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

I want to thank the member for Page for the question and acknowledge the advocacy of both the member for Page and the member for Richmond in their concerns about various proposals in the Northern Rivers area. This is an issue which has been raised by many members on this side and also very prominently by a number of members of the crossbench.

When a federal approval is given over a large coalmine or a coal seam gas project, the public expectation is that we have taken into account every possible impact on what it could mean for water, whether it be underground water or whether it be its connection to surface water. The reality of environmental approvals at the moment is, legally, an environment minister is not able to take all those issues into account. They are only able to take them into account to the extent to which there might be an endangered species downstream or to the extent to which, for example, there might be a Ramsar wetland downstream, and that is the knock-on effect. But the broad based, taking into account the full impact on a water resource, is something where the public expectation is that that is exactly what we do. The legal requirement falls far short of that.

We bridged the gap a fair way a year ago when I introduced legislation into this parliament which established the independent expert scientific committee. That made sure that the scientific work was being done to fully take into account all the potential impacts on water of these sorts of projects. Notwithstanding the work being done, it still fell short when you got to the approval process. We had data there that was not then able to be taken into account when we got to the decision at the federal level.

For that reason, I announced earlier today that the government will be introducing amendments to national environmental law and, in those amendments, we will be establishing a water trigger as one of the matters of national environmental significance. We obviously want to make sure that we are only hitting the very large water issues. We do not want to create a problem for anyone who wants to put in a farm dam or anything like that. For that reason, the same window that applies to the independent expert scientific committee will apply to this new matter of national environmental significance. That will be coal seam gas projects and large-scale coalmines. In doing this, we will then be able to make sure that the community expectation of what is taken into account and the work that we fund to be independently assessed are taken into account when it gets to the decision-making time. In transition processes, we are also making sure that projects that are already within the system do not have to go right back to the start on their environmental approval process. Simply going through the normal process of seeking additional information will make sure that we have a streamlined approach that does not add significantly to time lines for businesses that have already commenced.

Against all of this, we should be able to meet the actual community expectation: an approvals process where the rigorous work is done to make sure that all the data is taken into account for the impacts on underground and surface water and at the same time making that part of the decision.

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