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

I want to take a moment to send a very big well wish to the member for Calare, Peter Andren, who, we know from the news of the last week, is suffering from cancer. This man is an outstanding politician and representative of the people of Calare, which encompasses cities like Lithgow, Bathurst and Orange. He is an Independent representative, but he has been quite remarkable in the way in which he has been able to put a point of view where opposition has failed or where government has failed in the country. He has shown his bravery in tackling issues such as the Tampa crisis and the current dispute about the rights of Indigenous people in the Northern Territory to be consulted and have a say in a huge government intervention in their affairs while having their children protected. He has even spoken out on issues of the Tasmanian forests. He and his wonderful partner, Valerie, organised a dinner in Orange to let locals know about the national importance of these high conservation value forests. Peter’s repeated hand on the excesses of parties in parliament that wanted to improve things for parliamentarians on issues like superannuation and take-home pay, while there are so many people struggling in our own community who needed to get first attention, marked him out, and continues to mark him out, as a leader in political thought in this country.

He is a pretty humble bloke. He is very friendly and affable and extraordinarily intelligent. He has given this parliament a much-needed fresh voice when sometimes the spirit of debate has dipped below that which is expected by the Australians that we represent. I know I will have enormous support in wishing him well and, if there is any man with the spirit to tackle a life-threatening illness like the one he has at the moment, it is Peter. I have spoken to him in the last few hours—and there it is. He is just a remarkably positive human being. I wish him well and I know that many people listening to this and certainly all those voters who have supported him in Calare and people from around the country who have admired him will be wishing him well in overcoming the illness which attacks him from within at the moment.

The news today in the Australian is that a former adviser to the Prime Minister, Mr Geoffrey Cousins, described by Matthew Denholm in the Australian as a senior business figure and confidant of John Howard, has attacked as absolute madness a proposal to build a $2 billion pulp mill in the heart of Tasmania’s prime wine district. Mr Cousins told the Australian yesterday that Canberra should block approval for the Gunns proposal until a more transparent and rigorous assessment had been conducted. He said:

Here’s Malcolm Turnbull, a possible future prime minister, with the perfect opportunity ... to exercise his power to see that due process is carried out. Instead of fast-tracking this thing, he ought to slow it down and say, ‘I’m not going to rush it through, just because some company says it suits them.’ To put an enormous pulp mill in the middle of a very beautiful area, a major wine-producing area, is absolute madness—unless you could prove beyond any doubt, after allowing everyone to have their say, that it would cause no problem. And that hasn’t happened. ... Quite clearly I’m not anti-business—I’ve been a businessman all my life, I’ve been on the boards of 10 public companies.

I am told by my colleague Mr Nick McKim, who represents Franklin for the Greens in the Tasmanian house of assembly, that there is very strong evidence that the new environmental guidelines that will be put before the Tasmanian parliament in a fortnight’s time to put requirements on Gunns for the building of this pulp mill may well currently be being assessed by Gunns itself before they go to parliament. One wonders at the depth of straying from proper democracy and probity that there is between the Tasmanian Labor government of Premier Paul Lennon and Gunns. It is as if parliament is being sidelined until Gunns is satisfied, and then parliament will be asked to push through these guidelines.

Recently, 11,000 people in Launceston, a city with a population of 100,000, marched in opposition to the pulp mill, and I can tell you how heartfelt that was. There are many good businesses, including vineyards—as Mr Cousins pointed out—abalone fisheries, restaurants, organic farms, tourism and hospitality businesses, and other creative businesses in the heavily populated Tamar Valley which are distraught at the prospect of this mega pulp mill—one of the biggest in the world—being built in the heart of that clean, green produce area.

There is enormous alarm that it will pump tonnes of effluent into Bass Strait each day. A report by scientist Dr Stuart Godfrey just last week pointed out how those toxic chemicals coming out of that effluent, which the fisheries industries are alarmed is going to contaminate their fisheries in Bass Strait, will wash back onto the beaches of the north coast of Tasmania and into the Tamar River itself.

There is clear evidence of the threat to rare and endangered species where the pulp mill will be built. There is scientific evidence that some 200,000 hectares of native forest, which this mill will consume over the next 30 years, contain rare and endangered species, listed by the national government, which will be driven closer to extinction by the pulp mill. Beyond that, it is going to take enormous amounts of fresh water, at a price other Tasmanians will not get, and it is going to pump carcinogens—cancer-causing agents—into the atmosphere of the Tamar Valley. The Australian Medical Association has forecast more deaths as a result of pollution of the Tamar Valley, where pollutants are held in by the inversion phenomenon.

This mill should be built elsewhere. This mill should not be based on native forests but on the huge plantation estate there is in Tasmania, and it should be a closed loop, so that is not putting toxic—including cancer-causing—agents into the environment. In a world alarmed about the impacts we have had on the global and the human living environment over the last century it is the task of good government to ensure that that happens.

This will also be a mill which is a producer of an enormous amount of greenhouse gases. Attached to the mill will be a forest furnace, burning 400,000 or 500,000 tonnes of native wood a year to produce electricity to supply the mill itself, with the excess being sold, presumably, through Basslink on to the Melbourne market, outrageously, as green power. They say that this is biofuel. No; this is destruction-of-native-forests-and-habitat-of-wildlife fuel, and it does not have to be. We should be doing much better than that in the beautiful state of Tasmania, in the beautiful country of Australia in 2007.

So I would add my words of appeal to all members of the Senate and this parliament to consider the options which are available. We should have a truly first-rate, world-class, closed-loop pulp mill, based on plantations, where it is not an affront to heavily populated local residential areas and business areas, as is the proposed pulp mill in Tasmania.

The extraordinary arrogance and high-handedness of Gunns and the reaction which that has caused in the area—as exemplified by a packed public meeting in the region last night—against this proposed pulp mill needs to be met by politicians with probity, prudence and a demand that alternative, better options be taken up. This pulp mill will, at the end of the day, provide 390 jobs. It will cost many more jobs to the labour-intensive local businesses in the region than that. The alternatives must be taken up so we go to a win-win situation, instead of to a situation of winner takes all and of loss not only for Tasmania as a whole but for the rich, beautiful region of vineyards, organic farms and fisheries, and indeed residences, which are threatened by this monstrous pulp mill, which has no place in Tasmania in 2007.

Just last night the government’s cabinet committee decided to permit the sale of Australian uranium to India, which has refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty. Not only will India not sign the proliferation treaty; it has demanded that a condition of the sale of Australian uranium be that it is allowed to test and build more nuclear bombs. This is a country which is rapidly gaining the technical wherewithal to have rockets which can reach Australian cities. And this decision comes on top of the government’s decision to sell uranium to China and its forthcoming decision to sell it to President Putin’s Russia. In every case, our uranium is said to go into nuclear reactors, freeing up domestic uranium to go into nuclear bombs and fuelling a new round of nuclear weaponry and the spread of nuclear weapons in an already dangerous world.

It is unforgivable that the Howard government has decided, because George Bush—the lame duck President of the United States who is about to lose office and who is in the dying days of a failed presidency, which has been marked by enormous mistakes in the carriage of its international responsibilities—has to sell Australia’s uranium into that dangerous nuclear fuel cycle in countries which refuse to stop the building of nuclear weapons. It is an assault on the right to security of the future of this country. The Prime Minister has talked a lot about securing our future from the fear of terrorism, but the ultimate potential terrorist—the spectre hanging over the future of our kids and our country—is a regional nuclear conflagration. Make no mistake about this: countries like Indonesia will be next, looking at their potential for nuclear weapons. Where will it end?

Professor Ian Lowe, President of the Australian Conservation Foundation, has pointed out that, even with the cost of uranium at $120 a pound and potentially heading to $200 a pound, uranium exports will produce less income for this country than cheese exports. What an extraordinary failure of responsibility by the Howard government that it wants to export uranium for such a pittance, with such a threat to the future of this nation. Mr Rudd, the Leader of the Opposition, has said he will not follow suit. He should make a commitment that one of the first things he will do in the wake of being elected—if he is—in November is tell the Indian government that this arrangement is off.