Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities) Share this | Hansard source

And it is marked ‘confidential’ so I do not have to table it. With respect to the similarities between some of the issues raised on the Liverpool Plains and the comments I made yesterday, the member for New England is right, and the advice that I receive from Geoscience Australia backs this up, that the science on coal seams is limited. That is why there will be some coal seams which are watertight and some which are porous. The conditions that I imposed on the Queensland projects I referred to yesterday demanded that individual testing will have to take place seam-by-seam. If the individual seams turn out to be watertight, then in those situations there is not connectivity, but where there is connectivity there needs to be either repressurisation or water actually being reinjected into the seam. The reason for this is you want to avoid a situation where—with your water table issues on the Liverpool Plains or with the Queensland example, the Great Artesian Basin—you do not create a void of water which, because it is porous, causes water to actually backfill and therefore you lose the water you otherwise would have had access to. It is a genuine concern. Geoscience Australia was saying there will be seams where this may apply and there will be seams where it may not. My view and what is reflected in those conditions is that that needs to be precautionary and you need to test every seam.

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