BG: Anti-Development Activism Threatens Thousands of Jobs (Australia)

BG Group Australia Chairman Catherine Tanna said Wednesday that anti-development activism threatened thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of investment in Australia by the natural gas industry.

Ms Tanna said many of the criticisms of the industry were highly questionable and propagated without challenge to the point where activism was determining public policy.

Speaking in Brisbane to the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia, Ms Tanna said a prime example was the proposed amendments to the federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, introduced in haste to Parliament in March this year.

The proposals aim to broaden the Act to make water resources a matter of national environmental significance and to make just two industries – coal and natural gas – subject to the new law when they have a relatively small impact on Australia’s water. Coal and natural gas currently use less than 4% of Australia’s water whereas agriculture uses more than 50%.

Ms Tanna said the proposals were not introduced to deal with an environmental problem but to appease activists.

“We believe the proposals are fundamentally flawed because they deal with a fabricated perception and not with reality, and will effectively shift the regulatory goal posts for projects already approved by a regulatory regime that already works,” Ms Tanna said.

She said about 9000 jobs had been created in Australia by QGC’s Queensland Curtis LNG Project alone and two other natural gas projects in Queensland have similar numbers.

“When fully operational, our business will contribute more than A$1 billion a year to state and federal government revenues,” Ms Tanna said.

“That’s equivalent yearly funding for more than 20 primary schools or about 1000 hospital beds.

“That is a measure of what is at stake when we have decision making on this basis; when green activists and their supporters deliberately misinform; and when motives and charges go unquestioned and unchallenged.”

QGC has asked that the Bill be withdrawn.

[mappress]

LNG World News Staff, May 1, 2013; Image: BG