Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move Greens amendment (11) on sheet 7482:

  (11) Schedule 1, item 8, page 6 (line 29), at the end of section 5C, add:

  ; (h) the impact of infrastructure on local ecological services and ecosystems;

(i) peak oil and resource depletion, as they relate to infrastructure;

  (j) the contribution of infrastructure to the liveability, productivity and sustainability of Australia's cities and regions;

(k) the impact of infrastructure on the social amenity of local communities;

  (l) social license from local communities for infrastructure projects.

We have dealt, I think, rather casually with climate change, given that neither the government nor the Labor Party supported the Greens amendment that would have given that clause some teeth. Nonetheless, climate considerations aside, there are a significant number of other issues that we think have had insufficient evaluation by Infrastructure Australia when it is considering projects. Again, this is not laying it all at IA's door, but this amendment would send the signal out to the planning community and to the state and territory governments and departments that, when they are pulling their projects together for a priority listing, if they want a favourable response from IA, these are the things they need to include and incorporate. It should not be too much to ask.

Senators are free to see Greens amendment (11). We have circulated it. What it puts in place is, firstly, the impact on local ecological services and ecosystems. This can be as simple as, for example, new sea walls or as important as modifying coastal environments, which can have catastrophic and largely unforeseen effects.

The amendment also requires coverage of peak oil and resource depletion. This is one of the areas where I had—although I respect him greatly for his independence and his intellect—dust-ups over a period of six years with Mr Michael Deegan, the Infrastructure Coordinator. The dust-ups were over Infrastructure Australia's methodology for working out what the future price of oil was going to be. Working in a carbon constrained future does not simply mean dealing with the pollution impacts of carbon emissions from the coal, oil and gas sectors; it also means dealing with the depletion aspect. This idea that we are just going to continually double up freeway infrastructure, for example, as though there is an infinite amount of oil on the planet, is mad. That kind of calculation needs to be factored into the way IA contemplates its prioritisation of infrastructure projects.

The item on 'the contribution of liveability, productivity and sustainability' is starting to feel a little on the doomed side—because that language has already been rejected by Labor and by the government. The impact on social amenity and the social licence from local communities for infrastructure projects—some of that is often forgotten. Is Prime Minister Abbott proposing to simply send bulldozers down people's streets? In the cases of the WestConnex project in New South Wales, the east-west tunnel in Victoria and the so-called Perth Freight Link—which proposes to smash tarmac through the Beeliar Wetlands and disrupt communities from one end of the City of Perth to another—these projects have no social licence. At one end of the spectrum, that simply means that these projects end up being significantly delayed or much more expensive than they should have been in the first place. At the other end of the spectrum, you end up with effective community opposition to projects that end up being stopped—a lot of planning resources and expertise and a lot of money wasted, and communities being forced on the defensive to fight repetitive acts of stupidity that they simply should not have to. That is what is going on right now in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth—around Commonwealth infrastructure projects that were not on the priority list, projects out of nowhere that have been brought forward and funded. For projects like the Roe 8, the Perth Freight Link, the bureaucrats at the table during estimates week did not know where the project went, what its alignment was, whether it was an elevated freeway or whether it was going to simply dump vast amounts of container traffic into the approach roads to the Port of Fremantle in North Freo.

I strongly commend these amendments to the chamber. Infrastructure is not just about spreadsheets and concrete pours; it is about people and it is about the landscapes and the host communities in which these projects are built.