Robert Ray (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for the Environment and Heritage, Senator Ian Campbell. Can the minister confirm that in September 2002, three months after lodging its proposal for a wind farm at Bald Hills, Windpower lodged a separate proposal for a wind farm at Wonthaggi, about 20 minutes drive up the road? Did the Wonthaggi proposal explicitly recognise that the wind farm posed a threat to the orange-bellied parrots because the bird had actually been seen in the vicinity? Is it not true that, despite the proven threat, the government allowed that wind farm to go ahead without any conditions at all? Why is it that an application which explicitly acknowledges a threat to the orange-bellied parrots gets approved without conditions but another application for a wind farm 20 minutes up the road, which did not identify any threat, gets held up for 450 days and gets knocked off?

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

What Senator Ray’s question does not say but implies is that there was no explicit threat at Bald Hills. He would not know that unless he had read the documentation that I have read, and he certainly would not know it by reading the Victorian government’s documentation, which advised his comrade Minister Hulls that orange-bellied parrots do fly through the Bald Hills site. I again call on Minister Hulls to release publicly the Victorian government’s own report so Senator Ray and everyone else can read it. It says that the parrots fly through at the height of the rotor blades. In fact, the submission from the proponents at Bald Hills did not refer to the threat. The proponents said in their own submission, which is wrong, that there was no threat to the OBP at the Bald Hills site. So the submission of the proponents was wrong.

Senator Ray will no doubt go back to Victoria and ask Minister Hulls why he makes decisions about stopping wind farms in one part of Victoria for his own reasons and not stopping them in other parts. I have no doubt that he will engage in that. If Senator Ray wants to make accusations about my decision making at Bald Hills, I again refer him to his comrade Christian Zahra’s private member’s bill and ask him to indicate, when he gets up to ask a supplementary question, whether he would have supported Christian Zahra’s bill. As I promised to do earlier, I table Christian Zahra’s private member’s bill documentation with endorsement from Mark Latham and ask Senator Ray to, at some stage, let us know whether he supported Christian Zahra’s bill, which would have stopped the Bald Hills wind farm.

Robert Ray (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr President, I ask a supplementary question. In the 450 days that Minister Campbell was considering the Bald Hills proposal, did his own department at any stage draw to his attention Minister David Kemp’s decision in Wonthaggi, the reasons for it, and make comparisons between the Wonthaggi decision and the Bald Hills potential decision? Did his department ever do that, and did he consider it?

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

Senator Ray shows his ignorance. He has clearly not done the homework on this issue as he should have done. The department advised me to seek advice on the cumulative impact of wind farms. Even Christian Zahra in his own pamphlet recognises the fact that when you provide $3 billion worth of subsidies to wind farms you are going to have a big cumulative impact on migratory birds.