David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Again, we've got Senator Pratt faithfully standing up for the gas companies, allowing them to promise the world and deliver an atlas, and we're very happy with it! It shouldn't be good enough. When companies make commitments, they should be held to them. They had a commitment to inject at least 80 per cent of CO2 underground. They should have captured 3.4 million to four million tonnes per year but have only captured a total of 6.5 million tonnes since 2016. That sounds like serious underachieving—through you, Chair, to Senator Pratt. If we're happy to allow them to continue to promise things and get approvals and then not follow through with them, then keep voting for Labor and the coalition. That's what's going to happen.

We can't allow fossil fuel companies to continue to get away with this. We hear stories of fossil fuel companies getting approval. Whitehaven's Maules Creek coalmine got their approval based on an offsets plan. A decade later, it's still not implemented. A decade later they still haven't met their offset requirements. We then hear Whitehaven argue that it's too expensive to recycle their tyres, so they get a variation to bury their tyres on the site.