Ian Campbell (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

I did not hear Senator O’Brien make one word of criticism of his comrades in the Victorian government, who used their environment protection legislation in July 2005, less than 12 months ago, to stop the Yaloak wind farm. This is located only around 200 kilometres from Bald Hills, and the same consultants who did a comprehensive analysis of the cumulative impact of bird strike from wind farms advised the Victorian Labor minister, a comrade of Senator O’Brien’s, that that wind farm would kill possibly three to four wedge-tailed eagles per year. The wind farm at Bald Hills was, in my view, appropriately stopped because it was located in a known habitat, a known migratory path, for orange-bellied parrots.

The wedge-tailed eagle, which the Labor government in Victoria used to stop the construction of a wind farm at Yaloak—I apologise to the members of that community if I have the pronunciation of that wrong, which I could well have—is listed on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s threatened species list under the lowest category of threat. In other words, it is a species of ‘least concern’. The IUCN red list, as it is known, goes from the highest category of ‘extinct’, obviously, through ‘extinct in the wild’, ‘critically endangered’, ‘endangered’, ‘vulnerable’ and ‘near threatened’ right down to ‘least concern’.

On the best science available, there are 50 breeding pairs of the orange-bellied parrot left in the world, and they are only found in Australia. This species of wedge-tailed eagle has around 100,000 left, but the Victorian government chose—for whatever reason; and I am not even criticising their decision—to stop a wind farm only a couple of hundred kilometres from Bald Hills because of the threat to a wedge-tailed eagle which is not listed as endangered or critically endangered. The orange-bellied parrot is referred to on the Victorian government’s own conservation department website as a species that is equally as endangered as the panda bear and the Siberian tiger.

In relation to the criticism that has been made of the statement that appeared in the press this morning about the Penola pulp mill proposal, this is, as I have said, one of 300 referrals that on average come to my department every year. Around 97 per cent of these sorts of proposals are dealt with at the departmental level. Again, this is a very different process to the process for Bald Hills. As I said, most of the referrals that come to the department are handled at the departmental level. This one was described to me when I arrived back from overseas yesterday afternoon as an entirely routine one. We corrected the record because the proponents, as I think Senator O’Brien correctly cited from the press reporting, were concerned that there might have to be an environmental impact statement. My department said, ‘No, that is almost certainly not going to be the case,’ that in fact it was an entirely routine referral and, that, based on getting further information from the proponents, it was likely to be dealt with in a relatively short period of time. That is why I made the statement—to confirm that.

This government, as I said in question time, is committed to having a robust environmental policy. We have invested more money in environmental repair than any other government in the history of Australia. We have brought in a very strong environmental law and we uphold it very strongly and consistently. We uphold it based on science, the basis of all of these decisions. What you hear from Labor is a confused yelling and screaming and carping and whining—from a political party that really has no environment policy, and what little policy it does have is deeply confused and deeply confusing.