John Madigan (Victoria, Democratic Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

With the collapse of contract for closure negotiations last week in the Latrobe Valley, the raging controversy over the super trawler, the failure to assess properly the local environmental impacts of Mitsui's proposed Bald Hills wind farm, and the questionable wisdom of selling Cubbie Station into overseas control, I would like to spend the next 10 minutes reflecting on environmental matters and governance.

Like many other people, when I heard that the contract for closure negotiations with Latrobe Valley's brown coal generators had failed I wondered: how are we going to achieve emissions reduction in these most highly polluting parts of our energy industries? What happens next? Is that it? I also had reason to reflect again on how terribly important our energy generation sector is—so important that it should be in public ownership and under public control. When the Victorian coalition government enthusiastically sold off Victoria's energy industry during the 1990s, they did not care about the environmental and social consequences or the governance implications of that policy. The SEC was well advanced in its planning to reduce greenhouse emissions. All of that was put in the bin by privatisation.

Today, instead of an orderly, planned approach to emissions reduction in energy generation, we have disorderly, even chaotic, attempts by the federal government as it struggles to manage the legacy of past policy failures. This sense of disorderly and chaotic governance is not helped by the federal government's continued support for full energy sector privatisation in New South Wales and Queensland, as promoted in the energy white paper.

It does not add up. Why continue to promote policies that have totally failed environmentally, financially and socially? Why continue to pursue privatisation policies that blatantly ignore the environmental dimension of energy generation? It makes about as much sense as allowing one of Australia's leading coal exporters to build a large, damaging wind farm in the midst of a sanctuary for migratory shorebirds located at Bald Hills. It makes about as much sense as allowing overseas interests to purchase one of Australia's largest rural properties that also happens to be of critical strategic importance to the health of the Murray-Darling Basin.

We can overcome this disconnected and uncoordinated policy by consciously setting out to do the opposite—that is, to commit to long-term policy settings that seek to integrate environment, society and economy in a deliberate, planned way. To do this, all political parties need to commit to the goal of integrated, strategic policy development and implementation. All political parties need to become environmentally conscious and proudly so. Collectively, we need to stop the knee-jerk reactive stuff that promotes political opportunism and divisions over environmental protection and social good. All political parties need to commit to the process and outcomes of good science, and evidence based policy development. We need to hunt out the connections in our quest for an integrated approach. Those connections must be personal and political as well as scientific and environmental.

Some of my fellow senators may be surprised to hear that today I wrote to my fellow Greens senator, Senator Lee Rhiannon, seeking her personal support to help protect the migratory shorebirds of Bald Hills and South Gippsland region. Senator Rhiannon is an enthusiastic bird observer and member of the Hunter Bird Observers Club. I know she would have been interested to learn that the Hunter and Bald Hills regions share some 39 common migratory species. For the last few years, we have learned about the remarkable migration route of the Ruddy Turnstone, a small bird that flies some 27,000 kilometres between Siberia and Australia every year. The tracking of these birds has shown that Bald Hills and the Hunter region share individual birds in common, birds that visit both places in their yearly pattern of migration. So when I ask Senator Rhiannon to join me in opposing the proposed Bald Hills wind farm, I reach across the political divide and make the connection as a fellow senator who values the safety, beauty and wonder of these remarkable creatures.

I have learned more about migratory shorebirds because of the conservationists, environmentalists and naturalists in that part of South Gippsland. They have engaged in grassroots scientific research for many years about their region. They value good science and so should we all. Good science should not be exploited and undermined by political opportunism.

I oppose our oceans being raped and pillaged. I support good fisheries management based on good science. I support proper funding and resourcing of that science and peer review amongst scientists of their research outcomes. Late this afternoon I learned that the science of fisheries management and super trawler impacts are going to be improved by further research. While I believed that the existing science was a sound enough basis for allowing the super trawler to fish our seas and was concerned about the possibility of an emotionally based reaction overriding rational debate, the outcome is a good one. We have committed to learning more and improving further our knowledge about fisheries management, and that can only be a good thing.

Every political party and every person in this parliament has a moral responsibility to support policy that reduces our environmental footprint on the planet. We have to be big enough to overcome the base motive of political opportunism and big enough, too, to change our minds publicly. Are other senators in this place able and willing to do that? There are some testings examples on the table before us right now. I hope that every one of us is brave, wise and strong enough to reach out, connect with the issues and make good decisions that are the right decisions for now and into the future. Thank you.