Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on the Bureau of Meteorology Report for 2007-08. I want to endorse the comments made by the previous two speakers. It is high time this government took more seriously the excellent services that are provided by the Bureau of Meteorology, especially in a time of climate change. As the last speaker, Senator Ian Macdonald, noted, the bureau is tracking the cyclone off the coast at the moment and providing enormously important services. Just a few days ago there was the prospect of that cyclone crossing the coast, with a potential death toll and damage toll that would have exceeded anything in the last century. The cyclone has now turned in its tracks and is heading north again, into warmer waters, but the possibility of it intensifying and crossing the coast is still with us. And here we have the minister for the environment, the minister responsible for this bureau, Mr Garrett, cutting services. It is incredible that this could be happening.

By the way, the tracking of that cyclone down the coast ought to have been enough to ensure that a ship laden with chemicals was not heading into the path of that cyclone—certainly not off the coast of the third most populous city in Australia and a coast with high ecological values. Yet that has happened. Who in the federal government has gone to sleep here? Is it Mr Garrett? Is it the minister responsible for coastal transportation? Is it the minister who is responsible for disaster services? Whatever happened—and this will no doubt be the subject of close scrutiny by the press if not by the Labor governments in Brisbane and here in Canberra—the highly dangerous and, as it turned out, disastrous passage of a ship laden with ammonium nitrate, of all things, was allowed, heading north from Newcastle into an oncoming cyclone. The consequences are some 30 containers of that chemical being somewhere in the ocean and the potential mixture of that chemical with oil from the ship, due to the ship’s ejection of large amounts of oil now on the coastline of Moreton Bay and the Sunshine Coast. It is an environmental calamity. On the face of it, it was highly irresponsible that that ship could have been able to head into an ocean affected by Cyclone Hamish.

I call on the Prime Minister to institute an urgent independent inquiry into this set of circumstances, because there is negligence afoot and the consequences are grave. There simply cannot be shoulders shaken by the Rudd government or by the Bligh government in Queensland. This is a spectacular failure of provenance and of due care and due diligence by the authorities in Brisbane, if not in Canberra. I would expect that we would have a statement to the parliament by Monday from the Rudd government as to how this could have occurred, what is being done by rapid Commonwealth action to reduce the impact of this oil and chemical spill and what action the government has taken to ensure that it does not happen again.

Debate (on motion by Senator Ian Macdonald) adjourned.