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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2010-10-14 Daily Xml
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OLYMPIC DAM

The Hon. M. PARNELL (15:00): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking a question of the Minister for Mineral Resources Development about the Olympic Dam expansion.

Leave granted.

The Hon. M. PARNELL: On 26 September this year in South America, Andrew Mackenzie, the chief executive of BHP Billiton's non-ferrous metals division, gave an overview of the company's plans for the Olympic Dam expansion. Included was a timetable for expected copper production. The scale of copper production in Mr Mackenzie's presentation is vastly more than the 750,000 tonnes of copper product per year included in the 4,600 pages of the draft environmental impact statement the company released last year. In fact, a graph on slide 12 of the presentation shows that BHP Billiton now expect to scale past the full 750,000 tonnes of production included in the draft EIS in just year 11 of the expansion, and past the one million tonne mark included in their EPBC Act application in just year 17.

Members may recall that BHP Billiton set the time frame for the assessments in last year's draft EIS at 40 years. By this end point, year 40, the company, according to their latest statement, have now forecast that they will be producing 1.4 million tonnes of copper per year, almost twice the figure included in the environmental impact statement.

Members will also know that this project has been declared a major development, under section 46 of the Development Act. Section 47 of the Development Act, addresses the issue of a significant alteration to the original proposal. It says, in subsection (2)(b), 'if a proposed amendment would in the opinion of the Minister significantly affect the substance of the EIS', a further round of public consultation and public submissions is triggered.

The proposed BHP Billiton plan is now twice what was previously revealed to the South Australian people in the company's 2009 draft EIS, and that has major flow-on impacts in terms of, for example, water demand, the size and impact of the desalination plant proposed for Upper Spencer Gulf, the size of the tailings dams, the size of the waste rock piles, energy use, greenhouse pollution, to name but a few—not to mention the requirement to fully rehabilitate and decommission the mine site at the conclusion of operations. My questions are:

1. Considering the vastly different scale for the Olympic Dam expansion now proposed by BHP Billiton, will the minister, firstly, exercise his responsibilities under section 47 of the Development Act to require BHP Billiton to undertake a review of their EIS?

2. Will he ensure that any amendment to the EIS will go through a thorough public consultation phase?

The Hon. P. HOLLOWAY (Minister for Mineral Resources Development, Minister for Urban Development and Planning, Minister for Industrial Relations, Minister Assisting the Premier in Public Sector Management) (15:03): I know the honourable member is implacably opposed to the Olympic Dam expansion and will do whatever he can to try to misrepresent it. The fact is there is an EIS that BHP have released. They are now in the process of responding to that, and I would expect that a supplementary environmental impact statement from BHP will be available to the government, perhaps by the end of this year.

BHP's EIS outlines the scale of production that they envisage, and the government will be assessing it on that basis. Whether the head of one of their divisions might have been speculating on how much production there could be in 40 years, 11 years, 17 years or whatever hence is one thing. What BHP is seeking approval for is what is in their environmental impact statement, and that is what the government will be assessing.

The PRESIDENT: The Hon. Mr Parnell has a supplementary question deriving from the answer.

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