GREENS Senator-elect Larissa Waters has pledged to follow through on an election commitment to push for stronger protections of groundwater and quality agricultural land from mining when she takes her seat in Canberra from July next year.
Ms Waters, a 33-year-old environmental lawyer from Brisbane, became the Australian Greens’ first Queensland Senator at the recent Federal Election.
The Greens will hold the balance of power when the new Senate takes effect from July 2011.
Ms Waters told a Rural Press Club of Queensland breakfast in Toowoomba this week that good quality agricultural should be sacrosanct from any other land use.
“We have alternatives for energy production, we don’t have alternatives for food,” she told the gathering of 150 mainly farmers and rural business people at AgShow.
“2.2pc of Queensland is considered good quality agricultural land… we have 80pc of Queensland under mining tenements, they have other places to go.”
Ms Waters provided a critique of existing federal and state environmental legislation which she described as inadequate and ill-equipped to manage the emerging coal seam gas industry.
The Federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 required the federal minister for the environment only to consider impacts of mining developments on threatened species, not impacts on groundwater or the potential loss of agricultural land.
Ms Waters said that if not done before July, she will personally introduce amendments aimed at making coal seam gas a matter of environmental significance and requiring the minister to consider all major impacts when assessing a project for approval.
She would also look to amend legislation to preclude the minister from approving a project that would have a long-term effect on groundwater, on agricultural land or involve large amounts of methane release.
At state level the Queensland Government had been “very negligent and very slow” in coming up with a policy response to mining impacts, she said.
The recently released Queensland Government’s Strategic Cropping Land (SCL) policy framework contained a built-in loophole which gave the minister over-ride powers where a proposal was deemed to provide a “significant community benefit”.
“Now that is one of those amorphous terms you can never define, which gives the minister Stephen Robertson huge discretion to approve something despite the impact on Strategic Cropping Land,” Ms Waters said.
The legislation was also underpinned by the presumption that good quality agricultural land could be rehabilitated. This Government was basing “a lot of trust” on that presumption even though Queensland was yet to see any evidence of successful rehabilitation of mining land.
State planning laws included in the policy framework were “toothless” and limited in their usefulness because they only applied to council-approved urban and industrial developments, not to mining projects.
“In our view, when there is only 2.2pc of land in the top quality then we simply shouldn’t be gambling with it,” Ms Waters said.
“It should just be off-limits for any other use until we know for sure that environmental protections are going to work and that land can be rehabilitated then we shouldn’t be mucking around with it.
“We will continue to push for strong protections at state level, until they’re forthcoming we will continue to call for those federal amendments and put them into the senate.”
The Greens were under no illusion that either party would support them, Ms Waters said, and recognised that the balance of power would only come into play if the major parties disagreed on an issue.
“So I urge all of you who are concerned about the future of the Darling Downs and the future of our local food production to lobby your local members and really call on them to stand up for you and your farm land and change our laws so they can appropriately deal with the challenges we are now facing,” she said.
She also challenged the notion put forward by the gas industry that CSG was a “greener” source of energy than coal, citing research that indicated that by the time CSG was pumped from the ground, compressed and exported it was similar in greenhouse gas intensity to coal.
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