Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In supporting the passage of the Environment and Heritage Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2006 government members have argued that this legislation does not in any way alter the protections in the existing act. That is untrue. I want to concentrate my remarks on a particular provision in this legislation that can have profound implications for the protection of Australia’s natural and built heritage—that is, proposed section 324JJ. In essence, it says that the minister is to decide whether or not to include a place on the National Heritage List. In so doing the minister will receive advice from the Australian Heritage Council and that advice will be in the form of an assessment of the heritage values of the particular site. The minister then, under the amendments proposed in this bill, will take account of the advice of the Australian Heritage Council but, crucially, at section (5):

(b)

the Minister may seek, and have regard to, information or advice from any source—

in making a decision as to whether a site will or will not enter onto the Heritage List.

Let us, as a parliament, understand what this means. The minister receives the advice from the Heritage Council. That advice, no doubt, will be well formulated by a group of experts, but in the end the minister can completely ignore that advice in making a decision on whether a property shall enter onto the register. It means that the minister can take account of anything—any information provided by anyone. It could be advice from the minister’s brother or mother. It could be advice from the minister’s newsagent or his political donor. I wonder if you can see the direction in which I am heading.

This sort of legislation has precedence. It has precedence in the Bjelke-Petersen era in Queensland. I was an adviser in Canberra to the then Prime Minister when particular destructive developments were occurring in Queensland under the Bjelke-Petersen government. I refer to the midnight demolitions of the Bellevue Hotel and the Cloudlands Ballroom. What the then Premier of Queensland did was effectively argue, ‘It’s all very well me being advised that these are areas of great cultural significance and have heritage values; I’m just taking into account another consideration, and that is donations by my developer mates.’ And so he did. And there was no legal remedy to those midnight demolitions.

Fast-forward 30 years and we have here, in this parliament, a piece of legislation that validates Bjelke-Petersen type behaviour—that is, the minister can receive from the Heritage Council rolled gold advice that a particular site is of wonderful, iconic heritage value in Australia and say, ‘Wow, that’s interesting but I’ve also got another piece of advice and that is that my developer friends think that this’d be a dandy place to stick a high-rise development or a golf course or some other commercial development.’

The Bjelke-Petersen era is alive and well in the Australian parliament. And we have government members coming into this place and saying that this legislation does not in any way alter the protections in the existing act! That is complete rubbish. I know that no-one on the government side will be drawing attention to this legislation. They have brought into this chamber a piece of legislation that runs to 407 pages. It has been rushed into the parliament, and government members are awishin’, ahopin’ and aprayin’ that no-one will notice this particular odious provision that empowers the minister to reject any and all heritage applications at his or her whim.

Now, let us look at some of the sites that have been nominated for the National Heritage List but have not yet been accepted. Empowered by this amendment bill, when it has passed through the parliament, the minister can, at a whim or for any other reason, reject nominations that have already been lodged under the recommendation and analysis of the Heritage Council. I thought I would download some of those nominations. I am sure that those who are listening tonight will understand the significance of some of them. I have not ranked them in iconic status, because they are ranked in alphabetical order, but they are household names. Starting with A, there is Australia Square in George Street in Sydney. If the minister considers that there is a development proposal or interest, and therefore that Australia Square does not have heritage significance, then under proposed section (5)(b) of 324JJ the minister can say, ‘All very interesting, lovely report, but it is not going on the Heritage List.’

Another area that most Australians will have some fond associations with is the Australian Antarctic Territory. Maybe it is that, after the expiry of the present agreement that there would be no mining developments in Antarctica, the minister of the day would say, ‘Well, it’s fine that the Australian Antarctic Territory seems to have heritage values, but I’m not going to recognise those values by putting the Australian Antarctic Territory on the National Heritage List.’ Similarly, the minister could knock back the Cherub’s Cave grey nurse shark habitat on Moreton Island, in Queensland. There might be a sandmining proposal that interferes with that habitat, so the minister, rather than saying, ‘Yes, I accept it’s got heritage values,’ can say: ‘I reject the notion that this has heritage values. I reject the advice of the Heritage Council, and it is not going to be recognised as having heritage values by being added to the National Heritage List.’

The City of Adelaide Historic Layout and Park Lands could receive the same treatment, as could a rather iconic piece of sand in the Great Sandy Region called Fraser Island. Most Australians would know about Fraser Island. But the minister, in a Howard government, can say: ‘Fraser Island does not have national heritage significance because I have decided it doesn’t. And, by the way, there are some development proposals there that I don’t want complicated, so it’s not going on the National Heritage List.’ Regarding the Great Western Tiers in Tasmania, the Greater Wilsons Promontory area, and the High Court and the National Gallery precinct here in the ACT, the minister could say, ‘I don’t see any heritage values in those whatsoever.’

The Kosciuszko National Park falls into the same category, as does Noosa National Park. Regarding the very place in which we are having this debate, Parliament House in Canberra, there would be no heritage significance if the minister decides that it has no heritage significance. Regarding Old Parliament House, the beginning of national parliament in Australia, the minister is empowered under this legislation to determine that it is not worthy of entry onto the National Heritage List. Point Cook air base falls into the same category, as does the Tarkine wilderness area, the Greater Blue Mountains area and an area in which I was born and grew up, the Warrumbungles National Park, on John Renshaw Parkway, Coonabarabran, where the Siding Spring Observatory is located. This is astonishing legislation—the minister could say that the Warrumbungles National Park and the Siding Spring Observatory have no heritage values because he has decided that they have no heritage values and are not going onto the list.

The government will argue that the minister had this capacity anyway because of the silence of the existing act. The reason that this amendment has been put in is to protect the minister’s butt, so that he can say, ‘To remove any doubt as to whether I have the capacity to knock back a heritage application, based on a whim, I am going to put into this amendment a clause which says that I can—on a whim or for whatever other reason—decide that an area does not in fact warrant listing on the heritage list.’

This is not the way to manage the issues of the economy and the environment. Fundamentally, we make an error when we talk about balancing the economy and the environment. What we need to do is integrate the economy and the environment by embracing the philosophy of ecologically sustainable development—that is, having the economy growing strongly but in an environmentally sustainable way, so that we are not visiting upon future generations the economic and environmental costs of environmental damage and ultimate clean-up. Translate the concept of ecological sustainability into this legislation, and this is how the legislation should work. The Heritage Council does a lot of serious work on an application. It comes to a view. It then makes a submission to the minister, and the minister then would not have the discretion to say, for whimsical reasons or because he has developer mates, that an area does not have heritage values. It either has heritage values or it does not have heritage values. It is not up to the minister to say, ‘It’s got economic value and therefore it doesn’t have heritage values.’

The Heritage Council in many cases may advise that an area does not have heritage values, but if the council says it does have heritage values then it should be acknowledged as an area of national heritage significance. Then we come to the management of that property. Here is where I would argue that putting something on the National Heritage List does not necessarily mean that no economic development can occur on that site. It is a matter of protecting the values. If you can preserve the values, it is not necessarily a matter of totally protecting the site. That is an important distinction.

This has historic precedent. I understand why the first bill came forward: there were real problems with the national estate heritage listing process, from the 1975 legislation all the way through the eighties and 1990s. That is, an under-resourced Australian Heritage Commission was receiving nominations to the Register of the National Estate—a different concept. It was so underresourced that it could not properly assess the applications. So, for the benefit of doubt, it was very strongly disposed to putting anything and everything on the Register of the National Estate.

This was used by people in the environment movement to try to prevent development occurring, for example, in any area of Tasmania that was on the Register of the National Estate. Their tactic was to put as many areas on the Register of the National Estate as possible. A compliant Australian Heritage Commission would agree because it did not have the resources to assess the heritage values properly. The way to manage that would have been to say—and the Hawke government did—that the government was not going to accept the argument of the environment movement that there could be no logging in a national estate area. The Hawke government, on 12 June 1986—it was one of my first duties as an adviser to the Prime Minister—put out a press release saying that the Hawke government would protect national estate values. The environment movement had wanted it to say that it would protect all national estate forests.

I understand and accept that that national estate listing process was basically flawed. Therefore there was a case for a new piece of legislation that got the listing process right and that improved the integrity of the listing process. But, having improved the integrity of the listing process, you cannot then give the minister a veto right to say that, notwithstanding the advice that something is a rolled gold piece of iconic Australian natural, built or cultural heritage, it is not going on the list because he or she has commercial reasons not to put it on the list.

Having made those points, and having made them strongly because I feel strongly about this, I will say there is no doubt that in this legislation there are ample provisions that involve extra protection or improvements to the existing legislation. The tragedy is that, through this Cloudland Bjelke-Peterson style amendment, the government is destroying any possibility of the good parts of this legislation being properly recognised; there are so many fundamentally bad parts to this legislation. The way that this should have been approached—and I understand that this legislation was developed in consultation with the states—is that it should have enjoyed a proper public consultation process so that a light could be shone on some of its most odious provisions. That would have allowed us in this democracy to argue that they be deleted and the good parts retained. But those of goodwill and who are well motivated in the bureaucracy and in the Heritage Council, and those who have a genuine interest in Australian heritage and economic development, are going to confront the situation where this bill will have a very bad reputation because it has such odious provisions included in it.

Working with the states is the way to go. The intergovernmental agreement on the environment that was reached in 1992 introduced the notion of full faith and credit. By that I mean that the Commonwealth and the states would agree on an environmental assessment process, and if that were followed rigorously by a particular state then the Commonwealth would not seek to replicate the entire process. There had been the problem of a project proponent going through a state environmental assessment process, getting a tick for that and then being confronted by new Commonwealth environmental assessment processes that dragged out the assessment process and applied new restrictions. After a while, commercial development proponents just gave up and went away because they had been subject to a death by a thousand cuts. That is why the 1992 intergovernmental agreement on the environment was developed. It was based on the principles of ecological sustainability and applied the notion of full faith and credit. There was so much potential to do good in the bill being considered—to protect genuine cultural, built and natural heritage—but the reputation of this legislation will be badly sullied.

That brings me to my final point. The government has been in office now for 10 years. It is very difficult in looking back to think of any major environmental improvement or major environmental achievement of this government. Yes, it did put a lot of money into a National Heritage Trust, some of which no doubt was spent well and wisely, but much of it was spent in marginal and National Party seats and was not necessarily spent very wisely at all. You can hardly qualify that as a great environmental achievement. If we look at the Murray-Darling Basin system, we see that when Bob Hawke launched the environment statement Our Country Our Future in 1989 one of the big challenges was seen to be to improve the health of that system. This was symbolised by the fact that the Prime Minister launched that environment statement on the Murray River. There were a lot of dead trees on it because of waterlogging and salinity. Come forward from 1989 to 2006, and the Murray-Darling Basin system is sicker than ever because the government has not got the guts to take on the issue of water allocations and move to permanent trading in water rights.

I cannot think of any great environmental achievement of this government—and then it brings in a piece of legislation, much of which I might find had a lot of merit if I had the time to go through its 200-odd pages. But, because it has the Joh Bjelke-Peterson amendment, I will certainly be voting against this legislation. I want the Australian people to understand the significance of the power that the minister now claims for himself in this legislation: the power to knock over any application for any icon anywhere around Australia because he or his developer mates, brother, sister, mother or daughter thinks it should not go on the list. This is absurd and it is obscene. Therefore I will be strongly opposing this legislation.

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