Anti-coal seam gas campaigners say the Baird government has "nailed its colours to the mast" after a bill aimed at protecting parts of NSW from coal seam gas mining was unexpectedly nipped in the bud.
The NSW Greens, Labor and the Rev Fred Nile's Christian Democratic Party declared on Thursday morning they would jointly back laws to enable a five-year CSG moratorium and establish permanent no-go zones in areas including the northern rivers region and the Pilliga.
They had agreed on proposed amendments for an upper house bill that was first introduced by Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham in May to ban CSG activity statewide.
The watered-down bill was expected to stall in the Legislative Assembly, where Mr Nile said he hoped it would "call (the government's) bluff".
But it never made it that far.
The Shooters and Fishers Party sided with upper house coalition MPs on Thursday afternoon to vote Mr Buckingham's bill down 19-16.
Mr Buckingham said in a statement the government had leant on the cross-bench MPs, but a Shooters source denied that Robert Brown and Robert Borsak ever intended to vote up the amended bill.
Georgina Woods, from anti-CSG group Lock the Gate, accused Nationals MPs of "hanging their constituents out to dry".
"By nailing its colours to the mast of the CSG industry this morning, the NSW government has committed itself to a dead end path that will only lead to more determined community action," she said.
Speaking in the upper house earlier on Thursday, Labor MP Adam Searle said the environmental, scientific and regulatory design work recommended by the NSW chief scientist last year needed to be completed before the government could take any further steps on CSG.
"Until there is a scientific consensus that CSG mining will not damage aquifers and groundwater systems, we need to hit the pause button," he said.
"The risks to our most important natural resources are just too high."
Mr Nile told parliament he understood the backlash from the state's farming community, given the "devastation" he said CSG had caused to prime agricultural land interstate.
"If you see the latest aerial photographs of Queensland, those farm areas have changed from being farm areas to becoming industrial zones: hundreds of wells, roads connecting those wells, pipelines and so on over the farmland," he said.
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