Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for the Environment and Heritage (Senator Ian Campbell) to questions without notice asked today.

There are a number of answers and I refer briefly to an answer that Senator Bishop referred to fleetingly. It cannot be put on the record often enough how disgraceful it was that the findings about Private Kovco were leaked to the media before the family were informed. I think we can all imagine how hurtful that would have been, but it has the wider consequence of further decreasing faith in the military justice system, something which is an ongoing problem and which harms the recruitment and retention rate of our entire Defence Force.

Other answers Senator Campbell gave in his own capacity as Minister for the Environment and Heritage I found particularly interesting. My own question to him went to the issue of how he will use his powers under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act to deal with the assessment process to be used for the two major dams proposed for south-east Queensland. Another question to him was about coal. Senator Campbell is on record today in the media as ruling out comprehensively and categorically the federal government ever supporting a greenhouse trigger in the federal EPBC Act. It may not seem to be that significant a statement, because the government has always refused to put in place an EPBC trigger, but to categorically rule it out in such a clear-cut way is a significant step backwards for this government. At least the rhetoric from previous environment ministers, particularly Senator Hill, both at the time of the passage of the EPBC legislation in 1999 and subsequently, was that the government were making efforts to incorporate a greenhouse trigger in the federal environment protection act. The cover they were using for not doing it, because they always had the power to do it, was that they were seeking to negotiate with the states about the best way to do it.

Discussion papers were released and the issue was raised at ministerial council meetings. The minister made a number of comments in this chamber and elsewhere saying that the government was still pursuing the option. Of course, it is no surprise that states like my own state of Queensland—those states that are very dependent on coal—were very cold on the idea and certainly would not give it their support. That, combined with antagonism within the wider coalition about anything that acknowledged the reality and the seriousness of climate change, meant that the federal government and the federal environment minister never followed through on their commitment to implement a greenhouse trigger in the federal environment laws.

To now come out and categorically say that the federal government, as a matter of policy, will never put in place a climate change trigger I think is a serious concern, a major step backwards and another indication of the unnecessary stubbornness involved here. It needs to be recognised that putting in place a climate change trigger in the federal environment act does not mean that anything that triggers it will be stopped. It does not mean that all coalmines will cease. It does not mean that everything will be stopped. It means that the impacts will be assessed. That is a very different thing, but it should be a minimal thing.

Surely, at the very time when even the Prime Minister is finally acknowledging that climate change is serious and a major problem that needs to be addressed, even if we accept the potential for geosequestration—I am not sure clean coal is ever a phrase that I would like to accept, but there are some arguments that say geosequestration may deliver some benefits—what is the problem with assessing what the actual impact will be of undertaking certain developments? It is this continual desire to refuse to confront reality and to just leave the debate at the level of spin. That is a serious problem and it is an unnecessary stubbornness from the federal government and the environment minister. It is quite possible to run some of the lines that he is running without being so totally blatantly focused on blocking out everything that might not go with the spin of the day.

I would follow that by referring to the minister’s other answer about the dams in Queensland, which do in themselves have greenhouse emission implications that should be assessed, along with implications for threatened species. The suggestion that we can just accept the Queensland government’s good faith on face value is extraordinary. Given the record in this area, I find the minister’s statement rather disconcerting. Frankly, once he looks at what has happened to date and the deceit that has been involved time after time, he will need to reconsider how much trust he can put in the way in which the Queensland government engages in this assessment process.

Question agreed to.