Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Australia's natural environment is one of the defining features of our nation. The nature is in crisis. The 2021 State of the environment report pulled back the curtain on the devastating damage that is being done to our environment. We have the highest rate of deforestation in the developed world. We have the highest rate of animal extinction of any country and we are doing irreparable damage to the Great Barrier Reef. Threatened species have been declining between two per cent and three per cent per year since 2000, meaning we have seen a 60 per cent decline in Australia's threatened species index in the past two decades. Add to this the existential threat posed by climate pollution and our environment has never been in greater danger. Our failure to address the decline is in no small part due to our broken environmental laws. The EPBC Act was introduced under John Howard a quarter of a century ago, and the laws are still stuck in the past. They don't protect the environment and, frankly, they don't work for business either, who are tied up in a slow and process-driven approach to environmental approvals.

The minister has rightly acknowledged the need for reform, and I know she is sincere in her commitment to achieve this, but more than two years into parliament we don't have any legislation to address the fundamental flaws in our national environmental law. There are numerous parts of this law that require reform, so I am going to focus my comments on two, including identifying things the government could move on now, even without a full review of the EPBC Act.

First, we need to end the exemption of regional forest agreements, which allow destructive native forest logging to continue unchecked. Native forest logging causes huge environmental damage across the country, affecting over 250 threatened species the past two decades in southern New South Wales alone. The destruction of koala habitat that's permitted in these exemptions in our national environment law is mostly to make low-value products like paper pulp, which we could get from plantations instead. As well as the environmental damage, native forest logging destroys an incredibly powerful carbon sink, so much so that experts estimate stopping native forest logging in southern New South Wales would be the state's largest carbon abatement project. At a time when we're fighting to meet our targets, this seems absolutely so obvious. It would also be good for a New South Wales taxpayers, who have been forced to subsidise the loss-making state Forestry Corporation to the tune of nearly $30 million over the past couple of years. Native forest logging is bad for the environment, it is bad for climate and it is bad for taxpayers. It needs to stop and that means we have to reform our broken environmental laws. Even if the government isn't going to do a whole-scale review of EPBC Act in this parliament, the government could move now to stop regional forestry agreements so that we could at least stop native forest logging in this term of parliament and that's what I'm calling on the government to do.

The second area I'd like to talk about is climate and why it's so important that it's integrated into our national environmental laws, because the truth is global heating is having a devastating impact on nature, with rapidly rising ocean temperatures, floods, fires, droughts and extreme weather causing enormous damage to our environment. Our main environmental law does absolutely nothing about this. The EPBC Act does not require emissions to be considered when evaluating project proposals and does not even require them to be disclosed. As a result, 740 fossil fuel projects have been approved since the beginning of the EPBC Act, including four new coalmines in this parliament. Because climate is ignored, our environmental laws don't recognise the positive long-term benefits to the nature of renewable energy projects that reduce climate pollution. The government has indicated a willingness to incorporate climate into our national environmental laws in a manner consistent with policies like the safeguard mechanism, but the can has been kicked down the road and we simply can't wait any longer.

I'd like to acknowledge that the road to reform is not smooth. It's a complex process fraught with conflicting opinions, but I know community support is there. Last week I was invited to speak at a community forum hosted by the ACF Eastern Sydney group and the fantastic Stephen Lightfoot. More than 200 people filled the Randwick Town Hall, all desperately asking for reform of our broken environmental laws and, most urgently also, for our native forest logging to be addressed. There is huge appetite for change from the community. Now we need people in this place to show the courage to act.

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