Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I present the report of the Environment and Communications References Committee on the regulatory framework governing water use, together with the Hansard record of proceedings and documents presented to the committee. I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

This is an incredibly important report looking at the issues of water use by our extractive industries. During the operations of this committee, we heard from scientists, farmers, environmental groups and industry both in submissions and in public hearings in Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra. I want to thank everybody who participated in the report. We heard about the scale of water use by the coal seam gas and unconventional gas industries and the impact of these industries on water quality. Even where the water take is incidental to the mining industry, and so isn't needed for the operation, it often ends up being very polluted and unsuitable for other uses.

Water truly is our most precious resource. Across a very significant part of the country, groundwater is the resource that people, agriculture and our native plants and animals rely on. Of course, our groundwater resources are interconnected across large parts of the country, so it's so important to get the management right, right across the basin. The biggest example is the Great Artesian Basin, which spreads across four states, but there are other groundwater systems too. This report is largely focused on groundwater systems, but is also on the water take of surface water because of the water take from the huge mines, which can act as dams and stop water that otherwise should be flowing into rivers and creeks from doing so.

The issue of how we manage this water and how we allocate water use for mining, agriculture, domestic use and the environment gets really pointy when we get drought conditions, such as we have now gone into in New South Wales and Queensland, where we really have got such pressure on making sure that the water is incredibly wisely used. The impact of drought has been a very salient parallel context for the report to take place in. The feelings of landholders, with some weighing up water use by the mining industry with water use by, say, agriculture, have reached crisis point. It makes the findings of our report today very pertinent. This is particularly relevant in circumstances such as those in Queensland, where mining operations have an unlimited take of water. As long as it's associated with the mining operation—they're not actually mining the water explicitly for the water; it's coming alongside the coal or the coal seam gas—there is unlimited take. There is a huge amount of concern in the community about this.

Our report provides a set of broad recommendations for government, whether the present government or future governments. I'm very pleased that we have a majority report, supported by Greens and Labor senators, that has some very important recommendations. One of the most significant recommendations is that we want to expand the water trigger to other types of unconventional gas, like shale gas and underground coal gasification. At the moment, the water trigger, which said this is an issue of national environmental significance, only applies to coal seam gas and large coalmining operations. Another recommendation was that the Commonwealth not commit to any bilateral approval agreements, which means that both the Commonwealth and the states need to be concerned about what's going on. We can't just have the Commonwealth handing over its responsibility for looking at whether water decisions are in the interests of the community. The Commonwealth needs to be involved. We need more resources for compliance and monitoring of the use of water, because if you are not measuring it you don't know what's going on. It's an absolutely fundamental thing, to have those resources put into that compliance.

Similarly, there is a recommendation that projects should release real-time water level and water quality data to the public so that people know what's going on. We also need to have more clarity about the impact and legality of rainwater tanks, more resourcing for the bioregional assessments so that you can say, across a region, where you have got multiple projects underway, what the cumulative impact of that water take is. This is fundamental information. We need to have the resources put in so that people know, so that we have that information and so that we can have better management. We need better modelling requirements for groundwater ecology and a broad set of reforms to better integrate the extractive industry with the National Water Initiative.

Our committee wasn't able to agree on everything, and there are some important Greens additional recommendations which we believe are supported by the evidence put before us. There needs to be a moratorium on fracking both because of its water take and its impact on water quality and because it is another fossil fuel that we just cannot afford to be burning and adding to our carbon emissions and climate change. Likewise we need to have a long-term exit from unconventional gas and coal both for water resource protection and for the climate. We need to do a thorough review of compliance with the approval conditions for existing projects. We had clear evidence put before us during the review about the level of noncompliance with conditions. I guarantee that, if we did a thorough review, there would be many more circumstances where it would be shown that there were conditions placed on these projects but then the project does not comply with them.

We need to know what the bioregional impact of these projects are beyond the prescribed area of impact, while taking into account the cumulative effect of those multiple projects, and we need much better controls on associated water. As I said, in Queensland there is unlimited take of associated water with mining projects. When you have the potential for massive new projects in addition to the existing ones—the Galilee Basin coal projects like Adani, like Clive Palmer's Waratah coal, like Gina Rinehart's GVK Hancock mines—there is huge concern about the impact that these projects are going to have on the Great Artesian Basin. We are calling upon the Commonwealth to work with Queensland to change this situation so that at the very least for any of these mining projects there is much better control of the water that is being taken alongside of it, so that we can have much better management of our most precious resource.

We cannot survive without good quality and good quantities of water in the second-driest continent, second only to Antarctica. Water is our most precious resource, and the recommendations outlined in this report would go a long way towards much better management of our water resources.

Question agreed to.