Ted O'Brien (Fairfax, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Nature Positive (Environment Protection Australia) Bill 2024 and the associated bills. This series of cobbled-together, half-baked bills is what we've come to expect from this Labor government—a government which promised the world from opposition but has failed to deliver time and time again since coming to government.

Before I dive into the serious concerns the coalition has about these bills, I think it's important to understand the context in which they are being introduced. According to Labor, these nature-positive bills represent part of the government's plan to fix the broken Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act—otherwise referred to by its acronym, the EPBCA. Business groups and conservationists alike have been waiting for the EPBCA to be fixed for a long, long time. The government's so-called plan was meant to deliver a comprehensive overhaul of national environmental laws, chiefly in response to the Samuel review of the EPBCA—the Samuel review being the statutory review of the operation of the EPBCA that was instigated during the final term of the Morrison government and completed in late 2020. Yet, instead of the substantive overhaul and reform of the EPBCA that Labor had promised, the government has now decided to introduce an expensive and unnecessary new layer of bureaucracy to paper over its failures.

In his final report, Professor Samuel said the findings of his review should all be delivered by 2022. But the Albanese government have arrogantly, or maybe lazily, decided to give themselves another year to complete the work. But they couldn't even meet that extended deadline. Humiliatingly, today they still can't even nominate a date by which they'll get the job done. No-one knows when they will deliver the overhaul resulting from the Samuel review. It's one of the great mysteries of life.

In bringing these bills to parliament, the environment minister has bizarrely claimed that their introduction represents the second phase in a supposedly carefully crafted three-stage process. It's laughable. There never was a three-stage process. That phrase only began to pass the government's lips starting on 16 April this year, as a means to rationalise their cynical decision to rush these three bills before the House today through this chamber. The minister has astoundingly cited the passage of legislation in December last year to establish a nature repair market and to make changes to the water trigger as the supposed first phase of her work. Yet the only reason such changes were legislated at that time was they were part of a hastily negotiated deal with the Greens.

The minister also said in her 16 April announcement that, by now staggering her changes, she was following Professor Samuel's recommended staged approach to environmental law reform. Seriously? What she did not mention was that her approach is completely different from the one outlined by Samuel. Professor Samuel said that the elements of the first tranche of changes should be the immediate creation of legally enforceable national environmental standards, the start of work on complex enabling reform and the delivery of Indigenous-specific reforms, none of which has yet occurred—none. The government have seemingly ignored Samuel's advice but now seek to associate themselves with it. Talk about making it up as you go along!

It is also worth noting that Professor Samuel did not propose that an EPA be established at all. Clearly, the government's course of action is only being taken now so that they can frantically say they've ticked off one of their environmental portfolio commitments.

The three pieces of legislation we are now debating are bills the government are bringing to the parliament at the wrong time and in the wrong order. This is a desperate and vain attempt to signal to the community that they are trying to reset Australia's environmental laws. Clearly, they thought that, by introducing this legislation, it might give at least the appearance of some action. It may win back some of the many stakeholders and broader members of the Australian public who have been so disappointed with this government over the past two years. However, as usual, they have failed miserably. As Tom McIlroy very accurately observed in the Australian Financial Review on 29 May, these laws are 'friendless' from start to finish. But we actually don't know when it's going to finish, though, do we?

The minister's handling of what was promised would be a comprehensive revision of national environmental laws has been a story of remarkable incompetence and the minister has left a trail of wreckage in her wake, including through what we now know are dramatic and unprecedented rises in the numbers of threatened animal and plant species, as well as widespread instances of lost economic investment and job creation opportunities. These bills are aimed at putting in place the legislative requirements for the creation of the new environmental protection authority, to be known as Environment Protection Australia, and a data collection body they are calling Environment Information Australia. But, as has been true of so much of the government's Orwellian nature-positive agenda, they reflect overreach and a misreading of what is practically needed.

If the EPA were being set up along the lines Labor had originally nominated, albeit as part of a policy cynically released just one day before the 2022 federal election, then things might actually have been okay, because that would've merely given us a new body that was responsible for delivering better data and better compliance with environmental law as well as improved processes for the proponents of economic developments in Australia. Instead, it has now morphed into something very different and much more concerning, and this from a government that has shown us time and time again that their word is clearly not their bond. Among the new powers of the EPA will be the likely takeover from the minister and department of the authority to undertake many of the environmental assessments of projects under the EPBC Act; extensive new audit and inspection arrangements; the ability, through what are called environment protection orders, to force project proponents to immediately cease work on their developments at any time where it is reasonably suspected that they have contravened their obligations under federal environmental law; the imposition of unprecedented monetary fines of up to $780 million for businesses that are regarded as having caused serious environmental damage; and a significant degree of free rein for and the near complete impunity from removal from office of the EPA's CEO.

Inevitably, each of these changes will be damaging to industry, leaving them with more red tape and confusion to overcome and again increasing sovereign risk and exerting another chilling effect on future investment in Australia. Basically, what the government has done here in introducing the EPA is introduce a cop on the beat to ensure compliance and further bureaucracy for a body of law, the EPBC Act, that the government itself has said is broken. That is effectively what the government is seeking to do by way of these bills. I move, as an amendment:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House:

(1) expresses its commitment to making changes to national environmental laws that are genuinely beneficial for both the environment and business;

(2) notes that this bill does not meaningfully improve Australia's environmental laws, and that they have particular shortcomings in each of the following forms:

(a) the expansion of the EPA's proposed remit well beyond the compliance and data functions promised by the ALP during the 2022 Federal election campaign;

(b) the excessive size, and lack of proportionality, of the new penalties;

(c) the requirement for more regular, earlier reviews of the operation of the EPA than is mandated in this bill;

(d) the need for clearer limits on the range of circumstances in which environment protection orders can be applied;

(e) the lack of accompanying information about the full regulatory and financial impacts of the bill, including on cost recovery; and

(3) calls on the Government to finally honour their long-flagged promise to introduce a full package of new National Environmental Standards and an overhauled EPBC Act".

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