Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

What is truly unique and iconic about my home state of Tasmania has been saved by federal oversight in recent decades. I think about the things which have put Tasmania on the map globally and what brings us nearly a million tourists a year from all around the world. They have spent billions of dollars of revenue in our economy. They come to see the iconic wilderness in Tasmania's World Heritage areas. They go to the Franklin-below-Gordon, judged recently as one of the greatest whitewater rafting rivers in the world. They come to our national parks, which are loved and known all around our country and all around the world.

When I look at these special areas, they were hard-fought for and won not just by conservationists but by lots of people around this country. In the end, while they exist in Tasmania they are owned and are the property of all Australians. In fact, when they go into World Heritage they are, of course, the property of everyone around the world.

When I think about what actually got the global Green movement going it was an absolutely stunning and unique piece of wilderness down in the south-west of Tasmania—a beach that you can land aircraft on that literally became a chapel of the open sky to lots of Tasmanians who would go there with their children on the weekends. It was called Lake Pedder.

Lake Pedder was lost in 1973 to a Tasmanian state government hell-bent on development. It galvanised the global green movement. People do not realise that the Greens in countries and parliaments all around the world now started with a fight to save Lake Pedder. That then morphed into a campaign to save the Gordon-below-Franklin. I am pleased to say that one of my predecessors, Bob Brown, Prime Minister Bob Hawke and others all came together to save that truly unique piece of wilderness for every Australian and everyone around the world. That, once again, would not have happened if the federal government had not stepped in to check the attitude of the Tasmanian government.

This issue is something near and dear to my heart because my own experience, which has led me to parliament, involved fighting what I thought was a rogue corporation—and I think history will find me to have been correct—and a rogue state government that wanted to build one of the world's biggest pulp mills in the Tamar Valley. Not only would it have led to thousands of truck movements in the beautiful tourist valley; they would have dumped 30 billion litres of industrial waste in the ocean every year. They would have dumped that into the Bass Strait. They would have dumped that into a very productive salmon fishery just kilometres from seal colonies.

As I know from personal experience, the state government was not prepared to properly assess the risks of this project to the environment, the community or even the local economy. So I and some other surfers, who are quite hard to get off their backsides sometimes, went and met with this company, Gunns Ltd, and asked them what this pulp mill business was all about. We were not happy with the response we got, so we tried to get information off the state government. A friend of mine paddled from Byron Bay down to Hobart on a sea kayak to raise money and eventually we raised enough to fund a big international report which we submitted to the Resource Planning and Development Commission in Tasmania. That was an independent assessment of what was going to be the single biggest private investment in Tasmania's history. But it was also going to lock in the destruction of four million to five million tonnes of native forest a year. It was going to be used to make pulp to send overseas into the Chinese and Japanese markets.

Those forests are now protected, thanks to the Greens and also to Labor. They have now gone into World Heritage protection. The Liberal Party has tried to rip up that World Heritage agreement in recent months. But those forests have been saved for future generations because we have had checks and balances.

Back to the pulp mill, although the RPDC process was underway, my friends and I put in a 68-page submission. I took a year off from the university study I was doing to get this done. I cared enough about it to do that, and the community cared too. But our community process was ripped out from underneath our feet as Gunns pulled out of the resource planning development process and the state Labor government fast-tracked assessment, using parliament as a planning body to bring in this pulp mill.

When we thought all was lost, we found when we went up to see the federal environment minister, who at that time was Peter Garrett, that the ocean outfall was a big problem. No-one had done the work on that. The state government was prepared to just tick the boxes. Luckily, Mr Garrett made the company go back and do that two- to three-years worth of modelling studies they needed to do. Eventually the GFC came along and the company could not raise the finance for its project. My opinion is that it was never going to be profitable in the first place, aside from all the environmental issues.

It was that federal oversight in that critical area where state responsibilities merge with federal responsibilities that meant we actually got some proper scrutiny of the risks of this project. I lived and breathed that, including making several trips to Canberra with other community groups to speak to anyone who would open their door to us. That federal oversight was critical. This is just one example of that. Tasmania dodged a bullet by not building that project. It was never going to be economically successful. It promised so many people so much, but it was never going to be able to deliver and survive in a global economy. Also, those forests have now been saved. That ocean is still full of fishermen and surfers like me who are quite happy to go and recreate there. This is just one example of the types of projects that are happening right around the country. I wanted to share my experience on this issue.

We need federal oversight. It was a Liberal government that brought in federal oversight. As environment minister, Senator Robert Hill established the EPBC Act, set up the National Heritage Trust and set in train a process of expansion of marine parks and national parks across this country. Until now, that policy framework has been largely untouched by parliament. Especially over the last decade we have had debates on this and a comprehensive review was done in 2009 by the Rudd government. That also found that the EPBC Act needed to be strengthened, not weakened. But, unfortunately, that review was shelved.

This Liberal government is unwinding the work that was done during the Howard era to have sensible checks and balances in place to make sure that rampant state governments, wanting development at all costs to fill up their coffers, with no thoughts for the long term or the sustainability of these projects, have checks and balances in place from federal oversight. That is why the Greens do not believe that handing power from the Commonwealth to the states and putting the environment at risk is a sensible thing to do. There are good reasons why the EPBC Act came into being in the first place. If you want to see what those good reasons are for yourself, come down and visit Tasmania, walk in the World Heritage forests, go rafting in the Franklin and go visit the Tarkine. It is now under threat from mining. The only thing that has held that up so far is, once again, Federal Court action which found that the EPA in Tasmania run by the local government—surprise, surprise!—was not doing its job.