Michael Johnson (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased and delighted to speak in the parliament again on a very significant piece of government legislation, the Environment and Heritage Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2006. In fact it is a world-class piece of legislation that I know many Australians will support. Certainly the overwhelming majority of Ryan constituents will support it. We have just heard, again, another inaccurate and, frankly, pathetic presentation from the member for Wills. As usual, the federal opposition play the man—they do not play the ball—including abuse of the US President and abuse of the Australian Prime Minister, and they have hardly anything to say in the way of substantial policy.

Before I speak on the bill in any depth I want to take this opportunity—as a very strong supporter of the coalition government—on behalf of the people of Ryan to extend their very best wishes to our farmers, our country brethren, who are doing it tough. As we all know, this is a terrible time for them in terms of the environment and the drought in particular. The environmental suffering they are going through with the drought is quite awful. The people of Ryan would want me to extend their very best wishes and their sympathies to their country brethren. They will also, I am sure, support the government’s initiatives to financially support our farmers in this difficult time.

The first thing that can be said about running the Australian economy is that it has to be a strong economy to support all the services that the Australian people expect. In the area of the environment, again, nothing is more significant to good environmental policy, programs and long-term and sustainable environmental policy than a strong economy that will underwrite federal funding.

Of course, we know that at the moment the Australian economy is humming along quite nicely. The challenges and problems we have are ones of labour shortage. Our economic challenges and difficulties are those coming from national prosperity. We all know that the opposite problem is having massive unemployment and massive labour oversupply. When you have that, when it comes to the environment, no government policy will be effective—you cannot have people not in work—and the government’s focus will be on trying to get people into work rather than on good policies that will improve our environment. In terms of the environment generally, a hallmark of the coalition’s approach to the support and protection of our environment is the encouragement of hands-on and grassroots strategies—very successful programs like the Natural Heritage Trust, the Australian government’s Envirofund and, of course, one of my favourites, the Green Corps program.

These programs have helped to protect eight million hectares of wetlands and to treat 400,000 hectares of land for salinity and erosion. They have helped 800,000 volunteers to get involved and to have a stake in their local environment. And with funding of over $1.55 billion in 2006-07, the coalition government is also taking direct action to further tackle salinity, boost water sustainability, improve our air quality, address climate change, control pests and weeds, and invest in environmental research. It will help to protect forest diversity, endangered species, oceans, whales, the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland and natural Indigenous and built heritage. This commitment has been backed up with resources, with total environment expenditure increasing from $379 million in the Labor year of 1995 to $1.55 billion in 2006-07.

This bill is a strong indication of the government’s meaningful focus on environmental policy. The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999—the EPBC—is Australia’s strongest ever environmental protection law. It was introduced in 2000; it represents the most fundamental reform of Australian government environment laws since the first environmental statutes were enacted in the early 1970s.

As usual, we hear the federal Labor Party bagging all of the good things the Howard government does. They stand to be condemned because all they do is whinge and carp, rarely coming up with anything of substance as an alternative policy when they seek to run this country—or, I should say, when they seek to be in power with their union masters.

The EPBC Act enables the Australian government to join with the states and territories in providing a truly national scheme of environment protection and biodiversity conservation. The act establishes a comprehensive regulatory scheme for the conservation and management of important protected areas and places, including national heritage sites. The act provides for improved enforcement through the introduction of strong and effective civil and criminal penalties for noncompliance as well as provides for environmental audits.

The protection of matters of national environmental significance—including world and national heritage places, internationally recognised wetlands and nationally listed threatened species across all of Australia and its waters—provides for improved environmental outcomes in a wide range of significant activities such as major mining developments, offshore seismic surveys, urban development, infrastructure projects and energy production. The EPBC Act’s environmental assessment of fisheries ensures that Australia’s fisheries are ecologically sustainable and that the export and import of wildlife is consistent with international wildlife trade conventions. Those are some of the elements that the act provides for.

The act has been in operation for six years, and during this time it has provided protection for more than 1,680 flora and fauna species, 37 threatened ecological communities, hundreds of migratory birds and animal species such as whales, albatrosses and shorebirds. Some 64 Australian wetlands have been listed on the Ramsar convention as well as 16 World Heritage places and 29 national heritage places.

While the EPBC Act was a major reform, the amendments in this legislation will improve it further. They will streamline the operation of the act and, importantly, will reduce red tape, which we on this side of parliament are in the business of doing. The changes mean that matters of national environmental significance will continue to be protected, but that business—large and small—will be able to benefit from a more streamlined approvals process. The amendments will ensure that environmental protection continues while ensuring certainty for business and investors.

The amendments will, as I said, streamline the act and cut red tape. They are going to speed up approval processes, particularly for more straightforward proposals. Importantly, they will reduce duplication by enabling the Minister for the Environment and Heritage to rely on approval conditions set by other governments. They will encourage bilateral agreements by enabling accreditation of state and territory authorisation processes, management arrangements and legally binding management plans. Importantly, they will make the EPBC process more flexible, which is something quite desirable. They will speed up decisions by reducing the number of mandatory steps in the process and allowing different processes to occur concurrently. The amendments will also allow voluntarily compensatory actions and financial contributions as offsets to unavoidable environmental impacts. The amendments will also encourage major developments to be considered earlier in the development phase by allowing individual projects approved under strategic assessments, regional plans and conservation agreements to be exempt from further assessment under the act.

The amendments will also strengthen compliance and enforcement, which is very significant. They will establish strict liability provisions for a number of offences under the act, and, as those who have a legal background will know, this confirms a well-known legal principle that ignorance of the law is not a defence. They will introduce penalties for minor breaches of approval conditions, provide alternatives to lengthy and expensive court proceedings and allow the minister to require mediation action.

An important provision that should be noted is that employers and principals will be liable for the actions of their employees and contractors, and landholders will be liable for what happens on their land. The bill will introduce measures to deal with the increasing problem of illegal fishing by foreign nationals in Australian jurisdictions, which Australia must be very focused on. This is a very important bill; it is an amendment bill with very significant provisions.

I want to also talk about the Natural Heritage Trust, which those in the Ryan community will all know of. It was the biggest, most successful environmental restoration program in Australia’s history—it provided $3 billion in funding to help local communities in 56 regions across Australia to clean beaches, rehabilitate coastlines, reduce erosion, improve the health of land and waterways, increase the productivity of agricultural land and protect our threatened species.

That is the sort of funding that a federal government can allocate when it is confident the national economy is prosperous and is continuing to grow and to expand. As I said at the beginning of my speech, if the economy is not right, if the economy is not growing, if the economy is not expanding, and if people are not employed and in good jobs, then any Australian government would be in less of a position to allocate resources to the environment, which all of us, as Australians, want to protect, want to conserve and want to leave in a better condition than we find it currently. I reject absolutely those opposite who think they somehow have the moral high ground on the environment, they somehow have the monopoly of knowledge and they have the exclusivity of wisdom on matters environmental. They do not, and those of us on this side of the chamber should reject that absolutely and unequivocally.

Native vegetation work has been conducted on 1.57 million hectares of land; 63 million seedlings have been planted; 113,000 kilometres of fencing have been constructed; 4.2 million hectares of land have been protected from erosion; and 172,000 megalitres of drainage water or treatment effluent were recycled—all this happened under a very significant Natural Heritage Trust agenda.

I also want to take the opportunity in the parliament to remind the Ryan electorate of the Envirofund, which the Australian government promotes very strongly and very proudly, because it is something that we should be very proud of. The Howard government, of course, in 2002 launched the Australian government’s Envirofund to specifically focus on and facilitate the local action component of the $3 billion Natural Heritage Trust. In fact, only this month, the environment minister announced $20 million worth of community projects, raising the total investment by the Envirofund to more than $110 million.

I also want to speak in the parliament about the Green Corps project because I have had a lot to do with this in the Ryan electorate. I support it very strongly. It gives our young people an opportunity to connect with their local communities and the environment. It is youth orientated. It allows for personal growth as well as doing something very good for the communities’ environmental challenges. It is for people between the ages of 17 and 20. It is one of the very significant initiatives of the Howard government in the area of environmental policy. I have had the opportunity to go to pretty much every Green Corps launch and graduation in the Ryan electorate, and I am a very strong supporter of the projects. I know that Ryan constituents are very supportive of the projects, because many of them go to the graduation ceremonies, as well as to the actual launch of them.

As the federal member for Ryan, I took the opportunity to sponsor two participants to come to Canberra to meet with federal ministers and parliamentary secretaries to convey to them how much they had benefited from being part of their particular Green Corps project. They reported to people like Senator Ian Campbell, his parliamentary secretary, Greg Hunt, other ministers, including the Minister for Workforce Participation, and the parliamentary secretary for education, Pat Farmer, how important this program is. They said that the funding should continue and that they have not only benefited personally but also been able to put something back into the community. The Green Corps project allows young Australians to train for over a half year, it allows them to gain practical experience and, indeed, it opens the door and creates greater opportunity for a job in the area of environmental study or in the community.

I will finish with some points about the Kyoto protocol. I know that those opposite hold the Kyoto protocol as the shining light, as the solution of almost all our environmental challenges and problems. I acknowledge that many Ryan constituents think that the Howard government should support the Kyoto protocol. I want to say to the parliament that the Howard government will not support the Kyoto protocol for one fundamental reason—that is, it is not in the national interests of this country. Unlike those opposite, we are in the business of running this country for the benefit of this country, not for the benefit of other people.

We are in the business of running this country for the interests of all Australians. To ratify the Kyoto protocol would destroy thousands of jobs held by the workers of Australia, whom I would have thought the Labor Party would stand up for very strongly. Here we have the Labor Party, the so-called workers party—the political party that claims to be the friend of workers—prepared to sign an international agreement that would destroy the jobs of thousands of workers, thousands of Australians. For the life of me I cannot understand how a party that claims to represent the working class would be prepared to sign an agreement that would destroy families by taking away their employment. This is just absurd.

This lies at the heart of why the Howard government will not support the Kyoto protocol. Kyoto does not require the high greenhouse gas emitting countries such as China, Indonesia and Brazil to be under any obligation whatsoever to clean up their own act. While we emit some 1.4 per cent of the world’s emissions, we would be compromised. I know that the Labor Party keeps banging on this drum, saying that this is the solution, but this is not the solution.

I want to again say to those in the Ryan electorate, in particular, that the Howard government is in the business of protecting the national economy. We are in the business of ensuring that Australians have job security. We are going to focus on things like the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. This is a substantial agreement that, as those well-educated and very thoughtful Ryan constituents will know, brought together ministers from China, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea and the US in January this year to Sydney for the inaugural ministerial meeting. These six founding partners, including Australia, encompass some 49 per cent of the world’s GDP, 48 per cent of the world’s energy consumption and 48 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention 45 per cent of the world’s population.

This approach is going to have more impact than signing an agreement that leaves out the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. With Australia contributing only 1.4 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, we played host to a significant meeting which showed that we in this country are well and truly punching above our weight in the area of climate control. The Howard government has committed some $100 million over five years to contribute to capacity-building activities under this partnership. This is on top of some $1.8 billion that we have already invested in Australia to address climate change, including $500 million for low-emission technologies and over $200 million for renewable energy initiatives.

I want to say to my electorate, to the good people of Ryan, that I know that they are very concerned about the environment. The western suburbs of Brisbane, which many of my colleagues in this parliament and many members of the cabinet and the ministry have been to in support of my representation of that local community, are in a wonderful area. The environment is very much at the top of the agenda. I will continue to focus on the initiatives, policies and ideas of this government that will enhance the environment and not only assist the community of Ryan but leave this country’s environmental landscape a better place. Again, I reject the assertion that the Labor Party bang on about—that is, that they have a total monopoly in this area. I think that the government would be well served to remind the Australian community that we are the party of ideas. We are the party of initiatives. We are the party of substantial policy that makes a difference to this country.

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