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

I will ask Treasury when I see them this afternoon whether it is the case that nothing is being paid back on these borrowings given at a weekly rate by the honourable senator. I think we will find that that is not the case.

I want to talk about the Wandoan coalmine in Senator Joyce’s home state of Queensland. This mine was ostensively given the tick-off by the Bligh government in Brisbane last week. It has been proposed by Xstrata. It is being done against a backdrop in which the Greens have an agreement with the Gillard government for a carbon price committee which will over the coming months be looking at where a carbon price should be set in Australia and through what mechanism it should be set in order to reduce the greenhouse gas pollution in the atmosphere. You will recall, Mr Acting Deputy President Barnett, that you were part of the coalition when it went into an agreement with the Rudd government last year, and that agreement was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by five per cent by 2020. The price tag put on that was compensation of $20 billion to the polluters from taxpayers, so we were going to pay $20 billion to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by five per cent.

Xstrata in Queensland will build this coalmine, which so far as I can ascertain—and the government has no information to the contrary—will be the world’s biggest open-cut coalmine. With transport facilities et cetera it will be 11,000 hectares in extent, next to the village of Wandoan on the northern Darling Downs. Out of the pit will come 30 megatonnes a year of coal, or 22.5 if it is dried, to be exported and burnt elsewhere in the world. But it does not matter, because we have the same atmosphere; we are all sharing that. Whether carbon comes out of Peru, Lithuania, Australia or Kazakhstan does not make any difference; it is the same impact on the atmosphere. When you do a back-of-envelope assessment of the impact of this one Xstrata coalmine in Queensland, you find that it will increase the impact of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions—and we are already the worst polluter per capita of all the developed countries in the world—by the equivalent of 10 per cent.

We had the two big parties agreeing to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 for $20 billion just a year ago. Here we have a coalmine which is going to increase our greenhouse gas emissions overall—this is not the way carbon accounting is done, but it is the reality—by 10 per cent, and Xstrata will be wanting public funding to help it get its coal to the seashore for export to be burnt and to damage our future economic and environmental prospects. I ask: what madness is this? James Hansen, the chief scientist for NASA in the United States, who drew the impact of climate change so clearly to congress’s attention in 1988, describes as criminals people who open coalmines like this and transport the coal to be burnt. I ask: what sort of craziness is in the air? I will ask to see Xstrata to hear from them what they have to say about all this.

I am told also that Wandoan is not a one-off; there are two similar coalmines coming down the line. The good folk at Felton, to the south of Toowoomba on the Darling Downs—I notice that Senator Joyce has now left the chamber—have a great farming community there. I visited them earlier this year. They are faced with another massive open-cut coalmine, although this one is, in its first iteration, only 900 hectares. But, as I have told the chamber before, that will swallow up farmlands, the creek at the bottom of the vale, which has platypuses in it, and the local hillside, which has an Aboriginal bora ring on it. They are going to put there a petrochemical works which is a bit short of water. So, to supply themselves with water, the purveyors of this particular mine say they are going to pump it uphill from Brisbane, where we have just had such exigencies in availability of water that the Bligh government wanted to dam the Mary River and put 1,100 farms out of action further north near Gympie. I ask again: what craziness is this?

I spoke at a public meeting in Brisbane on Sunday, and Drew Hutton, who is campaigning on this issue, also spoke there, as well as representatives of a marvellous group of young people called Six Degrees. I guess we have the old asseveration about six degrees of separation, but what I think they are really talking about is that, given current scientific data, what might happen if we do not control this phenomenon of climate change is that we might be six degrees warmer by the end of this century. That is at the upper end; we always talk about the lower end because it sounds better.

This morning I have been talking to Mr Enkhbat, the Green MP from Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. There is a Mongolian delegation in Canberra at the moment. He tells me that because they are at high altitude and—