombs and we're going to export all of this dirty energy around the world.'

We know enough now that we need to rapidly transition to renewables. And I reflect on this government campaigning at the last federal election on a climate action platform. Now, we've seen two signature pieces of legislation in this parliament—more than we saw under the previous mob, the LNP, who gave us nothing but climate inaction—so why are we undermining that today? Why are we putting the profits of Santos and big multinational corporations before the planet and people on coastlines around this country? Why are we ignoring the thoughts of our First Nations people—I know Senator Cox is going to speak about this shortly—especially in relation to the Tiwi islanders and their cultural heritage up in the NT? Why are we going down this road when we don't have to? It is shameful, given all the other priorities we have in this place, that we are debating a piece of legislation that everybody agrees is designed to facilitate more fossil fuel projects? We're going to get into more detail on the policy in the committee stage.

I heard the LNP say, 'Well, we agree there needs to be mechanisms in place to properly regulate these projects.' What amendments have the government been working on? We saw the amendments in the House, months ago, put up by the Greens and Independents. Have those amendments been adopted in this legislation? Not that I've seen. Has Minister Plibersek, who's got carriage of this, been working with those who have very valid concerns about how this is going to work? Or are you going to dump it all on the Timor-Leste government? We've got to do a lot better.

For those who point to the fact that carbon capture and storage is some kind of unicorn technology and that this has been highlighted by the IPCC, the IPCC have made it very clear: in their own words, this technology is no free lunch. So far, collectively, if you add up all the carbon capture and storage projects around the world—and only a handful of them are exactly the kind of CCS we're talking about today, which is using depleted reservoirs in our ocean—they amount to about 0.1 per cent of global emissions. So much for 'this is the future of reducing emissions and turning dirty energy into clean energy'! It is a fallacy. It has failed everywhere. It has been talked about now for three decades, and here we are in 2023 talking about the same thing—the definition of insanity—when we know exactly what we need to be doing.

My colleagues today have been in this place year in, year out fighting for climate action, fighting to protect the environment and fighting to protect our oceans. We know, along with all the great people who submitted to the Senate inquiry on this process, that this is a con. This is a sham. We should feel ashamed as a chamber, in this time of climate emergency, that we are about to pass legislation written for a fossil fuel company; written by a government that takes big donations from fossil fuel companies; and written by people who clearly think they're going to get away this, with the Australian people not noticing that companies out there are trying to find ways around the safeguard mechanism. This is a $4 billion project. Santos has around $1 billion of liabilities under the safeguard mechanism for Barossa. The fact they're prepared to spend $4 billion on this project tells you something. There will be a lot of other people wanting to dump their pollution in this field when it's built.

Another thing comes to mind: the oil and gas industry has a $60 billion liability to decommission its infrastructure in the ocean. How convenient is it that now there are nine carbon capture and storage acreage releases around existing fossil fuel operations in the ocean that allow them to use those fields to avoid their liabilities? (Time expired)