Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The minister has missed my point in explaining what is wrong with this legislation. It was designed 40 years ago, when the concept of regional marine planning was unheard of, unthought of, as was the concept of ecologically sustainable development and the concept of the precautionary principle. Forty years ago the legislation made the assumption that the sea was there to be drilled and so on and to go ahead and do it, so the only thing you had to consider in legislation was how to administer the giving of permits et cetera. In fact, the Bills Digest says that the bill is not intended to introduce any major changes, and that is my point. What are we doing, in 2006, just doing a re-edit of a bill which is so wildly outdated in terms of the conceptual framework in which we are working?

The government says, ‘New concept.’ Senator Colbeck, I would really like you to take this in. Regional marine planning is something which people around the world are grappling with. When you look at an area of marine environment, you have to look at ecosystem integrity, fishing, tourism, mineral exploration, mining gas and oil, or whatever else. You have to look at how you manage a regional area of the ocean so that you have these multiple interests taken care of plus the integrity of the environment dealt with. You do not announce that you are going to have a regional planning process for marine areas and then pre-empt that by coming in with an edited rewrite of an act which is based on philosophical assumptions that are outdated and from 40 years ago. That is my problem with this. You are bringing this in and it will become law at the same time as the government is trying to introduce regional marine planning.

What are you going to do then? Will regional marine planning have to be adapted on the basis of what you have already agreed to in this legislation? It is a nonsense. This legislation should be deferred until after the marine planning process and the regulatory and statutory framework are introduced and passed. Then you can fit oil and gas exploration into that context—not pre-empt the process, bring this in and essentially give it precedence. I completely disagree with the minister in his answer about precedence because the act requires that a licence or permit must be used in a manner that does not interfere with:

... the conservation of the resources of the sea and seabed ... to a greater extent than is necessary for the reasonable exercise of the rights and performance of the duties of the first person.

The first person is the licence or permit holder. That gives precedence to the licence or permit over conservation. That is fundamentally written into this act.

You imagine on one level you are just tinkering around the edges and that is all you are doing; but you are tinkering around the edges of something which is philosophically totally flawed, totally outdated, totally last century. That is why these amendments and the next ones I will move, in relation to ecologically sustainable development, are so essential. The amendments will at least provide for marine protected areas to have this capacity to ban oil and gas exploration because, as it stands, there is nowhere in Australia’s territorial waters that the oil and gas explorers and the seismic testers cannot go. This is the issue.

Under the world heritage management plan it is prohibited in certain areas of the Great Barrier Reef. Where management plans exist to exclude them, then they are excluded. That is why these amendments are so important. At least it is a move to get something by way of protection. There will at least be the capacity to have marine protected areas as a place where these activities are prohibited. I would like Senator Colbeck’s answer to my questions as to where this legislation fits into the government’s regional marine planning process and white paper, to explain how it does not pre-empt that process and how it will fit with regional marine planning, because that is precisely the point that I am making.