Senator MILNE (9:16 PM) —by leave—I move Australian Greens amendments (4) and (5) on sheet 5603 revised:

These amendments go to additional security for future liabilities. The Australian Greens believe that there should be a bond attached to these storage sites, just as we now have for the mining industry. Where clearly there will be costs associated with rehabilitation and risks associated with the venture, companies are required to put up a bond. That bond is kept by the state to make good the damages in the future. I think it is only sensible, particularly since we have no mechanism now for determining what the adverse impacts or the costs might be, that the minister has a mechanism to require the company to post a bond. If the company is so confident that the site will not leak and that there will be no liability into the future then this ought not to be a problem.

After years of dealing with the mining industry, we learnt that the best way of dealing with it was to require that companies post a bond. In that way there is an imperative for the company to be responsible. The bond money is there to address things in the future. Why wouldn’t we do exactly the same thing here? We have learnt from experience that not to require mining companies to do so leaves the community with multimillion-dollar—in some cases billion-dollar—costs.

I refer again to the Tasmanian context, where the Queen and King rivers have been destroyed. There has been massive pollution of those rivers and Macquarie Harbour as a result of mining over many years. When we moved for years for tailings dams they said: ‘No, it will be too expensive. It will not be economically viable for us to continue.’ The company soon leaves, leaving the community with the massive cost of rehabilitation—so massive, in fact, that it is unlikely, in my lifetime, that they will ever clean up those rivers and Macquarie Harbour as a result of the mining at Mount Lyell over a long period. You would not want to go back and do that again, so from my point of view it is essential that we have additional security for future liabilities other than those provided for. The Greens are putting forward that:

Amendment (5) states that the amount of the security will be the sum of the estimate referred to in the previous paragraphs. So this does not specify the exact amount; it provides a framework for the government to strike an amount for that additional liability. Otherwise, I would like to know who is going to meet the costs in respect of monitoring, remediation and repair of the site. How is the Commonwealth going to pay for the monitoring of the site?