Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Ryan, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion. In my electorate of Ryan, every time we have heavy rains I have constituents contacting my office worried that they may again face what happened in the 2022 floods: houses and livelihoods destroyed. Many families are still grappling with the aftermath of that, struggling to rebuild, some of them dealing with dodgy insurance companies. The 2022 floods were said to be unprecedented—like the 2011 floods and like many of the floods we've seen right across Australia. But we know the stark reality is that with climate change these natural disasters will only get worse and, unfortunately, more and more frequent.

Yet what does our government do in the face of this crisis? It shamelessly attempts to ram legislation through, handing the resources minister unprecedented—and this really is unprecedented—authority to fast-track new coal and gas projects, completely undermining the environment minister. It's pretty amazing stuff, really. The government is essentially passing legislation written by the gas industry for the gas industry. The government gets a letter from a few gas company executives and a few months later they offer up a bit of legislation that removes all the headaches of environmental approvals processes. Evidently that's what big political donations get you these days—pay to destroy.

The Labor government and the environment minister have failed to deliver on their promises to overhaul our broken environmental laws, make them stronger and truly protect our environment. But it's pretty clear that the government is actually siding with the gas cartels, making it easier for them to continue destroying our precious environment. The fact that the resources minister can make changes to regulation and not have to consider the environmental laws is absolutely reckless in an age when we know the urgency of the climate crisis. That's why this bill must be delayed until after the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act reforms come into effect. These significant environmental reforms are meant to protect our environment from greenwashed habitat destruction and dangerous fracking. Prior to this, and unbelievably, the minister was not required to assess fracking projects for their impact on the environment. The Greens and environment and First Nations groups have been campaigning for a decade to expand the environmental laws to include a water trigger, which effectively closed the loophole that gives gas fracking corporations a licence to drill without any federal environmental water assessment.

On the back of this, the government is effectively trying to legislate another loophole back in for gas companies to get the green light on environment-destroying projects. Basically, the government is allowing companies like Santos and Woodside to get around complying with the current requirements of environmental laws for gas projects. Yes, you heard that correctly: gas companies will essentially be exempt from complying with certain environmental regulations under even the new amendments. The independent regulator, NOPSEMA, has an endorsed program for the requirements of any gas project, and the government is giving gas companies more powers to bypass this process or rush it through altogether. Just at the moment, Santos has six approvals through NOPSEMA for the Barossa, and they could all be exempt from any environmental approvals process in the next 12 months. This is the project that would emit 401 million tonnes of CO2 pollution in its lifetime. That's the equivalent of 80 per cent of Australia's total emissions in 2020.

We've just gone through multiple flooding events and sweltered through a summer with outrageous humidity, heatwaves and fires, and we know this will only get worse as the planet gets warmer. We're in a climate crisis. Australia cannot afford to pay the price of any new coal and gas projects. The government must not give fossil fuel companies any more power than they already have. This bill must be considered after the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act reforms have come into place.

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