Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The coalition welcomes the introduction of this bill for reasons I'll outline to the chamber now. The legislation we're debating is aimed at giving expression to two sets of amendments that were made a number of years ago now to the London protocol. In our view, these are each necessary and well-intentioned changes. If the bill passes then it's likely to provide Australia with improved flexibility and an opportunity in relation to the import and export of carbon dioxide streams and the rapidly emerging field of marine geoengineering. In turn, these changes would be likely to enhance Australia's capacity—and, indeed, the capacity of other nations—to manage carbon emissions, which is something that is quite essential these days, as we all know and accept.

For background, along with the London convention, the London protocol is an international treaty that's aimed at protecting the world's marine environments from the dumping of wastes and other hazardous matter. Australia was an early adopter, being a relatively early signatory to both instruments. As a nation, we signed up to the London convention with effect from 1985—10 years after it first came into force internationally. We became a party to the London protocol in the same year as it came into force globally—in the year 2006. Generally speaking, both instruments have worked effectively for Australia and for dozens of other countries around the globe that are also signatories.

Recognising that we live in a reality where we need to be able to both balance the economic imperatives of this nation and protect the environment was key in our thinking in our position on this bill, and it seems reflected in the government's thinking as well. It became apparent that there was a need to modernise the protocol in order to reflect a range of environmental issues and considerations in relation to the use of various emerging technology, such as carbon capture and storage—CCS—carbon capture utilisation and storage—CCUS—and marine geoengineering. This led to agreement on the development of two separate sets of amendments to the protocol in 2009 and in 2013. The 2009 amendments and permits allow the international transfer of carbon dioxide streams between countries for the purposes of placing CCS or CCUS materials into the sub-seabed geological formations. The 2013 amendments, meanwhile, allows for certain wastes and matter to be deposited into a marine area in order to facilitate scientific research through marine geoengineering activities such as ocean fertilisation.

Around the globe, parties to the convention and/or the protocol have taken a considerable amount of time to assess their responses to these amendments. It should be stressed this has not been a reflection of widespread or deeply entrenched resistance to such changes—again, we recognise the fact we live in a reality where we do need to balance the imperatives of the economy and the environment. Instead, it's because countries have wanted to consider all of the many potential implications and effects that they may have. Australia has proudly adopted this painstaking approach too. It's been the sensible and correct path that both coalition and Labor governments have taken over a considerable period of time, along with a great deal of care, to endorse and prepare for such changes. There are many important issues at play here, including, as many environmental groups have pointed out, the need for the vigilant management and regulation of activities related to CCS, CCUS and in particular marine geo-engineering. In turn, work continues to be needed on assessing how Australia can practically extract the best value from each of these forms of endeavour.

In all of these respects the coalition is very appreciative of the work that has been undertaken domestically, in particular by members of each of three sets of committees here in Australia over recent years. These committees are the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water, and the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee. Inquiries undertaken by each of these committees have elicited valuable information and evidence about the worth and potential environmental impacts and risks of CCS, CCUS and marine geo-engineering. Importantly, they've each concluded on balance, and taking into account the overwhelming majority of evidence presented to them, that the 2009 and 2013 London protocol amendments have the potential to deliver a myriad of benefits to Australia and to other nations, both, again, economically and environmentally. Significantly, those benefits include the very real possibility of substantially lowering carbon emissions, and that point has been expressed by expert witnesses on frequent and repetitive bases.

Given, in particular, all of that context in the background, the coalition will certainly be supporting this bill. We also endorse the general points included in the various recent committee inquiry reports about the need for careful monitoring, management and regulation of the kinds of activities that are the subject of this bill, especially if and when they increase in frequency in relation to Australia. We hope the government will discharge the responsibilities they have in this area sensibly and vigilantly. At a time when certainty for international investors has been stripped away by actions of this government, such as under the safeguard mechanism, anything that improves our standing in this respect is welcome. Therefore, we thank the government for bringing this bill to parliament and we commend the bill to the Senate.

Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to 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)

Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) Bill 2023 implements Australia's international obligations under the 1996 Protocol to the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter, referred to as the London protocol. The intention is to ratify both the 2009 and the 2013 amendments. This bill will amend the Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Act to allow permits for the transboundary movement of carbon dioxide streams from industrial processes for the purpose of sequestration in sub-seabed geological formations. It would also allow for the placement of waste or other matter from marine geoengineering activity. As Senator Whish-Wilson has referred to: where things don't stack up, they won't happen. I do appreciate his passion in this debate, but, where projects are not going to stack up, they won't happen; but, where they do, they will.

In 2009 we agreed as a country to an amendment to the London protocol which does enable the export of carbon dioxide for the purposes of carbon sequestration in sub-seabed geological formations. Carbon capture and storage has been talked about for a very long period of time across the world and in Australia. There are a variety of views. There are projects that have shown great promise, and there are others that have not. This bill does not pick them. It merely enables the structure for us to explore these and stay in line with our international obligations.

The 2013 amendment was to allow the placement of waste and other matter for marine geoengineering activities such as ocean fertilisation for the purposes of scientific research. This kind of scientific research could have a significant impact on how we deal with the challenges of our future. It will enable legitimate scientific research to be undertaken to determine the feasibility of methods to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide. Examples of these scientific activities include microbubbles, which is the process of injecting tiny bubbles into the ocean surface or sea foam to increase sunlight reflectivity; marine cloud brightening or seeding; ocean alkalinisation, which is adding alkaline substances to seawater to enhance the ocean's natural carbon sink—a huge natural carbon sink that we can enhance to help us deal with the challenges we are facing into the future and our desire to hit net zero; the ocean has huge potential here—and, macroalgae cultivation, which is large-scale growth of algae that converts dissolved carbon dioxide into organic carbon through photosynthesis.

Any permits for the above type of activities can only be granted after a robust, comprehensive assessment process, which would ensure that any activity is in accordance with the London protocol and has a minimal impact on the marine environment in Australian waters. The intent here is not to cause damage to the ocean, as laid out by Senator Whish-Wilson. That is absolutely not the intent here. The intent here is to use every option we have available to us to reach net zero by 2050, to reduce emissions and to ensure that we stop the planet warming.

The proposed amendments will meet Australia's international obligations under the London protocol and protect and preserve the marine environment from potential environmental risks. Passing the bill will enable the government to administer permits for these internationally emerging activities and ensure legal certainty. Regulating this type of activity through a robust application assessment and approval process would ensure that only legitimate scientific research activities which explore options to reduce atmospheric CO2 proceed. This amendment also provides for regulating other potentially harmful marine geoengineering research activities, should they emerge in the future.

This bill is also important because it will help our international partners, particularly the Timor-Leste government, in the development of the Bayu-Undan carbon capture and storage project. As the foreign minister said during her visit to Timor-Leste in July, Australia:

… will keep striving to be the best possible partner, and a partner who will stand by you—

Timor-Leste—

today and throughout your future.

We share the belief in the Timorese people's fundamental right to decide their own future, and the Australian Labor government has a deep appreciation of just how much economic resilience is key to Timor's sovereignty. Our support for their economic resilience and sovereignty is why we strongly support Timor's ambition to convert the Bayu-Undan field. It has been a main contributor to the Timor-Leste economy for over 16 years, and Australia wants to work with Timor to transition it to a commercial carbon capture and storage project.

We know that this project is important to Timor. That's why it's so disappointing to see the narrow political interests of our friends in the Greens party claiming that everything that may happen under this bill will be a disaster, that it's all about encouraging fossil fuel activity, when nothing could be further from the truth. We want to help our friends in Timor. We also want to ensure that, in Australia, we can sequester as much carbon as we possibly can and that we use every opportunity available to us to deal with this problem. The future is important. We cannot be narrow minded as we look at ways to address the challenges we face.

We've seen the inquiries. The House had an inquiry. The Senate had an inquiry. There's plenty of material and plenty of submissions talking about the upsides, the potential risks and the concerns. But, overwhelmingly, the evidence was not in line with Senator Whish-Wilson's passionate speech. It was more in line with a balance—yes, concerns that if it's not done properly there are risks. But it will be done properly, and we will manage those risks.

Submitters to the inquiry included CO2CRC, who argued that carbon capture and storage is an:

… increasingly cost-effective technology that can deliver large-scale reductions in emissions for a wide range of industries.

They argued that projects enabled by this bill are:

… an essential and urgent priority that is accepted as a critical component of the national and global emissions reduction strategies.

Other submitters argued that reaching net zero by 2050 will be virtually impossible if we don't use all options available to us—and that includes the options that we may have in the ocean. They argued that carbon capture and storage is a technology with decades of experience globally—a proven technology for some applications.

CCS plays a unique role amongst a portfolio of emissions reduction technologies as it can address emissions from existing facilities, mitigate emissions from hard-to-abate industries and support low-carbon hydrogen production and underpin large-scale carbon removal. Geoscience Australia have urged that we have an opportunity to continue to promote best practice through this bill by setting and adopting standards for environmental information that is used to understand the benefits and impacts of offshore carbon capture storage and geoengineering activities.

Net zero by 2050 is this government's unequivocal priority in our fight against global warming. This bill is a critical aspect to us reaching that goal, and I urge the Senate to pass the bill.

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

We know how important it is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We heard from the Treasurer just last week in his address in Melbourne that further action is required for Australia just to meet its emissions reduction targets, which we know are not in line with what scientists say a wealthy nation like Australia that is one of the highest per capita emitters in the world, a wealthy nation like Australia that is one of the biggest fossil fuel exporters in the world, should be doing as its fair share. Nevertheless, even with our very modest 43 per cent the government say they need to do more.

Despite its name, the Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) Bill 2023 is not about fighting climate change. The name 'using new technologies to fight climate change' is incredibly misleading and incredibly disappointing from the Labor government. At its heart, this is a bill to allow big oil and gas companies to continue and to expand the burning of fossil fuels and to shift their carbon pollution to other countries, with no liability if the carbon dioxide is accidentally released in the future.

The bill amends the Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Act 1981 to enable the granting of permits to export carbon dioxide captured from burning coal and gas for the purpose of storing that carbon dioxide under the sea. This means fossil fuel companies can capture the carbon dioxide they produce and ship it to other country's waters, where it would theoretically be injected into undersea geological formations for long-term storage—we hope. By sending their emissions overseas, companies could transfer responsibility elsewhere and meet their safeguard mechanism emissions targets with little real reduction in emissions.

We now hear Labor and the coalition are on a unity ticket on carbon capture and storage, spruiking it as the technology that's going to allow us to continue to expand the fossil fuel industry. We know that there are very legitimate uses for carbon capture and storage, and that's for the hard-to-abate sectors. There's some really good work being done with cement and with other sectors that are genuinely hard to abate. But I'll tell you what isn't hard to abate: opening up new coal, oil and gas projects. How are we, in 2023, rather than taking this seriously, having a Labor government that was supposedly elected promising more bold climate action, while this is what they're offering up? We know that taking climate change seriously means listening to scientists and not expanding the fossil fuel industry at a time when we simply cannot afford to do so.

If we turn to carbon capture and storage and the promise versus the reality, Chevron's Gorgon project in WA aims to capture carbon emissions from their LNG facility on Barrow Island and inject it under the island. However, in the 12 months to June 2022, Chevron injected only 1.6 million tonnes of CO2 into the underground reservoir and vented 3.4 million tonnes to the atmosphere. The project has consistently failed to meet its carbon sequestration targets. This is similar to carbon capture and storage trials globally.

It's my understanding that there are specific projects that will benefit from this bill. Santos has stated that to comply with the safeguard mechanism it is developing a carbon capture and storage project in East Timor's waters. This bill would allow Santos to export its carbon dioxide to East Timor for undersea storage. Just think about that for a moment. Offshore gas development from Santos's Barossa gas project, in Australian waters, will meet the safeguard mechanism by transferring its greenhouse gas emissions to a developing country for undersea storage using a technology that we can't get to work here in Australia. We know that carbon capture and storage is a tactic to delay the demise of the fossil fuel industry, and it's deeply concerning that the Albanese government is seeking to push it through the Senate instead of making sure we meet our net zero target through genuine emissions reductions.

Again, the Treasurer acknowledged that the government needs to do more to secure renewable energy generation, transmission and storage. However, we're now lagging behind the US in incentivising the clean energy transition. We've heard next to nothing from the government, in any substantial way, in response to the Inflation Reduction Act—the biggest investment in climate and energy the world has seen. And the science is very concerning. According to last year's State of the climate report, produced by CSIRO and BOM, Australia's climate has already warmed by an average of 1.5 degrees. Heatwaves are increasing, rainfall patterns are changing, extreme fire weather has increased, and the bushfire season has lengthened, as we see across the country.

According to Pep Canadell, a Canberra based CSIRO climate scientist, recent global investment in clean energy is still insufficient to keep us under 1.5 degrees. Emissions are still rising. Until now the best we've done is to meet the growth in global demand for energy with non-fossil-fuel sources. We haven't actually cut emissions yet. Professor Rod Sims from the ANU has set out three ways Australia can help reduce world greenhouse gas emissions. We can remove emissions from our own economy, we can stop approving new coal and gas projects—something the Labor government doesn't want to hear about—and we can pursue industries in which Australia has a clear comparative advantage in a net-zero world, something that I fear we're missing the boat on with a lack of a response to the Inflation Reduction Act.

I have proposed three amendments to this bill. The first of these directly addresses Professor Sims's approach of stopping new coal and gas projects. If we allow new fossil fuel projects on the basis that the carbon dioxide will be exported, we are allowing global emissions to increase. We cannot assume that the carbon dioxide will be permanently captured using a thus far unsuccessful technology. Therefore, I'm proposing an amendment to exclude new coal and gas projects from the permit and export provisions of the bill. If the government is truly serious about taking the climate crisis seriously, I sincerely hope that they will support these amendments. This amendment is the same as that proposed by the member for Indi, Dr Helen Haines, in the House of Reps. The second of these amendments relates to who is responsible into the future for carbon dioxide stores under the seas released at a later date. It's easy to see how this could happen through failure to maintain equipment, deterioration of infrastructure over time, earthquakes, or other natural processes or events. The third amendment would allow for merits review of a decision to grant a permit under the proposed legislation. There is no good reason why decisions should not be subject to a merit review process. Given what is at stake, we have to ensure that decisions can be scrutinised. This bill should not be passed, but if it is these amendments will provide some limits on the amount of damage that this bill is likely to cause.

Australians sent a strong message at the last election that they want to see the Australian government do a lot better, a huge amount more, when it comes to environmental protection, management and action on climate. This bill is nothing more than greenwashing for gas companies, with potentially catastrophic impacts on our marine environment and sea life. It allows companies to claim to meet emissions reductions targets while exporting those emissions to other countries. It would place the ongoing management of sequestered CO2 in the hands of developing countries, when it's been shown that countries like Australia are struggling to manage it successfully. It will enable the expansion of oil and gas projects that the IPCC and every credible expert say we cannot afford. It's tragic and incredibly disappointing that the government is more interested in supporting fossil fuel companies than it is in protecting our environment, our way of life and our planet. I ask the government to please consider supporting the amendments I've proposed to reduce the climate risks to future generations.

At today's global average temperature rise of 1.2 degrees Celsius, we're seeing the consequences play out before our very eyes—bushfires raging across the country, tropical storms devastating coastal cities in Mexico—yet we have the major parties in Australia on a unity ticket when it comes to supporting the fossil fuel industry. We heard Senator Grogan accusing the crossbench of narrow political interests. The major parties' narrow political interest is looking after the fossil fuel industry, facilitating the expansion of the fossil fuel industry, at a time when every credible climate scientist is urging us, pleading with us, to show some leadership on this.

Dr Joelle Gergis, who was a lead on the IPCC's sixth assessment, which she describes as the last assessment—the last warning—before this window to act closes, talks about it in her bookHumanity's Moment: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope:

… every fraction of a degree of warming matters. Every year of further delay matters. It's the difference between how much we destabilise the ice sheets, the amount of dangerous heat we are exposed to each summer, and whether or not millions of people lose their homes to rising seas. The longer we delay, the more irreversible climate change we will lock in. Any young person can tell you that stabilising the Earth's climate is literally a matter of life or death. It will impact the stability of their daily lives, their decision to start families, and their chance to witness the natural wonders of the world as their parents did. The ability of current and future generations to live on a stable planet rests on the decisions the world collectively makes right now.

Here we are making those decisions, and what have we got? We have the Labor government facilitating the expansion of the fossil fuel industry. Dr Gergis goes on to say:

There are corporate interests that are willing to sacrifice our planetary life-support system to keep the fossil fuel industry alive for as long as humanly possible, using unproven technology. Carbon capture and storage, known as CCS, is based on the idea that you can extract carbon dioxide from the smokestacks of coal plants or steel factories, compress it, transport it and then inject it back underground, where, in theory, it will remain forever. And that's assuming you can find the right geologic conditions that are stable enough over millennia so that carbon doesn't leak out and back into the atmosphere.

The problem is not only that the technology is enormously expensive, but that despite over twenty years of research, it is still unproven to work at the scale required to substantially reduce emissions.

She goes on to point out how foolish it is for us to be facilitating the expansion of the fossil fuel industry, yet here we have the Albanese government, aided by the coalition, doing exactly that.

Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to add my voice to this debate and to associate myself with the comments made already by Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson and Senator David Pocock. This bill is a sham. This bill, the Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) Bill 2023, is actually called 'sea dumping' for a reason, because all this bill does is dump on the planet while paving the way for the expansion of the fossil fuel industry.

Let's not forget who has put forward this bill—Australia's Minister for the Environment and Water. If our minister for the environment is the one shepherding through a piece of legislation that allows the continuation and expansion of fossil fuels, by allowing the big polluting corporations to literally sweep the pollution under the carpet, let's be clear about what this bill does.

This bill allows the fossil fuel industry—coal and gas—to bury their rubbish and their pollution in the seabed. So, rather than stopping the pollution and rather than cleaning up, they want to bury it under the sea—unproven pseudoscience. The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, warned of exactly this—that fossil fuel companies 'have humanity by the throat'. He warned that, if governments and parliaments around the world didn't stand up against this type of pressure, we would see more pseudoscience and PR spin from the fossil fuel industry, who do everything in their power to keep expanding their dangerous, toxic polluting operations that are putting humanity at risk. They will keep going and keep going until they can do no more.

But we in this place have a responsibility. We know that the climate science is dire. We know that we are already hurtling towards a cliff when it comes to the global temperature rise. We are already seeing the real impacts of the climate crisis here in Australia today. We're only into the first few days of November and already we have seen bushfires in Queensland destroy over 60 homes in the last fortnight alone. We've had two people die in New South Wales in bushfires and 27 homes destroyed since July. In the Northern Territory we've seen 13 million hectares burnt in the last two months—and the list goes on.

For those of us who live in the southern states, we fear what this summer is going to bring. I live in the Adelaide Hills, and I can tell you that I and every single one of my neighbours are on high alert. We know that this summer is going to be horrid. Only the other day we could smell smoke drifting through the valley, and everyone was worried: Is this going to be the summer that our house is lost? Is this going to be the summer that our community is devastated? Is this going to be the summer that fossil fuel companies burn our towns to the ground? That is what communities right around this country today are thinking about and feeling. Rather than tackling that and taking on the fossil fuel companies that are fuelling these climate fires, what we are seeing is the government of the day doing the work for the big fossil fuel companies, by not only paving the way to allow them to expand but giving them the cover of a green-washing bill like what we have before us today.

We know that what has to happen is the pollution must stop being produced, not continue some pretence that we can keep going at the rate we're going and just bury it under the ground. Ask any primary-school-aged kid whether that argument would fly at home when their room is a mess: 'I'll just brush it under the bed and pull over the cover. No-one will see it.' It's not good enough. It's a disgrace and, worse than that, it is risking, in the sickest of sickest sense, the future of this planet, the health of our environment and humanity as we know it.

So let's be clear: who really wants this piece of legislation? The reason this piece of legislation is being rammed through and rushed through this parliament this week is that it's Santos, the big gas company, who need this done. They want this done. They're donors to the major parties and they want a pound of flesh for their penny. They want this done. So rather than putting in place a plan to reduce pollution, to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and say, 'We need a proper transition. We've got to get out of this dirty, toxic industry and into energy production that is clean, green and sustainable,' we have ministers in this place coming along and handing up on a silver platter exactly what the fossil fuel industry and companies like Santos have asked for. This is all because of the safeguard mechanism legislation that was passed in this place earlier this year with, after strong negotiation by the Greens, amendments that meant the fossil fuel industry would have to do more to reduce their emissions and that there would have to be more transparency around how much pollution was actually being produced. What does that do? That costs industry and the company money. Well, they don't want to have to pay. So here's your quid pro quo, a facilitation to pretend that this industry can just keep going by burying its toxic rubbish and pollution under the sea.

We know it's not just Santos; it's also other companies that are worried about what they're going to do and how they're going to keep expanding. They want to use Australia and our oceans as a dumping ground. There is a big push here on the Australian government from the Japanese government in relation to this issue, and that is another reason why this is being pushed through at warp speed today. The Japanese government and its state owned companies have behaved appallingly since this parliament passed the safeguard mechanism agreement. What has become clear is that they are simply not serious about climate action and are now using their diplomatic powers to push Australia to go slow on the climate transition. This bill is an appeasement to their complaints.

To the Australian government, the Labor Party: stand up for what you believe in. You are either committed to climate action and reducing pollution or you're just going to keep handing up on a silver platter what Santos and the big fossil fuel companies want, and backflipping and bending over backwards for foreign owned companies, Japanese or others, so that they can keep expanding their dirty industries. Meanwhile, it's Australian bush and nature and communities that burn.

How can it be that the Australian government, the Labor Party, stand here today and say, 'We need this bill because it will help deal with the pollution problem,' when all it's going to do is bury the pollution under the sea? It's ludicrous. As Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, himself said, this is pseudoscience and should be called out. It's all PR spin. And the Labor Party and the Dutton opposition are happy just to let it go, to facilitate it, because their election donations depend on it and there is pressure inside both sides. We know that there are some in government who desperately want a better climate policy from the Labor Party, but, gee whiz, they are held back by the fossil fuel and coal and gas rump that still dominates the government's decisions. I wonder whether the Minister for the Environment and Water, Tanya Plibersek, likes this bill at all. But here it is, under her name, facilitating more pollution, burying that toxic pollution in the seabed and trying to pretend that it's actually good for the environment.

If you want a definition of greenwashing, this is it. The environment minister should stand up and call this out for what it is. It is not a bill designed to protect the environment. It is a bill designed to protect the profits of Santos and all the other fossil fuel companies that want to keep expanding for as long as they possibly can. While pollution continues to rise and while this government allows new coal and gas to expand, the climate fires in this country will get hotter and hotter and more deadly. That is what we do know.

As you vote on this bill in this place today, rammed through by both sides of the chamber, the Labor Party and the Liberal Party in lock arms, doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry, just think about what you're going to say to your communities over summer when their towns are on fire, when the bush is covered in ash, when people have put their masks back on, not because of COVID but because of smoke and when the temperatures are so hot in our suburbs that the elderly and the sick are dying. What are you going to say to them? 'Oh, Santos asked us,' or, 'The Japanese government said we needed to do something quickly. They were not happy.' Think about what you are going to say to the elderly in your community who are suffering over the summer because of extreme heat. Think about what you're going to say when the bushfires are on our screens every single night. What is the Prime Minister going to say when he goes to the Pacific Forum later this week? What will he tell our neighbours about what he is doing? Think about that.

Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As a servant to the fine people of Queensland and Australia, I want to ask a question. If you want a perfect example of how insane the UN's net zero pipedream is, look no further than this bill, the Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) Bill 2023. Why? We're going to spend billions on pulling natural trace gas out of the air and then spend billions more to try and inject it under the seabed and hope it stays there. Science and nature show that it cannot.

You may have heard of the concept of carbon capture and storage, commonly abbreviated to CCS. The climate activists claim we need carbon capture and storage to save the world. That's a lie. I'll get to that later. But no-one really talks about what storage means in these schemes. It seems our government and bureaucrats and our opposition don't want to talk about the details, because anyone who explains carbon dioxide storage out loud will immediately realise the concept is stupid and dishonest.

One might think that a bill titled 'environment protection sea dumping' would be an amendment saying, 'You can't dump things in the sea to protect the environment.' Think again! The fake environmentalists have decided that the best way to protect the environment is to dump stuff in the sea. Just like the koalas being euthanised to make way for wind turbines or damaged solar panels leaking toxic heavy metals into waterways, the United Nations net zero plan again involves killing the environment to save it.

Carbon capture and storage can be summarised by the following steps: carbon dioxide—a harmless, colourless, odourless, tasteless, natural trace, atmospheric gas that is generated from the burning of materials containing carbon atoms, including digesting food in animal guts and including our own guts, burning trees and bushfires and burning coal in power stations to produce among the cheapest forms of electricity available for human progress. In the case of carbon capture and sequestration or storage, carbon dioxide is captured at the point of production. Carbon dioxide is transported then via ship and/or pipeline to a storage location. The carbon dioxide—wait for it—is injected underneath the seabed via drilling for storage, theoretically permanently. It's theoretically permanent because there is no guarantee that the carbon dioxide will stay there.

History is full of episodes of spills where companies couldn't contain the oil they were drilling for. Natural leakage from reservoirs has been the case for nature since time immemorial. Even if it were necessary to bury carbon dioxide—and it's not—there's no guarantee it will stay there after being hit by some type of undersea seismic activity or even a very common underocean earthquake.

It's worth remembering that carbon dioxide makes up just 0.04 per cent of the Earth's atmosphere. Human beings are responsible for just three per cent of the annual production of carbon dioxide, and Australia contributes just 1.3 per cent of that three per cent. Yet the net-zero advocates tell us that, if we take a fraction of our carbon dioxide and pay an oil-drilling company to dump it in the ocean by injecting it under the seabed, we can save the world. Wow! Amazing! Obviously it's a bloody lie, an absurd lie.

Carbon capture and storage is just another scheme designed to make some multinational companies rich at the expense of Australians, and you lot are falling for it, while adding huge costs to power bills that will needlessly continue increasing, killing standards of living and raising the cost of living needlessly. That's what gets on my goat—you're doing it wilfully.

The second part of this bill deals with allowing permits for research into ocean fertilisation. Ocean fertilisation is an untested, radical experiment with our planet's natural environment. It involves dumping elements like iron, nitrogen or phosphates into the ocean in the hope that stimulated phytoplankton will take more carbon dioxide out of the air. They're shutting farms down in Queensland, where I come from, because they say farmers are putting too much nitrogen into the ocean.

One Nation supports research—scientific research, empirical data driven research. We'll never make any progress unless we test new ways of doing things. Research must be balanced though between the potential risks and the potential benefits. When it comes to ocean fertilisation, an untested form of geoengineering, the potential risks are too great and the benefits are non-existent.

Let's be clear what we are talking about here. Ocean fertilisation is the wholesale dumping of chemicals into the ocean with the intention of creating systemic changes to the ecosystem, creating unplanned systemic changes to the ocean—unknown. Unintended consequences are almost guaranteed. If it works, we have no idea how a huge systemic change will affect the environment and the ecosystem. The potential risks are unquantifiable and frightening.

The supposed benefit—sequestering more carbon dioxide out of the air—is negligible. We do not need to remove more carbon dioxide out of the air. Carbon dioxide is the lifeblood of vegetation on this planet. No-one has been able to prove to me that human produced carbon dioxide affects temperature more than natural variation does, because they can't provide that evidence. Ocean fertilisation has huge risks and no potential benefits. It should be opposed.

I'll sum up this bill for the Australian people. The UN's net-zero lunatics are yet again saying they need to kill the environment to save it. The Greens; the teals, including Senator David Pocock; the Liberals-Nationals; and Labor all blindly sign up and hurt families, industries and national security. Australia must ditch the United Nations World Economic Forum net-zero pipedream and all of its insane requirements, including the Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) Bill 2023. One Nation will be opposing this bill designed to enrich predatory globalist billionaires who donate to the Greens and the teals. Every senator, by the way, should do the same—oppose this bill.

Now I turn to the bill's underlying premise. I'll go through the carbon dioxide reality. We're exhaling it. Every one of us in this chamber is exhaling it. Every human and every animal is exhaling it. When we breathe all animals, including koalas, multiply the concentration of carbon dioxide 100 to 125 times. We take in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at 0.04 per cent and we exhale it at four to five per cent. We increase the concentration 100 to 125 times.

Carbon dioxide is essential for all life on earth. This is a fact sheet on carbon dioxide. It's just 0.04 per cent of the Earth's air—four-hundredths of one per cent. It is scientifically described as a trace gas because there's bugger all of it. It is non-toxic and not noxious. Senator Hanson-Young called it toxic. That is straight out wrong! It's highly beneficial to and essential for plants. Greenhouses inject the stuff into greenhouses to stimulate the growth of plants. In the past, when carbon dioxide levels on this planet were four times higher than today—and they have been 135 times higher than today, naturally, in the fairly recent past—it has resulted in earth flourishing as plants and animals thrive with the benefits of carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide is colourless, odourless, tasteless. It's natural. Nature produces 97 per cent of the carbon dioxide produced annually on our planet. It does not discolour the air. It does not impair the quality of water or soil. It does not create light, heat, noise or radio activity. It does not distort our senses. It does not degrade the environment nor impair its usefulness nor render it offensive. It's not a pollutant. It does not harm ecosystems; it is essential for ecosystems. It does not harm plants and animals; it is essential for plants and animals. It does not cause discomfort, instability or disorder. It does not accumulate. It does not upset nature's balance. It remains in the air for only a short time before nature cycles it back into plants, animal tissue and natural accumulations—and oceans. It does not contaminate, apart from nature's extremely high and concentrated volumes close to some volcanos, and then only locally and briefly. Under rare natural conditions, when in concentrations in amounts far higher than anything humans can produce—that we can dream of producing—temporarily due to nature, that's the only time it can harm. It is not a pollutant.

As I said a minute ago, in the past it has been up to 130 times higher in concentration in our planet's current atmosphere than today. It's not listed as a pollutant. Prime Minister Gillard invoked the term 'pollutant', 'carbon pollution'—it's not even carbon. It's carbon dioxide; it's a gas. President Obama then copied Prime Minister Gillard on his visit to Australia during her tenure. That's where we got 'carbon pollution'. It doesn't exist. So koalas exhaling carbon dioxide are polluters.

We do not control the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We couldn't even if we wanted to. In 2009, after the global financial crisis, and in 2020, during the COVID mismanagement, we caused severe recessions around the world. In 2009, we actually didn't have one in Australia because we were exporting coal and iron ore, but, nonetheless, there were global recessions in 2009 and 2020. All of a sudden, the use of hydrocarbon fuels—coal, oil and natural gas—decreased dramatically. Exactly what we're being told to do by the teals, by the Greens, by the Labor Party, by the Liberal Party and by the National Party. What happened to the level of carbon dioxide outside in the atmosphere? Did it start going down? No. Did it even inflect slightly and decrease the rate of increase? No. It continued increasing. Why? Because nature controls the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

According to the UN IPCC, the fraudulent climate science mob, the oceans of the planet contain 50 to 70 times the amount of carbon dioxide in dissolved form than in the earth's entire atmosphere—50 to 70 times as much than when you invoke Henry's law of chemistry, which has been known for a couple of hundred years, and the level of carbon dioxide in the air depends on the quantity dissolved in the oceans and varies with the temperature of the oceans because solubility of carbon dioxide in the oceans varies with temperature. In the annual graph of carbon dioxide levels, you can see the seasonal variation in the Northern Hemisphere and in the Southern Hemisphere. Carbon dioxide levels follow the temperatures of the ocean, especially the sea surfaces. We do not significantly in any way affect the level, and we cannot affect the level over and above natural variation due to nature.

The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not determine the temperature, unlike what the Greens, the teals, Labor, the Liberals and the Nationals are telling us. There has been massive increase in human production of carbon dioxide from China, India, Brazil, Europe, Russia, Asia and America, yet temperatures have been flat—flat!—for 28 years. Not warming; not cooling; flat. The trend during the massive industrialisation during the Second World War and the post-war economic boom saw temperatures from 1936 to 1976 fall. Over 40 years of massive industrialisation, the longest temperature trend in the last 160 years was cooling. Remember the predictions that we were going to be in for an ice age? In the 1880s and 1890s in our country, temperatures were warmer by far.

Variation in everything in nature is natural. There's inherent natural variation within larger cycles of increasing and decreasing temperature, rainfall, drought cycles and storm cycles. The CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology and the United Nations have failed to show any change in any climate factor, just natural variation. It's not climate change; it's climate variation. Every uptick is heralded as catastrophic and every downtick is silently ignored.

What's driving this political scam, this climate fraud? Ignorant, dishonest and gutless politicians are enabling scammers making money from it. Consider John Howard. In 2007, I sent him a letter of appreciation for his role as Prime Minister before I started researching climate. During his term, he introduced the National Electricity Market and the Renewable Energy Target, the first emissions trading scheme policy for a major party, and his government stole farmers' rights to use their property. He admitted in London in 2013 that he was an agnostic on climate science. Then we have parasites like Holmes a Court, Twiggy Forrest and Turnbull keeping it alive, relying on the subsidy. What's keeping it alive? Teals such as David Pocock and Greens such as Senator Whish-Wilson and Senator Hanson-Young, invoking fear and doom, yet never providing the logical scientific points and empirical scientific evidence. I encourage people to watch their speeches and see the dearth of scientific evidence.

Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) Bill 2023. I want to associate my comments particularly with those of my Greens colleagues Senator Whish-Wilson and Senator Hanson-Young on this issue. To name this bill 'sea dumping' is a disgrace. It's a weak attempt, again, at greenwashing. It should be called the 'greenwashing bill', in fact, not 'sea dumping'.

This bill allows for the import and export of carbon for the purpose of carbon capture and storage, or CCS, as it's referred to. Before I go into the issues, I want to put on the record what this bill does. In fact, this bill does nothing about climate change apart from accelerating it. That's the only thing it does. This bill is the government throwing a bone to its international investors and to Santos because the changes that the Greens secured in the safeguard mechanism that Senator Hanson-Young already spoke about added significant costs and cast some doubt about the viability of the Barossa gas project in particular that is linked to the Darwin harbour and to the Middle Arm project that both sides of this chamber continue to support. They continue to do that. Santos is the only company that is wanting to export carbon for CCS on waters outside of Australia. The key element of the Barossa project is being able to use the depleted gas field, Bayu-Undan, in the Timor Sea for the storage of carbon which will be emitted from the Barossa gas field.

This bill is not the government using new technologies to fight climate change. This bill is, in fact, as my colleagues have said, about the government doing the bidding of the fossil fuel companies in this country and enabling dirty gas fields to be developed and to destroy our climate but also destroying First Nations underwater cultural heritage.

Let's start with Santos. They're proposing to drill and build a pipeline through some sacred songlines and some burial grounds. They originally failed to consult the traditional owners in the Tiwi Islands, leading to a historical case in the Federal Court that was upheld on appeal by that Federal Court. What a win for the Tiwi Islands people. As a result of this case, Santos had to go to the Tiwi Islands to talk to the traditional owners and consult with the traditional owners, not just send an email or leave a voice message, like they've done before, and have that unanswered. What I've been told by traditional owners is that they went there during the time of sorry business. Sorry business was taking place. Anybody that goes into our remote communities or any of our communities knows that sorry business is an important time.

The anthropologists that were engaged to conduct a report have left because they were appalled by the way Santos was asking them to conduct this process. They actually left the consultation process, saying it goes against standard practice and goes against the code of ethics based on the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research 2018. When someone walks away from a project like that, you sort of have to think to yourself: 'Why would they do that? Why would they question that?' Because it's not ethical; that's why. You go into a community for a purpose, you want to capture a purpose and you use all of your power and all of your money to get the answer you want from that. You do not do that based on ethics. You do not base that on human rights and the human rights of First Nations people in those communities. It also goes against not just the Australian code for the responsible conduct of research but also the AIATSIS Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research. So not only are we contravening the terms of the Australian code; we're contravening the terms of the code built specifically for First Nations communities.

Further, we have been advised that the people who were since engaged by Santos to complete this report were in fact only given a six-week turnaround. Imagine that: for a process that should have taken 18 to 24 months, Santos have said, 'Go into this community and ask about underwater cultural heritage, and you've only got six weeks to do it.' The traditional owners have told me that this information was not even collected in a culturally appropriate way. They didn't even talk to the elders and the knowledge holders, who were the right people to share that sacred knowledge. Instead, they went and spoke to people who happened to be sitting at a cafe or wandering the street. They talked to anybody who was willing to talk to them. They refused to pay people for their time and their knowledge, since Santos didn't even allocate any funding to collect any of stories in an appropriate way. This is business as usual for these types of corporations in our communities.

The traditional owners worked exceptionally hard. They've worked with their legal team. Senator Whish-Wilson has been involved in some of the listening, and I know Senator David Pocock has also met with Tiwi Islands traditional owners, as have others in this place, to hear about the extensive work that they continue to do. They want to make sure that people who are speaking with elders and attending workshops are doing so at events organised by traditional owners, not running consultations that are disrespectful. Elders are being told things like, 'There's nothing you can do to stop Santos from putting up pipeline through your 160-plus sacred sites, and nothing you can do to protect your underwater cultural heritage.' This has in fact caused so much distress for some of those elders that they've had to seek medical attention. It is so profound to hear how damaging that is when people are saying: 'There's nothing you can do. You have to sit back and let Santos take everyone for a ride.'

Does this sound like a company that needs a free kick from the government? I'll tell you what: this is the best gaslighting venture I have ever heard. This is gaslighting 101. It's that psychological abuse. It's that constant: 'Are you sure that's what you heard? No, I don't think you did.' It's the constant questioning. The narrative is always about destroying the psyche of those people, the natural resistance for them to stand up for country, for their land and their sea country, against a big corporate entity.

I want to take this moment to congratulate those traditional owners from the Tiwi Islands. They put up a mighty fight against Santos. They have put the importance of consultation with First Peoples front and centre in this country, and they have helped further the conversation about how we as First Nations people and our culture, especially intangible cultural heritage like songlines, fit into a western legal system. They are making remarkable change. Just last week, the traditional owners had another victory, and it's worth highlighting in this place while I have the time. An emergency injunction was granted hours before Santos were due to commence laying their pipeline. This was in response to NOPSEMA's failure to consider reports of underwater cultural heritage, songlines, burial grounds and, in fact, the first human contact for this continent.

How remarkable is that? That is Australia's story, not just First Nations people's, but we are custodians of that land and sea country. All of this is at risk if that pipeline goes right through the middle of that. I don't see anybody in this country sticking pipelines through cemeteries or the Shrine of Remembrance or the Australian War Memorial. That is not happening in this country. Why should it happen for Tiwi people? That is my question. My message to those traditional owners is to keep up this fight across this country, particularly Tiwi people, because you have us here in the Greens in your corner all the way. Taking on the fossil fuel industry is no small task. Traditional owner Antonia Burke said, 'We are the cultural giants'—we are the people taking that on—and she is absolutely right in her commentary.

This behaviour from Santos is disgusting and shameful, but we expect nothing more from them, because they're all about themselves. They're just another fossil fuel company that is solely concerned about lining the pockets of its executives and its shareholders at the expense of the climate, First Nations people and the environment, particularly in our oceans. That's why I have the Protecting the Spirit of Sea Country Bill 2023 as my private senator's bill. Another example of their disdain for First Nations people is their use of the highly respected Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri elder Uncle Moogy without his consent. Santos have done that: they've put Uncle Moogy up there as a pin-up saying that they're doing the right thing by First Nations people. They're convincing us that they care about blakfellas in this country, but their actions tell a very, very different story. Like I said, we expect this dodgy behaviour from Santos, but we don't expect this from the government. This government is giving them a leg up for this project, for Barossa, for Middle Arm, for Beetaloo. They're doing that. They're masking the climate action that is required, and that is shameful. They should come into this place and hang their heads in shame.

Mind you, this is support of a technology that has not been proven. Senator Roberts comes in here and talks about the science. It has not been proven to scale. It is not a viable option to reduce any emissions. All the current evidence points to solely that PR spin that Senator Hanson-Young talked about—the PR tactic to justify the continued use, the new and expanded projects, of coal and gas in this country. It is disgraceful. That's about as useful as CCS is. It's political and PR spin. This government should be taking tangible and meaningful steps toward fighting climate change, such as shutting down and not expanding fossil fuel projects; ending native logging, which my colleague Senator Rice talked so passionately about; investing in renewables; building new transmission; and reforming our environment laws. Yet this government is taking this so-called 'climate action'—wow.

CCS has not met any expectations either offshore or onshore. Perhaps the most obvious example I would like to talk about is in my home state of Western Australia. The Chevron Gorgon facility at Barrow Island, which is being propped up by the government, is the largest CCS facility in the country, and it's only running at one-third of its capacity—more wasted time, energy and public money. In spite of this, this government is pushing ahead with this bill and propping up that unproven technology. This government is sinking taxpayer money into a review of this technology when it already knows what it is. I think all of us sitting in this block of the chamber know exactly what that outcome will be, and we'll continue to fight for the truth to be revealed and the science to be listened to. At the end of 2022 there were 30 operating CCS projects in the world, and if they were operating at capacity, they would sequester 42.6 million tonnes of CO2 annually. This might sound like a lot, but it's actually only one-tenth of Australia's 2022 emissions.

It's important to note here that there are a number of operating CCS projects globally, including enhanced oil recovery, or EOR, which is where the technology for CCS originally came from. EOR involves pumping the CO2—and Senator Whish-Wilson already talked about this—into the wells and into these nearly depleted basins to get more oil out. It actually increases the life cycle of greenhouse gas emissions. The takeaway from this, folks, for noting, iswhat these projects could sequester if they were at operating capacity, and the actual numbers are a lot worse. The Australian Institute estimates that, combined, all CCS projects globally may be sequestering only 6.2 million tonnes of greenhouse gas per year. However, Santos claim that they're able to sequester 10 million just at their facility in the Timor Sea—how very ambitious of them! If only that were feasible or there were any scientific evidence to back up this claim! I find it very hard to believe that one project alone will store more carbon annually than every CCS project globally. This is all going to happen on your watch, Labor, as you're the government that are in power.

There are so many flaws in this bill and in the technology that it seeks to facilitate. The Greens cannot support this bill. It is greenwashing and it is a shameful move, as has already been outlined by my colleagues. The government is claiming to take strong action on climate change—it's a joke.

Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the so-called Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) Bill 2023. I've got to stifle a chuckle. It would probably be more aptly titled the 'Using Unproven Technologies to Try to Hide Climate Change Bill'. That would be a more accurate description of this bill, which from cover to cover is an exercise in greenwashing. I pity the poor person that has to come up with the titles for these bills, particularly when they're the opposite of what the bill is seeking to do.

What we have before us today is a con job that is there to facilitate more fossil fuels. This bill is an attempt to facilitate more oil and gas development in our oceans by pretending that carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is commercially viable and somehow an effective climate solution. More on that later. Again, you've got to laugh, or you will absolutely cry. Labor and the Liberals are ramming through this bill which benefits major gas giant and major donor Santos, and other fossil fuel giants. This is despite evidence that identifies CCS as a public relations con, merely a delay tactic by the coal and gas industry to pretend it's doing something other than jeopardising the future of this planet for its own private profits.

Pumping carbon pollution under the sea from gas rigs and storing it underground simply does not stack up. The importing and exporting of carbon dioxide for sub-seabed sequestration risks turning Australia's oceans and those of our near neighbours into dumping grounds for the world's pollution. We are incredibly concerned that this legislation appears to be motivated primarily to facilitate the Santos Barossa project and its related Bayu-Undan CCS and other fossil fuel projects off Australia's northern coastlines. As well as that, it's intended to provide this government and its mates in the fossil fuel cartel with political cover to open up new areas of our ocean to fossil fuel exploration. The Albanese government should be taking tangible, meaningful steps to fight the climate crisis by committing to no more coal, oil or gas and by ending the expansion of new fossil fuel projects, but instead it's taken the valuable and short time of the drafters to bring forward a bill that appears to have been written by the fossil fuel industry for the fossil fuel industry.

It's very telling that the Labor Party and the Liberal Party are in fierce agreement on this bill. We've seen mostly opposition from this opposition, but on this matter they are on a unity ticket. Nothing unites the two big parties like support for new coal, oil and gas. That's because they are both wholly-owned subsidiaries of the fossil fuel industry. You don't need to look much further than the $11 billion in subsidies given every year to the fossil fuel industry. It's taxpayer money, public money, being allocated to things like accelerated depreciation and cheap diesel fuel for fossil fuel companies—$11 billion every year. I thought we were in a cost-of-living crisis. Most people out there will tell you we are in a cost-of-living crisis. But we all know you can't turn off the tap of taxpayer subsidies for the fossil fuel companies! So we've got an absolute unity ticket from the two big parties on this bill to bury carbon pollution under the sea. Honestly, a three-year-old wouldn't think this up and think that it could work. We've got a unity ticket to continue giving $11 billion of public money to fossil fuel companies, even though they're raking in millions in profits and often not paying any tax at all, let alone the tax they should be paying under our pretty weak corporate tax structures. They're also ripping off their workers much of the time, I might add.

But we've also got the fact there is a very weak greenhouse gas reduction target in this country. It's not based on science. It's a political target. It's not a science based target. We saw the Treasurer in the last few days admit that we're not on track to meet our greenhouse gas reduction targets or our Renewable Energy Target. We've also got both of the two big parties that accept millions of dollars in donations from the fossil fuel industry. Often you see many of the former ministers who, apparently, were meant to have been regulating the industry go off and work for industry once they leave parliament. There are countless examples of that. APPEA, the gas lobby, is headed by former ministers. In fact, some of the frontbenchers in the government used to work for Santos before they were elected. There's a revolving door between the fossil fuel industry and this parliament, and it absolutely stinks. It's why we've got bills today that will permit and seek to legitimise the ludicrous notion of burying carbon pollution under the ocean in an effort for onshore multinational corporations to claim that they're meeting their greenhouse gas reduction targets! Who can get away with it—burying it and saying it doesn't exist? Let's hope it doesn't leak. Let's hope there's no seismic activity that can lead to it bubbling up to the surface. Let's cross our fingers, shall we? What kind of a climate policy is that? What an absolute joke!

We see, today, a bill that attempts to subvert the effect of the safeguard mechanism. The government have taken the time to write this—or, again, perhaps the fossil fuel industry actually wrote the laws, and they've just changed the logo at the top! They've taken time to do this. They haven't taken time to draft a climate trigger in our environmental protection laws. They haven't taken time to actually fix our environmental laws. They certainly haven't taken time to write any other piece of legislation that says 'No new coal or gas'. Their priorities are speaking volumes, and it makes me sick.

I'm from Queensland, where sadly we've just had yet more people die over the weekend as a result of the bushfires burning in my state. We had about 70 fires burning a few weeks ago. We're down to 40 now. But it's really early in the season. Two weeks ago two people tragically lost their lives during bushfires in Queensland's Western Downs region, just out the back of where I live, in Meanjin. Glenda Chapman is one of those people; she is believed to have suffered a heart attack while attempting to evacuate from the bushfire zone. And Ulrich Widawski is believed to have died while defending his property in Tara. Our deepest condolences go out to the loved ones of Glenda and Ulrich. This sadness extends to the families of the 16 homes destroyed as a result of those Tara fires and the 350 people who had to be evacuated while 11,000 hectares of land around Tara were burnt. We're up to at least 58 homes destroyed in Queensland in just the last few weeks from these fires. The fire season started pretty early and it started early last year as well, in September. That leaves less time to do fuel reduction managed burns.

This is getting worse and worse, and this government's answer is a bill to let Santos and multinational companies bury their carbon pollution under the sea, while simultaneously giving them $11 billion of taxpayer money to shore up their corporate profits. Honestly, this is just ludicrous. I just don't understand what is going on in the heads of the people who are meant to be running this country. We see so many of them leave and go and work for those fossil fuel companies. I say to them: I'm sorry, but your job here is to represent the public interest, and, ideally, you should do it based on the science. When people are losing their lives, we demand better from you.

Yesterday, three people supporting the bushfire response in Queensland tragically lost their lives in the crash of a firefighting surveillance plane. These people were trying to help, and now they're not with us anymore. William Joseph Jennings was one of three people killed. He was a 22-year-old who was a recent mechanical engineer graduate. These Queensland deaths come after two firefighters were reported dead in New South Wales last month. This stuff is deadly. It's burning through tens of thousands of hectares of native bushland, with countless millions of native species lost. It's wrecking homes, and we're now losing lives.

Again, the coal, oil and gas frenzy that's supported by this government, with the complete sign-up of the opposition, is driving the climate crisis, and the climate crisis is what's making these extreme weather events more frequent, more damaging, more scary and more dangerous. I don't understand why they can't put two and two together. I don't understand why it's not a simple science based conclusion in the public interest to say, 'No new coal, oil and gas.' Australians voted for a change of government because they wanted a change of policy, including on climate policy, and so far they've been sorely disappointed. We face a really scary summer going forward.

This government's response to all that overwhelming evidence is to approve five new coalmines under Environment Minister Plibersek—and now a bill that will do the bidding of Santos and help encourage the burying of carbon pollution under the ocean, in some laughable attempt to pretend it doesn't exist. I might also add that the minister was arguing in court just a few weeks ago that she didn't have a duty of care to think about the future of our schoolkids when it comes to acting on the climate crisis. They want to bury carbon pollution offshore, they want to give $11 billion of subsidies to fossil fuel companies and they don't have a climate trigger. What are you doing, people? I say to the schoolkids who were up in the gallery just a few minutes ago: I'm really sorry that your government is teaming up with the fossil fuel industry and that the two big political parties are in lockstep to facilitate new fossil fuels.

We should be arguing about how quickly we should be transitioning off existing fossil fuels. That's the debate we should be having, and obviously the Greens want to do that as quickly as possible in a way that makes sure that no worker is left behind, that those resource based communities are asked what they want to come next for their community and that transition is planned arm in arm with those communities and those workers. That's the debate we should be having. Instead, we're begging you to not facilitate new coal, oil and gas in 2023. I've been in this place for a little while now, and I remember when last decade was called the critical decade for climate action. Well, it's 2023 now. What are we going to call this one—the really, really, truly critical decade? 'We're really not kidding this time.' I don't understand what is missing in this 'bozone layer', if I can be so bold, between the science and the two large political parties. I've already mentioned the large amount of donations that flow into their re-election coffers, and perhaps that has something to do with it, along with the incredibly overpaid lobbying jobs that no doubt await them.

I want to make a few other points. This bill, in particular, is really designed to get around the safeguard mechanism. Of course, the Greens sought and secured some strengthening to that safeguard mechanism, which imposed considerable additional costs on the Barossa LNG development. An estimated cost of between $500 million and $987 million out to 2030 would have been incurred by Santos. Boy, are they unhappy about that. So they've rung up their mates in government and said, 'Can you fix this for us, please?' and this is the bill that has eventuated. What an absolute sham.

A few of the non-government organisations who do excellent work have also made some comments about this bill. The Environment Centre NT says, 'This bill, if passed, will permit a new industry in Australia—the import and export of CO2 across international boundaries for subseabed carbon capture and storage. The bill is strategically significant since CCS is a crucial plank in the gas industry's sophisticated global strategy to maintain and improve its social licence by appearing to act on climate, while simultaneously opening up new fossil fuel projects against the advice of such bodies as the International Energy Agency and the IPCC.' I continue: 'This bill represents the Albanese government's collusion with and active pursuit of this gas industry strategy, including the greenwashing of significant fossil fuel expansion plans in Australia.'

What an absolute farce that here we are debating allowing the carbon pollution of new fossil fuels to be buried under the sea when most of my state is on fire, people are dying and you guys keep taking the money from the big fossil fuel companies. For shame.

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

When are we going to get serious about the climate crisis which is facing the planet and every single person and species—every single living creature—on this planet? It is absolutely irrefutable that we are in a climate crisis. The massive impact of the climate crisis, the extinction crisis, that we are currently in is an existential risk to the future of humanity on this planet—the future of life as we know it.

We know what's causing it. It is the ongoing burning of fossil fuels. This is what is causing it. There is no doubt about the science. The science has been clear for over 100 years. We know that the heating of the planet is being caused by the burning of coal, gas and oil. The science is equally clear as to what needs to happen to try and mitigate and pull back from the existential crisis that we are facing. It's very clear what we need to do. We need to stop the burning of coal, gas and oil. At the very least, we need to stop expanding the burning of coal, gas and oil.

So why is it that, in 2023, we are in this place debating a bill that is going to allow for the massive expansion of new fossil fuels? It is just totally unbelievable when everybody, from the Tiwi Islands to New York and from Kiribati to the people who are suffering from fires in Queensland at the moment—anyone who has got any ounce of understanding of the crisis that we're currently facing—knows that what needs to happen is that we stop the burning of coal, gas and oil as quickly as possible. We need to be getting out of fossil fuel use and replacing it with a rapid shift to clean, renewable energy.

Yet what we are doing today, with the support of the government and the opposition—hand in hand, total cahoots—is debating a bill that is going to allow for the massive expansion of new gas. And don't give me any garbage about how this is somehow about reducing the impact of climate change, that it's somehow going to be a magic bullet that means we can just keep on mining and burning this gas as much as we want. We know the reality about carbon capture and storage. It is a technology that has been touted by the fossil fuel industry for decades now. It is pseudoscience, as the UN have said. It is not going to allow us to continue the burning of coal, gas and oil and to expand that burning, and it is a complete fallacy—a lie—to say that it is.

Maybe sometime in the future—look, I'm happy for scientists to keep on doing the work on carbon capture and storage, as long as they don't actually destroy the ocean environments with the seismic testing that's required for it and destroy the lives of sea creatures that are massively impacted by the seismic testing—there will maybe be a small future for carbon capture and storage for, as Senator Grogan said on behalf of the government before, hard-to-abate sectors. We know we need to be sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. We need to be doing everything we can to reduce the carbon levels in our atmosphere if we're going to have a future. So maybe there is a tiny role for CCS in the future. But it is totally unproven now, and it is certainly not something to be legislated for now, to be giving the green light for, to allow massive expansion. We know that if this goes ahead and if the Barossa project and the associated projects go ahead it is going to result in more carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere. It is going to result in more global heating. It is going to result in intensification of the climate crisis that we are currently in.

I want to spend my time here today just reminding everybody of how serious this is. It's not a minor thing that we are facing. It is the No. 1 existential crisis facing the world now. It's been facing the world for decades, and it's getting worse. When I started in this place, in 2014, I said I wanted to be able to look my grandchildren in the eye and say that it was during my time in the Senate that we made the shift towards tackling the climate crisis and the shift towards a safe climate. Sadly, almost 10 years on, we have made next to zero progress. But in that 10 years, what has changed is that we've gone from talking about the climate crisis that we are going to face in the future to talking about the climate crisis that we are facing now.

The fires in Queensland are the latest example, after the fires of 2019-20—the Black Summer—and the fires being experienced in the US and Canada. These are places that have never burnt before in the history of humans on this planet. There are fires across the world, and they are continuing, because the world is getting hotter. I weep when I think of the lives that are going to be lost. Four years on from the 2019-20 fires we are facing what it looks like is going to be another pretty awful summer, and the Queensland fires are a foretaste of what that's going to look like. There will be much more loss. More people will die. Many more animals will die. Many more environments will be pushed to the brink—forest environments that are not going to recover from it. I look at the wonderful tall, wet forests that I know so well and love, and I think, how long are they going to be in existence? I think of the threatened ecosystem of the mountain ash forests in Victoria's central highlands and all the creatures that depend upon that ecosystem. If we have yet another fire season like we had in 2019-20 that rips through those forests at increasing frequencies those forests are not going to be there. It will be a huge loss.

Just think about the heat that the climate crisis is bringing upon this planet. Think about the people who are living in poor-quality housing without air-conditioning and with poor-quality insulation in the western suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, where we're looking at a trajectory of having heat in summer hitting 50 degrees. People can't live in that heat. People will die. It will be the most vulnerable people. It will be older people. It will be people with pre-existing health issues who are going to die. We know in the Black Summer fires that many more people died from heat than died from the fires.

That's just in Australia. Think of the heat in the tropics. In the last European summer, the heat that was experienced was on the verge of hitting levels that people just cannot survive. When you get that combination of heat and humidity, human beings just can't survive in those environments. Think of people who live in outback Australia. When you've got temperatures reaching 50 degrees, you don't survive. You die. This is what we are bequeathing to the future.

Think about the huge impact on our water supplies that global heating is having. Think about our ability to grow food. The climate of our major wheat-growing areas in Australia under three degrees of warming is forecast to become the same as the climate of the central deserts. You don't grow wheat in the central deserts. The increasing temperatures of the planet is going to have a massive impact upon our ability to grow food. Again, look at people in the tropics. Currently billions of people rely upon the ability to grow food in the tropics. The climate of the tropics is going to mean they will not be able to grow food there. This will impact on billions and billions of people. This is what we are staring down the barrel at. This is why every Green in this place is getting up here and speaking to this bill today.

This is not the legislation that we should be introducing and debating in this place today. It is not legislation that should have the government, the Liberal Party, the National Party and others joining together to be pushing through this parliament. This is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. We know we should be debating how we can quickly transition to getting out of fossil fuels altogether. We know that's what we should be doing and that that's the sort of legislation that would be giving us a future. But it's not. That shows where the power really lies in this place, when we've got the government, the Liberals and the Nationals teaming up to be passing legislation like this. It shows that they are puppets of the fossil fuel industry. They are puppets of the industry that is destroying life on this planet as we know it. The fact that this legislation that is going to increase our carbon pollution is being pushed through by this government shows that's where the power lies. Forget about democracy. Forget about the fact that you've got the majority of Australians wanting to see us drastically reduce our carbon pollution. The government are not listening to all of those Australians that want to see a drastic reduction in our carbon pollution. They are listening to their donors and they are listening to their mates. They are in cahoots with the fossil fuel destroyers. There's a revolving door. The same people who one day are a member of parliament are the next day a mining company executive.

We know the fossil fuel industry makes a motza out of destroying the planet. They are making a huge amount of money out of it. We know that they're not going to give it up in a hurry. That's why we need to have governments to actually say: 'No. This is not in the interests of humanity. It is not in the interests of life on the planet.' When you have the UN, the IPCC and every reputable organisation on the planet saying, 'Stop new coal, gas and oil,' you would think that we could have a government that is responsible enough to be taking that to heart. But, no. Why should I be surprised?

I was one of the founders of the Greens in Victoria 32 years ago because I saw that Labor and the Liberals weren't listening when it came to these existential threats. In fact it was about climate. Having studied climate science, having learnt about the science of global warming, global heating, the greenhouse effect—I learnt about that at university when I was 20, studying climate science, 43 years ago. And when I learnt about it, I said: 'This is really serious! The world needs to be doing something about it.' At which stage I finished my science degree and I set out on a career as an activist.

I had a partner who ended up being one of the world's leading climate scientists, who kept me on track in terms of what the science was actually saying. And so we founded the Greens because we knew, we could see then, over 30 years ago, that the Labor Party, the Liberal Party and the National Party weren't going to be listening to the people on this issue. They were going to be listening to their corporate vested interests, to their puppetmasters.

Don't despair, folks, because it's very clear. This bill is laying that clear today. It's very clear what the role of the Greens is, and the crossbench who are speaking up and the teal independents who were elected at the last election. The Labor and Liberal parties are not listening to the people, they are not listening to the science, they are not looking at the disaster that's coming towards us, so they need to be chucked out. They need to be replaced. They are not going to change. It is very clear they are not going to change. The power of the fossil fuel industry has got their tentacles into them and they are not going to change, so chuck them out.

Vote for people who are going to listen. Vote so that we would have a government in this place that would be respecting the science, that would not be bringing legislation like this into this parliament today. That's what we need to be doing. Chuck them out and vote for people who are actually going to be listening.

Penny Allman-Payne (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) Bill amends the current sea dumping act. The amendments to the act proposed by this bill would enable a permit to be granted for the export of carbon dioxide streams from carbon dioxide capture processes for the purpose of sequestration into a sub-seabed geological formation in accordance with the 2009 amendments to the London protocol, and enable a permit to be granted for the placement of wastes or other matter for a marine geoengineering activity for the purpose of scientific research in accordance with the 2013 amendments to the London protocol. This means that fossil fuel corporations in Australia get a free ticket to ship their CO2 abroad for the purpose of sequestration or storage under the sea.

This bill is a gift to the fossil fuel industry. It allows the gas industry to use carbon capture and storage to continue its expansion, and let's these polluters launder their reputation. This bill represents the pure collusion between the Albanese Labor government and the gas industry by greenwashing what is actually the expansion of fossil fuels. This is written by the fossil fuel industry for the fossil fuel industry. Carbon capture and storage is nothing but a public relations campaign led by the biggest emitters in the world. The only purpose is to delay the closure of coal and gas. CCS allows these coal and gas corporations to pretend they're doing anything other than completely jeopardising our future on this planet.

In a report released last year of the 13 flagship CCS and carbon capture utilisation and storage projects, it showed that more than half of them underperformed, two failed and one was mothballed. During the inquiry into this bill, the Environmental Defenders Office submitted:

… policies such as CCS and geoengineering carry the risk of justifying ongoing use and extraction of fossil fuels, and strongly recommends they should not be promoted or encouraged in order to sustain the life of the fossil fuel industry. CCS in particular also carries significant risk of additional and unintentional emissions pollution in its operation, while the environmental and social risks of large scale geoengineering remain unknown.

In their submission to the Senate inquiry, the Australian Marine Conservation Society expressed concerns about the impact of CCS on marine life, highlighting the effects of infrastructure, seismic testing and a lack of clear regulation.

A prime example of the complete failure of CCS is Chevron's Gorgon CCS project, which sits off the coast of Western Australia. This project was due to commence in 2016, but they didn't start their carbon capture until 2019. Despite being years behind schedule and only reaching one-third of their promised emissions reductions, Chevron still receive millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies for their project. The Chevron example is just one of many CCS projects failing to meet their targets already. CCS is not a viable method of reducing emissions at scale. It's a complete dud. It is a false solution that prolongs dependence on fossil fuels and delays their replacement with renewable alternatives.

Along with my colleagues, the Greens are incredibly concerned that this legislation appears to be motivated to primarily facilitate the Santos Barossa project, it's related Bayu-Undan CCS projects and other fossil fuel projects off Australia's northern coastlines, as well as provide this government and its mates in the fossil fuel cartel political cover to open up new areas of our ocean to fossil fuel exploration. Santos claims it's Bayu-Undan CCS project will have the capacity of 10 million tonnes per year. But the maths just doesn't stack up for Santos, if it sticks by its claim, to have the ability to capture more pollution in one project than all of the world's current CCS projects combined, having no proven track record of doing anything anywhere of this scale elsewhere.

The disastrous Barossa gas project, if it goes ahead, could damage ancient burial sites, dreaming tracks and cultural artefacts. I commend the Tiwi Island traditional owners, who've been fighting fiercely and relentlessly to stop this project from destroying their country. They have successfully won an emergency injunction to pause the Barossa gas project from going ahead, forcing Santos to pause its installation of the 263-kilometre-long gas pipeline. The destruction of tangible and intangible cultural heritage would be devastating to traditional owners, who have spiritual connections to significant sites, songlines, totems and ancient burial grounds. The power and financial imbalance between big fossil fuel companies and traditional owners is enormous and unfair, but this injunction buys time. That is critical because, once destroyed, the damage cannot be reversed.

This is not the first legal challenge Santos has faced in relation to Barossa and traditional owners. Last year Santos lost an appeal against a landmark decision that overturned approvals for its $4.7 billion Barossa offshore gas project. This begs the question of why the Albanese Labor government is falling over itself to rush to the aid of Santos. Santos, like the rest of the fossil fuel industry in Australia, continues to reap the benefits of its buddies in the major parties, with Australian state and federal governments handing over $11.6 billion—I'll say that again: $11.6 billion—worth of tax breaks and subsidies to help them along. Considering Santos has donated over half a million to the Labor Party from 2015 to 2022, that's a pretty great rate of return for them.

What do the Australian people get out of this deal? Well, off the bat, it's Santos paying no tax on its $68 million taxable income. In a cost-of-living crisis, it's absurd that the Labor government is prioritising the needs of fossil fuel companies like Santos while refusing to give more help to Australian families doing it tough. Add to this, we have the Santos CEO saying:

… oil and gas is going to be here whether CCS is here or not. That's just a fact of life—you cannot replace oil and gas.

So, to clarify: on the one hand, the Albanese government wants to increase CCS because of some vague commitment to stopping climate change, and, on the other hand, you have the CEO of Santos saying that actually they have no intention of ever stopping.

The fact that this bill is being rammed through parliament shows just the lengths that the Labor and Liberal parties are willing to go to to appease their donor Santos and the Japanese government investors in Barossa. This bill is a cynical and blatant attempt by the Albanese Labor government to facilitate more oil and gas drilling in our oceans. To pursue such an outcome, in the service of the oil and gas industry, is ecocidal. Our ecosystem is being crushed under the weight of climate change. We are seeing accelerations of climate catastrophes like never before. As the UN Secretary-General says, 'The era of global boiling has arrived.' The forecasts are clear and unambiguous: 2023 will be the hottest year in recorded history.

Earlier this year we watched in horror the catastrophic wildfires that ripped through Canada and Europe, and the devastation in Hawaii. In my home state of Queensland, the predictions of an early and destructive bushfire season are coming true before our very eyes, with hundreds of bushfires across the state and 80 per cent of the state at high fire risk. Gladstone, my home town, has not been immune, with fires in Oyster Creek, Deepwater, Mount Tom and Colosseum forcing people out of their homes. Central Queensland has been choked in smoke, and it's barely November. Bushfires are destroying homes and properties and devastating lives. Along with my colleague Senator Larissa Waters, I extend my sincere condolences to the families of the two Queenslanders who have died in the Queensland fires in recent weeks.

Fire seasons are getting longer and more intense, and it's getting harder to prepare adequately. The Albanese government must stop pouring fuel onto the fire. The Albanese government should be taking tangible, meaningful steps to fight climate change by ending the expansion of new fossil fuel projects. Instead, it has taken valuable time and energy to draft and bring forward a bill that appears to be written by the fossil fuel industry for the fossil fuel industry.

The Albanese government must implement the Greens recommendations to change the EPBC Act, including adding a climate trigger. Otherwise, bills such as this are nothing more than the Labor government caving to fossil fuel industry demands. The environment minister and the Labor Party need to stop doing the bidding of their fossil fuel mates and start doing what the Australian people elected them to do: to meaningfully act on climate change. Rather than favours for Santos, the vast majority of Australians want more action on climate change and they want an end to new coal and gas projects. If the government fails to deliver, there will be dire consequences for generations to come.

In 2018 I went back to Gladstone as a teacher. I remember early on that year I was teaching a course in work education, and part of the program that I was given for that course was to encourage students to participate in community debate. The question that was before students in that lesson was: should we continue to dig up and ship out coal and gas? Keep in mind that this was a class of students in Gladstone, in Central Queensland, a town that was built off the back of processing and exporting coal and gas. The students were asked to put themselves on a continuum—to stand at one end of the classroom if they thought we should absolutely stop doing that as quickly as possible and to stand on the other side of the room if they thought we should keep going. I simply asked the students to stand and place themselves somewhere on the continuum so we could start the debate. Out of a class of around 28 kids, 27 went to the far end of the room to signal that they thought we should stop digging up and exporting coal and gas now—27 out of 28 young people.

The young people in this country know that we cannot afford to continue to dig up and frack coal, gas and oil. They know that their future depends on it. They are looking to the adults in the room and the adults who are their political representatives to give them a future. We have every climate scientist, the UN and the International Energy Agency telling us that if we are going to give our young people a future that is livable then we must stop digging up and fracking and drilling for coal, gas and oil. This bill, far from doing that, gives cover to the fossil fuel industry to continue business as usual. I was a teacher for 30 years because I care about our young people. It is about time this parliament showed the young people of this country that they too care about their future.

Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Here we find ourselves yet again with the political duopoly in this place colluding to do the bidding of big fossil fuel. In this particular circumstance, the Labor and Liberal parties are colluding to do the bidding of the gas cartel. Even more specifically, in this place, the Labor and Liberal parties are colluding to do the bidding of Santos.

We should all understand the context of this debate. Fires are burning across the eastern seaboard of Australia. Globally, temperature records are being smashed, ocean temperatures are soaring and ice fields and glaciers are melting. Folks, if you can't actually feel—if you can't actually understand—the seriousness of the situation that we find ourselves in, you are simply not paying attention. The feedback loops have well and truly kicked in. The Gulf Stream is flickering. The great drivers of a relatively stable climate on this planet are beginning to falter. If you can't think about what that means for yourselves, think about what it means for your kids and your grandkids and their kids and their grandkids. We are in far more trouble than most of us realise. There's a very real possibility that we've left our run too late to avoid catastrophic impacts. There's a very real possibility that we've left our run too late to avoid a significant collapse in the society that we all take for granted.

History is going to view us collectively in this place very, very poorly indeed, unless we get our act together and act now, act strongly and act urgently. We could do that and we must do that, but it will only happen if the Labor and Liberal parties divorce themselves from big fossil fuel companies. This legislation shows clearly that that is a long, long way from happening. Believe me; Santos, the gas cartel and the big fossil fuel corporations have got their hooks well and truly into the political duopoly in this place, and that is proven starkly by this legislation.

Let's get back to first principles here. The Labor Party's policy of a 43 per cent reduction by 2030 is aligned to a world of more than two degrees of warming. We're going to see food shortages, mass displacement, mass involuntary migration, floods, fires, storm surges and sea level rise. The Treasurer acknowledged only last week that the government are not even on track to deliver on their pathetic 43 per cent target. But rather than actually do something about that, rather than actually taking some action to meet their legislated—although inadequate—emissions reduction target, what's the government been doing for the last week? Colluding with the opposition to enable gas expansion.

The origins of this bill clearly come out of the safeguard negotiations, where the amendments secured by the Greens increased the capital cost of developing the dirty carbon bomb Barossa project and significantly increased the capital cost, in some estimations, by close to $1 billion. The people of the Tiwi Islands successfully challenged the project in the Federal Court and again pushed up the costs of that project—a beautiful thing! But now Santos is calling in its favours. And here we find ourselves today, with the Labor Party, the Liberal Party and the National Party all working together to get this bill through not for the planet, not for our children and our grandchildren, and their kids and grandkids, but for Santos.

A valid question is: how can Santos just click their fingers and make sure this legislation sails through the parliament? Well, maybe Senator Chisholm could tell us about that because he came straight from Santos to the Senate. A former political strategist of Santos is sitting in this chamber right here, right now, as this legislation is debated. Maybe Senator Chisholm knows full well how Santos can click their fingers and get legislation like this through the Senate. Maybe it's the well over $1 million that Santos has donated to the Labor Party over the years. Maybe it's the over $1 million that Santos has donated to the Liberal and National parties over the years. Maybe it's their lobbyist Tracey Winters, a former employee of Martin Ferguson—who went, by the way, from being the resources minister who caused all the gas shortages and cartel behaviour on the east coast gas market straight to the job as head of APPEA.

Last week in Senate estimates, the Attorney-General's Department confirmed that Ms Winters, who now runs a consultancy to advise Santos, should be on the lobbyist register but she is not. We also had it confirmed by departmental officials that they have met with Ms Winters this year when she should have been registered as a lobbyist and disclosing to departmental officials. So what have we got? A situation where an unregistered lobbyist for Santos is running around putting the squeeze on the major parties in this place. It's absolutely disgusting.

Make no mistake, big fossil fuel has got its hooks into the Australian Labor Party and big fossil fuel has got its hooks into the coalition in this place. There is a revolving door that exists for Labor and Liberal-National Party politicians. They do their time in this place, delivering outcomes for big fossil fuel companies, and then they roll out the door into cushy, plum appointments in those very same fossil fuel companies. The list is nearly endless of former major party politicians and their senior staff who now hold cushy, plum appointments in fossil fuel corporations and PR firms advising big fossil fuel corporations. It is disgusting, it is corrupt and it needs to end.

That's what it will take for this parliament to actually start passing legislation that will potentially save billions of lives this century. That is what it will take for this parliament to start passing legislation to ensure that we stop approving new coal and gas mines, that we stop clear-felling our native forests and that we stop publicly subsidising the burning of fossil fuels in this country. That is what it will take for this parliament to pass legislation that will mean that we're not going to face billions of people being displaced from their homes around the world, mostly poor, brown and black skinned people from the global south. That's what it would take to make sure this parliament fulfils its responsibility not just to everyone in Australia and around the planet now but to our children, our grandchildren and their children and grandchildren.

That's what it will take, but we're a long way from that happening as we stand here and debate this legislation. The proof of that is the fact that we are standing here and debating this legislation, which is simply a barefaced scam designed to deliver for Santos. That's what we're doing here today. Sometime this week—possibly even sometime later today—the bells are going to go and we're going to find out who in this chamber is prepared to sit on the side of this beautiful planet that supports all human life, on the side of the complex, awe-inspiring ecosystems and ecological processes that support all life on this planet and on the side of unborn children, their unborn children and their unborn grandchildren. And we're going to find who's going to sit on the side of the ecocidal fossil fuel corporations.

Here's what's going to happen, folks: the major party politicians, the Coles and Woolworths of Australian politics, are going to sit with the ayes and pass this bill. There will be a small number of people—and I proudly let you all know that that will include every single Australian Greens senator—on the other side of the chamber voting no to this despicable piece of legislation. In voting no we will be standing up for the future, we will be standing up for a safe planet and we will be standing up for future generations.

The people who will sit on this side will find themselves on the wrong side of history soon enough—mark my words. But today they're going to come in here—and they are in here right now—and do the bidding of big fossil fuel: the gas cartel and the fossil fuel corporations. Many of them do it to feather their own nests. Maybe Senator Chisholm is going to roll back out into the Santos boardroom. Who knows? We know where he came from—from Santos to the Senate. The list is a mile long, of major party politicians who've been spat out the revolving door and into plum, cushy jobs, cooking the planet. That's what they do, because that's just how politics in this country rolls. It is corrupt. It is shameful. It is disgusting. It is disgraceful.

So I say to folks: When the bushfires are burning, as they are right now, when people are dying, as they are right now in Australia, in early November, folks, we ain't seen nothing yet. When people are dying, when they're losing their homes, when their insurance premiums are skyrocketing, when hundreds of thousands of people around the world, soon to be millions—soon potentially to be billions—are being displaced from their homes or dying of thirst or dying of starvation or dying from drowning in floods or dying of burning in fires, don't say you weren't told what's causing it and don't say you didn't know the role you played in this unfolding disaster we are living through.

Our climate is breaking down. Our biodiversity is crumbling around us. The natural ecosystems that support all life on this planet are flickering and starting to collapse. And what are we doing in this place? The bidding of the big corporations, those ecocidal corporations, with the psychopaths in their boardrooms who are running them, who are prepared to put the pursuit of the almighty profit above the future of human life on this planet. That's what the major parties in here are doing the bidding of today, and that is what we will be proudly voting against when the bells go for the second reading on this debate. Someone has to stand up for future generations. Someone has to stand up for this beautiful planet that we live on. Someone has to stand up to this planet's capacity to support all life, including all human life.

David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It turns out it is so cheap to buy the Labor Party. It is so cheap to put the Labor Party in the pocket of a fossil fuel industry that half a million dollars in donations from Santos is what it's taken for the Labor Party to mortgage the future of our kids. For half a million dollars delivered between 2015 and now, directly into the coffers of the Australian Labor Party, Santos have literally bought the future of our kids and bought the future of our natural ecosystems. It is so cheap to buy Labor, it turns out, if you're a fossil fuel company. It's despicably cheap, to literally sell out the future for half a million dollars in donations from a fossil fuel company, because, let's be clear, that's what Santos have got. They've been planning this for a while, going to the Labor Party fundraisers, delivering $10,000 here and $20,000 there. They've been doing the same with the coalition. Let's be clear: they play both sides. They're not investing in democracy when they're buying the Labor Party; they're investing in their obscene fossil fuel profits to be delivered by a future Labor government. They were paying that money in 2015, when they weren't sure Labor would get into office, and putting a saver on the coalition, and half a million dollars later what do we get? The Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) Bill 2023, a bill whose label was drafted by George Orwell—the 'Environment Protection Fighting Climate Change Bill'. It's an 'Environment Destruction Aggravating Climate Change Bill'. That's what this bill is. It's a naked attempt by Labor, paid for by their donors in Santos and the fossil fuel industry, to facilitate more oil and gas development in our oceans. It's particularly aimed at facilitating the Barossa project and other related projects off Australia's northern coastlines. And let's remember that the Barossa project is the project that a proud, strong, brave group of Tiwi Islands traditional owners managed finally to get an injunction against, because Santos, with their mates in the federal government, just ran roughshod over decent consultation, just ran roughshod over their rights for native title and to be respected. If this bill goes through it's a critical step to ramming through that 260-odd-kilometre pipeline, right through Tiwi Islands traditional land.

Again, imagine delivering that destruction to the Tiwi Islands people's culture and their land. Imagine delivering this destruction to the planet, all because Santos slipped half a million bucks into the ALP coffers. How obscene it is to watch our parliament literally being bought and sold and to watch the Albanese government being literally purchased by the fossil fuel industry like this.

This bill, which it looks like is going to be rammed through by Labor and the coalition, the planet-cooking parties, has come only after repeated pushes not only from Santos but also from large overseas fossil fuel corporations. Some of those overseas investors were deeply worried about the extra billion dollars in capital costs that the Greens managed to impose on this offshore gas development before they could get it started. So, they've been looking for ways to claw it back, to claw back some extra profitability from this offshore gas. And what have they got? They've got this Orwellian 'environment protection fighting climate change' bill, which actually is just a sea dumping bill—a sea dumping, sea destroying, ecosystem destroying bill.

We know there's been a strong diplomatic push, particularly from the Japanese government, to try to reverse some of the protections the Greens managed to put into what was otherwise a hopelessly weak climate bill from Labor in its first year of this government. They've been pushing and pushing, and donating and donating, and then they get their sea dumping bill, which is a public relations and delaying tactic for the coal and gas industry to pretend it's doing something other than just cooking the future of our planet.

And to think, at a time when we had a federal government saying they cared about Voice and cared about First Nations rights, that they're pushing through this bill, a result of which will be the destruction of tangible and intangible cultural heritage for the Tiwi Islands and for First Nations people across the north of this country. Within a month of losing the Voice referendum, they're ramming through legislation to literally tear up those spiritual connections to significant sites—to songlines, to totems and to ancient burial grounds. This is the same government, the Albanese government, that said they cared about a Voice, that they cared about First Nations peoples, and literally within a month they are ramming through destructive legislation to tear apart those songlines, those totems, and to destroy ancient burial grounds—all for $½ million in donations from Santos, and no doubt for the jobs that senior Labor staffers and broken, tired Labor ministers will get in the fossil fuel industry when they leave this place: $½ million for a board here, $200,000 for a board there, a $1 million exec job in the fossil fuel industry.

That's what we're facing here—the extended corrupting of democracy through the direct donations and through offers of jobs for broken Labor ministers, for failed backbenchers, for senior staffers, who'll get their cushy jobs in the fossil fuel industry, take the cash and hopefully retire and shuffle off before the fossil fuel industry totally fucks the planet. That's the plan here, from Labor. That's what they're proposing to ram through with their mates in the coalition today.

In '21-22 Santos drops $83,360 to the ALP. They'd seen a change in government, and they only put a $38,000 saving bet on the Nationals, with another 38 grand off to the Liberals. That's just in '21-22, and while they're handing this loose change from the fossil fuel industry off to the political parties, what are they giving the public? While Santos had more than $4 billion in revenue in '20-21, they paid not one cent in corporate tax—not one cent. Even when they cooked their investment figures and they skewed their capital expenditure and did every possible write-off that's been given to them under tax law—given to them by Labor, given to them by the coalition—no doubt to their horror, despite all of those write-offs they somehow had a $68 million profit. But they still managed to pay no tax, even on that: $4 billion in revenue, $68 million in profit, not one cent in tax. It's no doubt how they could afford to buy the Labor Party and buy the coalition. Of course, when it comes to carbon capture and storage, this is the long-term bullshit program of the fossil fuel industry.

Paul Scarr (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Point of order, Madam Acting Deputy President: I know Senator Shoebridge is passionate about these matters, but if he could find another term. He's a very intelligent man and has a very wide-ranging vocabulary, so I'm sure he can find another word to express his view.

Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes. If you could mind your language, please, that would be preferable.

David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In search of a preferred euphemism for carbon capture and storage, a lie a deceit, a complete and utter falsehood. Carbon capture and storage has been hanging around since Tony Abbott was a young politician, and it's about as reliable as a Tony Abbott speech or a Tony Abbott fact. It's about as reliable as a Boris Johnson political promise. Carbon capture storage is a lie from the fossil fuel industry, designed to somehow extend the life of a dying industry. That's what carbon capture and storage is, and to think that we're passing legislation pretending that carbon capture and storage works when we know it doesn't. Every credible report knows it doesn't. Of course, the report that came out of the House of Representatives here isn't a credible report. It was owned and dominated by Labor and the coalition. They just lapped up and repeated Santos's media releases. The majority report that came out of the Senate was much the same, just Labor and the coalition literally abusing logic, abusing fact, abusing science in order to find somehow some narrow path of deceit to pretend that this bill has any merit at all.

But carbon capture and storage is a false solution to climate change. It's unproven at scale, and even at the tiny sequestration volumes claimed by the industry in past projects, they leak and they fail to deliver on the storage promises that are given. Even if the proposed storage that will be facilitated by this bill gets up, it will be a tiny proportion of the life cycle emissions of new fossil fuel projects. Carbon capture and storage has not been proven feasible or economic at any viable scale. At best it will be a tiny fraction of the emissions generated from these projects. One of the recent reports by the IEEFA about the Norwegian Sleipner and Snohvit CCS projects demonstrates that CCS has real material ongoing risks that will almost certainly negate all or any of the short-term benefits it seeks to create. That's from a project that was literally paid for by the Norwegian government—which is almost entirely funded by the fossil fuel industry—and even that report says it stinks, it doesn't work, it's dangerous and it's a problem for the future. CCS prolongs dependence on fossil fuels and it delays replacements with renewable energy alternatives. We know that it's going to create long-term environmental health and safety risks for any community in its vicinity and for any worker associated in any way with carbon capture and storage. It is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode to kill, injure and damage those in their vicinity, and to add to global boiling.

As the Environmental Defenders Office said in its submission to the Senate inquiry:

policies such as CCS and geoengineering carry the risk of justifying ongoing use and extraction of fossil fuels, and [they strongly recommend] they should not be promoted or encouraged in order to sustain the life of the fossil fuel industry. CCS in particular also carries significant risk of additional and unintentional emissions pollution in its operation, while the environmental and social risks of large scale geoengineering remain unknown.

That's the evidence. Yet the ecocide lovers in the Labor Party and the ecocide lovers in the coalition want to pass this bill to open up the Barossa fields. They want to pass this bill to justify more offshore coal and gas. They want to pass this bill to keep their mates in the fossil fuel industry happy, to keep the donations rolling in. They want to pass this bill so that when they're pensioned off out of this place, they can walk hand-in-glove with the fossil fuel industry through that nice revolving door and get their job on the board, get the job from their mates, get the executive pay and sell out our future and democracy.

Of course we're going to vote against this, but it'll be a spectacle that any person concerned about the future should look at. Watch how Labor and the coalition join together once again to mortgage our future and screw up our climate simply for the short-term money they and their mates will get. We oppose this bill, and I thank Senator Whish-Wilson for the work he's done on this.

Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) Bill 2023. The amendments proposed by the bill would, amongst other things, enable a permit to be granted for carbon capture and storage in sub-seabed geological formations. This bill is a naked attempt to facilitate more oil and gas development in our oceans.

I was put here by the electors of South Australia who see the climate crisis unfolding around them, who want to see a safe planet for future generations, and who know the new and expanded oil and gas projects are a danger to our kids and to the planet. The science is clear. The experts are united. Our young people are especially clear that their future depends on an end to new fossil fuels around the world, and a rapid shift to renewables and a reduction in pollution. We cannot put out the fire of the climate emergency while pouring petrol on it, and this bill pours petrol on it. It enables the crisis. This bill is on the wrong side of history.

Since I arrived in this parliament in July last year, there has been no good news on the climate crisis. I'm a social scientist and so I listen to the scientists. Global teams of climate scientists report that the earth's vital signs are worsening beyond anything we have previously seen, to the point that life on the planet is at risk. Recently, international scientists showed that 20 of 35 vital signs on the planet are at record extremes, pointing to the underlying issue of what they call ecological overshoot. Several facts really must alarm us, and they should be shaping the decisions of this parliament on legislation. This bill should be reflecting that science and that knowledge. We have droughts, floods, temperature increases, typhoons and changed rainfall patterns which are costing lives, homes and communities. They're increasing costs to businesses and to individuals and they're changing agricultural and food production. The costs and incidence of increased fires in Australia are there for us all to see. And it's not just in Australia—this year Canadian wildfires have pumped more than one gigatonne of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is greater than Canada's total 2021 greenhouse gas emissions.

In 2023 there have already been 38 days with global average temperatures more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. According to the latest research, the highest average earth surface temperature ever recorded was in July, and there's reason to believe it was the highest surface temperature the planet has seen in the last 100,000 years. Dr Thomas Newsome, of the Global Ecology Lab in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney, said recently:

The trends indicate the need to drastically speed and scale up efforts globally to combat climate change while more generally reducing our ecological footprint.

Dr Newsome and his science colleagues make the point that without action—including an end to new coal, oil and gas—we're on our way to the potential partial collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems, and a world with unbearable heat and shortages of food and fresh water. Many scientists find it very hard to talk about what their science is telling them, and many of our young people find this very hard to hear, and turn away from the news as a consequence.

Biodiversity is in decline so much faster than we have predicted—it's now frighteningly fast—and we must arrest its rate of decline and end the continuing deforestation, which is still unfolding in too many places in Australia. So many climate records have been broken by very wide margins in 2023, particularly those related to ocean temperature and sea ice. Scientists expect that, by the end of the 21st century, many regions will have severe heat, limited food availability and elevated mortality rates. We know the cost of this falls particularly on those at the bottom of the income scale—those in poorer countries.

In this crisis we should be here in this parliament considering legislation that rapidly accelerates change in order to reduce carbon pollution. Instead, we're considering legislation that does the opposite. It enables carbon production by offering unproven technologies to store it and, indeed, to import CO2 from other places and to store it here. Instead of legislation to reduce pollution, we've got legislation before us that's a naked attempt to expand pollution. The legislation is to facilitate, essentially, the Barossa project and its related Bayu-Undan carbon capture and storage projects as well as other fossil fuel projects off Australia's northern coastlines. This bill will facilitate climate bombs that put our kids' future at risk. Barossa alone is expected to release 13 million tonnes of CO2 a year, which is around three per cent of Australia's total CO2 contribution. That's a massive climate bomb. This bill, and the manner in which it's being rushed through, shows that both Labor and Liberal are working very hard to do the dirty work of Santos, the Japanese government and the investors of Barossa—after the safeguard deal with the Greens, which added almost a million dollars to the capital cost of opening up this dirty gas field.

My colleague Senator McKim has pointed to the revolving door of politicians into the oil, gas and coal industries, and the work they do to do the bidding of these large corporations. These companies are in a greedy race for profit, while the world knows we need to end pollution and stop new or expanded oil, coal and gas. The Japanese government and its state owned companies have behaved poorly after the safeguard agreement. What has become clear is that they are not serious about climate action and are using their diplomatic power to push Australia to go slow on the climate transition. This bill is a response to their complaints.

Carbon capture and storage is a public relations delaying tactic for the oil and gas industries to pretend they're doing something other than risking the future of our planet. Further, sea based carbon capture and storage will mean the destruction of tangible and intangible cultural heritage that will be devastating to traditional owners who have spiritual connections to significant sites, songlines, totems and ancient burial grounds in the oceans.

Pumping carbon under the sea from gas rigs or storing it underground just doesn't stack up. We know that many such projects do not work. They mostly underperform, and others simply fail. Chevron Gorgon has been cited by proponents of carbon capture and storage as an exemplar of a functioning facility, and, as we have heard in previous speeches, that is not the case. In the 12 months to June 2022, Chevron injected only 1.6 million tonnes of CO2 into the underground reservoir, while letting 3.4 million tonnes into the atmosphere, and, in the six years since export of LNG commenced from the Gorgon project, 20.4 million tonnes of CO2 has been extracted but only 6.5 million tonnes has been stored. The importing and exporting of carbon dioxide for sub-seabed sequestration risks turning Australia's oceans and those of our near neighbours into dumping grounds for the world's pollution. It is a fictional device used to enable more coal, oil and gas production. It is unproven at scale. Why should we encourage, and enable, other places to look to Australia for a dumping ground for their waste?

South Australians have had some experience of this, with big promises of economic nirvana arriving on the back of taking the rest of the world's toxic waste. In South Australia's case, in 2016, it was high-level nuclear waste. The state was offered fictional amounts of money per tonne of waste, fictional accounts of safe, proven technology—it was neither—and fictional accounts of the cost of building storage for this extremely toxic waste. It was a giant model of unproven assumptions, and South Australians said no. We're looking at a similar kind of proposition here: one which is largely unproven at scale but which provides vital cover for the expansion of oil and gas. Our country should not be the dumping ground for other people's waste problems, especially when the technology is largely unproven and is being mobilised to create cover for the expansion of polluting oil and gas projects, as this bill does.

The carbon capture and storage industry has largely been a ploy and a distraction, deliberately designed to greenwash a dirty industry and delay the inevitable: the essential shift to renewables. This bill is about political cover. It's designed to give the government and its friends and donors in the fossil fuel cartel political cover to open up new areas of our ocean to fossil fuel exploration. As my colleague, Senator Shoebridge just commented, this is about, and reflects, political capture. Let's not forget that, in 2021-22, Santos donated over $80,000 to the ALP, $38,000 to the Liberals and $32,000 to the Nationals. Santos has donated over half a million to Labor between 2015 and 2022, and these donations have opened doors. They have fuelled the rotating door to enable legislation like the bill before us, which boosts and protects the profits of Santos, while putting at risk the future of our planet and our kids. In a cost-of-living crisis, it is absurd that a Labor government is prioritising, through this bill, the needs of fossil fuel companies, while refusing to give help to Australian families doing it tough. Significant subsidies underpin the activities contemplated in this bill and related activities. That's public money, and our money has better places to be spent.

The Albanese government should be taking tangible, meaningful steps to fight climate change, by ending the expansion of new fossil fuel projects. Instead it has taken the valuable time and energy of this place to draft and bring forward a bill that appears to be written by the fossil fuel industry for the fossil fuel industry. Carbon capture and storage is a false solution for the carbon crisis. It is unproven at scale and, even if sequestration volumes claimed by the industry were achieved, it would offset only a very small proportion of lifecycle emissions of new fossil fuel projects. Carbon capture and storage has not proven feasible or economic at scale. It can only take care of a very small fraction of emissions. It prolongs dependence on fossil fuels and delays their replacement with renewables. It creates environmental health and safety risks for communities. And what will be the impact of this bill on marine life? In its submission to the Senate inquiry, the Australian Marine Conservation Society expressed concern about the impact of CCS on marine life, highlighting the effects of infrastructure and seismic testing and the lack of clear regulation. It is also very likely in its enaction to trample on the free, prior and informed consent of First Nations people in its proposed uses and put at risk their cultural heritage.

It is disappointing that the Albanese government has created space within the environmental legislative agenda for this bill in front of effective, future focused environmental laws that would actually help the environment. Urgent environmental matters wait for action while the needs of the fossil fuel industry jump to the front of the queue. We deserve better. Australians deserve better from this government. Our scientists deserve better—for their work to be taken seriously. Most importantly, our kids deserve better. This bill should be rejected. It goes in the wrong direction. The crisis we're in demands different actions that actually address it and create a safe planet, end the loss of biodiversity and give future generations the future, the lives and the communities that they deserve.

Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As my colleague Senator Pocock has just stated to the chamber, this proposal—the Environment Protection (Sea Dumping) Amendment (Using New Technologies to Fight Climate Change) Bill 2023—goes in precisely the wrong direction at precisely the wrong time for all of the wrong reasons. Through the course of this debate, what you have heard from each and every Greens contributor is a factually based, impassioned and detailed critique of this legislation from MPs who were sent to this place to defend the planet and the environment from the clutches and maladministration of parties which have been captured by fossil fuel interests in this country.

Senator Pocock spoke of the way in which South Australia is so often used and proposed for the dumping of poisons and types of waste that politicians elsewhere don't want to have in their back garden. That's very much the case also for the state of Western Australia. The state of Western Australia also has a really good knowledge of the absolute con which is carbon capture and storage. The Chevron Gorgon experiment illustrates to the world the moribund nature of this technology. In some ways, I sit here as one of the younger members in this chamber, still attempting, at times, to grapple with the reality that folks far older than me have been able to be convinced that you should get on board with a technology that is the embodiment of a cautionary tale that is given to kindergartners and primary school children. Primary school children are told, 'Don't sweep your problems under the rug,' and yet, as a technology, that's exactly what carbon capture and storage is. It sweeps emissions—or attempts to sweep emissions—under the rug. But it can't even do that properly, and yet we have spent decades in Australia investing billions of dollars of public funds into these proposals.

People following along with this debate this afternoon would be wondering, I'm sure, why it is that we would do that. Why would we invest billions of dollars of public funds in a technology that doesn't work and basically flies in the face of a principle that we learn as children? Well, despite what it often may look like when you look into this space, I would put it to the community that the reason for that isn't actually that the vast majority of people in here are ignorant or unintelligent people. It certainly often appears that way, but that's not been my experience of talking and working with many of the people elected to this place. It's not a question of intelligence or access to information. What we see playing out before us is state capture. These decisions are made because the parties that make them in this place are bought by the corporations whom those decisions financially benefit. That is why we end up with these pieces of legislation. That is why we waste the precious time of the people and the planet on proposals like this. Then you might ask yourself, 'Well, what does it cost to buy an outcome like this from a legislative chamber like the Australian parliament? What is the price tag for the Labor and the Liberal parties in this place?' We do have some figures. We have some disclosed pieces of information around how much has been donated, so I'm able to share, as Senator Pocock has shared, as others have shared today, that in 2021-22 Santos, which stands to be the primary beneficiary of this project alongside the Japanese government, donated to the ALP some $83,000 then followed it up with $38,000 to the Liberal Party and $32,000 to the Nationals. It would be sad to be a National. I mean, you people come in here and you basically cosplay as rural Australians. You've never seen a gas project you didn't want to approve yet all you get is $32,000. You must feel robbed. The National party must feel absolutely robbed.

Santos—it is hilarious to observe this—paid no tax on its $68 million in taxable income off more than $4 billion in revenue in 2021. I wonder who writes the tax code that lets them do that? Who writes that? Is it the same politicians that take those donations? I think it might be. What a shock. What a stunning surprise. So you have, on one hand, this corporation able to make $4 billion worth of revenue, pay no tax, and, on the other hand, be able to go through a process of approval for a project based on worming its way around Australia's climate policies using a defunct technology. Well, you wonder why people think that this place is rigged. You wonder why people think that this place is bought. This is precisely why.

We are heading into a fire season, folks. We're already in one in WA. As I flew out of Western Australia to come here, our state was burning. Volunteer firefighters were fighting along multiple fire fronts. The climate crisis is a reality for the people of Western Australia, as it is a reality for the people of South Australia, as it is a reality for the people of Queensland and for the people of Tasmania. Yet what do we see? We see no declaration of climate emergency from this government, no opposition to projects like this. We see an environment minister who really loves to approve coalmines. We see legislation like this passing through this place to approve more dirty fossil-fuel-heavy projects, trying to game the system, putting hope in a technology that, in terms of emissions reduction, does not work, on the bidding of a company that will make so much money out of this project. And it will do so, by the way, via a tax system that allows it to make the primary profit off what should be treated, if it were ever extracted as sold, as a public resource. It's a joke yet it has such serious consequences for people.

Senator Pocock and Senator Hanson-Young see first-hand what the climate crisis is doing to South Australia, is doing to the koalas, is doing to the biodiversity of that great state. I see it first-hand in Western Australia. We are losing precious species that we will never get back. We are losing biodiversity that we will never get back on this precious, ancient continent that we are so lucky to inhabit and share together, gifted to us to guide, stewarded by First Nations people for tens of thousands of years, yet this government and the opposition are determined to oversee its destruction for the sake of a few donations. It makes you sick.

Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Steele-John, you will be in continuation when the debate resumes. It is now 1.30 pm, so I will proceed to two-minute statements.