Fracking inquiry a smokescreen

REVELATIONS this week that the Gunner government has fully implemented just 27 per cent of Justice Pepper’s hydraulic fracturing inquiry recommendations is a big worry for Territorians.

Justice Pepper said commercial fracking could only proceed if these recommendations were fully implemented – but already we have exploratory drills. A new forensic legal analysis shows that the government claims to have completed just 64 of 138 recommendations.

That seems bad enough, but here’s the kicker – of the recommendations marked as complete, 40 per cent of them have not been implemented properly to fulfil the Pepper recommendations.

That means that only 38 in total have been properly implemented, which is just 27 per cent of the total.

This woeful implementation is nothing short of a scandal, especially given the government is busy granting approvals for exploration fracking across the Roper

Gulf region even as I write this.

When schoolkids score 27 per cent on an exam, they fail. Likewise, the Gunner government has categorically failed to implement the rules and regulations that were meant to keep Territorians safe.

Territorians cannot be expected to have any faith in their government when it falls so abysmally short of achieving what it promised.

This quarter-baked implementation of fracking inquiry recommendations means the Gunner government is putting Territory communities, businesses and the environment at enormous risk.

Michael Gunner himself swore, during the last election campaign, that each and every one of these recommendations would be put in place, in full.

It’s hard to know whether this failure is due to incompetence or by design.

Knowing how the Gunner government operates, neither would surprise me.

But what is clear – based on the recommendations that the Gunner government claims to have implemented, but in practice has not completed the way Justice Pepper specified – is that transparency and accountability of the fracking industry will suffer.

As an example, Justice Pepper recommended a clear separation of responsibility between the agency responsible for regulating environmental impacts of the fracking industry and the agency responsible for promoting it.

However, the Department of Industry, Tourism and Trade is still the decisionmaker for crucial assessments for fracking projects, rather than the Environment Department.

It’s like leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse.

Then there’s the decision by Environment Minister Eva Lawler that fracking companies no longer need to advertise their projects – or incidents – in print media. For some remote communities situated near fracking projects, print media is the most widely read news source.

What’s more, Justice Pepper recommended that all monitoring results must be made publicly available online on a continuous basis in real time.

However, the government’s Code of Practice does not make real-time continuous release of data mandatory, and does not specify any release requirements for baseline data.

To date, the systems designed to do this do not work properly, stopping public scrutiny. All this increases the risk that when – not if – something goes wrong at a Territorian fracking project, the public will be the last to know.

Adding to the revelations is the fact the Gunner government has totally dropped

GRAEME SAWYER

When schoolkids score 27 per cent on an exam, they fail. Likewise, the Gunner government has failed to implement the rules and regulations that were meant to keep Territorians safe.

the ball on the Scientific Regional Environmental Baseline Assessment, or SREBA, which was required after the inquiry found that risks to groundwater couldn’t be properly assessed due to lack of information.

Unfortunately, this process has already been mired in controversy, including accusations the Gunner government refused to renew a contract with CDU researchers because they discovered unique aquatic organisms – thus identifying connected groundwater over vast areas, and foreshadowing potentially disastrous outcomes from fracking mishaps. Sadly, it increasingly seems the Fracking Inquiry was just an expensive, time-wasting exercise, held as a smokescreen while the government gave the green light to the fracking industry.

Now that the smokescreen is crumbling, the only way forward to protect the Territory is to ban fracking.

The community has long demanded it. Now Territory Labor needs to act to deliver it.