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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2019-05-15 Daily Xml
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Great Australian Bight

The Hon. L.W.K. BIGNELL (Mawson) (15:27): I am fortunate to represent one of the most beautiful electorates anywhere in the world. This electorate is under threat by a proposal to drill for oil in the Great Australian Bight. Can anyone in here imagine the sandy beaches from Port Willunga down through Silver Sands to Myponga Beach, Second Valley, Rapid Bay, Cape Jervis or indeed the 550-kilometre coastline of Kangaroo Island covered in oil? If drilling is to go ahead in the Great Australian Bight, that is a very real risk for our area. Quite rightly, many of the 24,000 people I represent in this place are concerned about the proposal to drill in the bight.

We hear from Equinor, the company from Norway that wants to do the drilling, that they have world's best practices and that there will be very small risk. We say that any risk is too great for this wonderful part of the world. Eighty-five per cent of the marine life in the Great Australian Bight and around Kangaroo Island—85 per cent—does not feature in any waters anywhere else in the world. That is the sort of significant pristine environment that we are talking about.

In my area, people from all sides of politics are becoming more and more outraged at the thought that this area could be under threat. Primary school kids at McLaren Vale, secondary school kids at Tatachilla Lutheran College and people in their 80s and 90s doing beautiful handwritten cards are asking me to go in to bat and stand up for not just this pristine environment but also the 40,000 tourism jobs here in South Australia, many of them largely focused around our clean and green image and our pristine coastline, and also the thousands of jobs in the fishing industry.

In the past few weeks, I have been heartened to have had a lot of emails and Facebook messages from people in Streaky Bay, Ceduna, Port Lincoln and other parts of Eyre Peninsula, who are also very concerned about the prospect of drilling for oil in the bight. In a couple of hours from now, in Oslo, Norway, Equinor will be having its annual general meeting, where people will get to have their say. I know there are some institutional investors who will be calling for Equinor not to go ahead with drilling in the bight.

Last week, I met with the secretary of state for minerals and petroleum in the Norwegian government. I met with him in Oslo, and I also met with some other high-ranking officials from the government. I want to thank the Prime Minister of Norway, Ms Erna Solberg, for organising that meeting. I wrote to her in March to convey the concerns of people in our local area. She was good enough to arrange the meeting, and I thank her for that. I also thank the secretary of state and the others who were at the meeting for their time and their interest.

The CEO of Equinor had actually been on the radio the day before I arrived in Norway, telling everyone that no-one in Australia had any problems with drilling in the bight and that it was all going to be tickety-boo. Of course, we know that the story is very different from that. I hope that the Prime Minister of Norway will get that message across to this company, Equinor, which is 67 per cent owned by the Norwegian government.

Norway sells itself as a place that is very democratic and wonderful, but there is nothing democratic about the way Equinor went about its study into whether drilling in the bight should go ahead. We had 31,000 people—including myself and hundreds, if not thousands, of people from the electorate of Mawson—put in submissions, and Equinor ruled out almost all 31,000 submissions. There is absolutely nothing democratic about that. Today, I have again written to the Prime Minister of Norway to say that if she wants to leave a blue legacy for Norway she cannot do so if there is a black stain on the coastline of Australia.

I was really pleased last week that Bill Shorten said that, if he becomes the Prime Minister of Australia after Saturdays' election, he will call for a full inquiry into the consequences of a spill in the Great Australian Bight. For people who are going out to vote on Saturday, remember that if Bill Shorten becomes the Prime Minister of Australia he will put forward an inquiry into drilling in the Great Australian Bight. If you want that inquiry to go ahead, you need to get out and vote for Nadia Clancy if you live in Boothby or for Saskia Gerhardy if you live in Mayo, and you need to vote for the Australian Labor Party in the Senate as well. Good luck to all the Labor candidates on Saturday. Let's hope for a Shorten victory.

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