Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That Senate amendments Nos (2) and (4) to (13) be disagreed to.

These amendments make a number of changes, which I do not think any member of this House saw coming, and were the consequence of a rather surprising unity ticket that Senators Heffernan and Nash formed with the Greens. In that surprising unity ticket that they formed in the Senate they did the opposite of what I am hearing members of the coalition argue should happen to my legal powers. We have just had a week where we have had significant debate as to whether or not my legal powers over the marine environment should be extended. But nothing that the government put forward to this House last week matches the extent to which the Senate are now asking and inviting me to expand the authority of national environmental law.

When the government, together with the member for New England, went to a lot of work to determine how we could improve the quality of scientific work that would inform environmental decisions, the principal concern raised by the member for New England and which the government signed up to, was to make sure that the quality of our research into water was as good as it possibly could be. For that reason we determined to establish an independent committee and we also established to fund, and significantly fund, that independent committee.

The Senate have decided that that work, which I can direct the committee to do, not only should be about water and water and water resources, but should actually be about land and its use. So, effectively, forget all the arguments that coalition senators are making in the Senate right now about whether national environmental law should be expanded. What they did last week was provide an overarching interest for national environmental law in pretty much every land-use decision that is made whenever you have a coal seam gas or a coal mining project.

They are significant decisions and they are decisions that matter a lot to local communities. They are decisions over which we have no federal constitutional head of power, so the legal challenges would come thick and fast, and they would win. It is an area where it has nothing to do with any environmental decision that I might subsequently make. So we end up with a situation where we send an expert scientific committee off to do scientific work on land-use decisions, which can go into anything such as council zoning which could be a land-use decision, and all this work gets done and comes back and is, in fact, irrelevant to the environmental decisions that get made at the end of it. What possessed Senators Heffernan and Nash to sponsor this in the other place is beyond me. But I want to make clear that while I appreciate the compliment from the Senators involved and from the coalition over there that they would like me to have an interest in pretty much every land use decision in country New South Wales and most of southern Queensland, we really do not think it is an appropriate policy to go down the path of. So I am hoping for a calmer and more sensible response from the coalition in this place than we got from the coalition in the other place.

There would be uncertainty about what is meant by land and its use. It would completely blow up the agreements we have with the states. I cannot imagine Queensland and New South Wales for a minute having anything to do with the National Partnership Agreements if we said we were now going to have federal oversight over every land use decision they made. It would be reasonable for them to reject it because it is something that is within their province. It is core business for state governments to be making these calls. There will be times when we think they make them the wrong way and people will use the parliament to make speeches about it and to rally against state decisions when we think they have done these jobs poorly. But it is not something that is the province of national environmental law, nor should it be so. It would massively increase the work of the committee. What is generous and required funding in the order of $150 million plus a further $50 million for scientific research would immediately overnight become grossly inadequate if we now had to get to the bottom of every land use and planning decision.

I appreciate that there can be some good local politics on this issue but, in policy terms, what the Senate has thrown up is something that we would not go near. It is contrary to everything I have heard from the Leader of the Opposition—once he backed off on how far the law should go on land use. I really do commend all members to join the government in rejecting these amendments.

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