Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm glad to speak in support of the bill itself, the Nature Positive (Environment Protection Australia) Bill 2024, and the associated bills. It's a vitally important reform and it seeks to address an urgent issue. Australia's environment is not in great shape; we know that. Australia's environment has suffered very significant harm over a considerable period of time. We know the reasons for that, and we have seen those apply over a considerable period. They include introduced species, deforestation and other kinds of human activity. More recently, they include climate change, which is making all of those other things worse. We've been told, in no uncertain terms, on a completely solid scientific basis that Australia's environment is in poor condition, and the trajectory is for further decline. That's why this government has wasted no time in making some significant reforms. These are very substantial reforms, and they join a considerable list of changes, legislative and regulatory reform but also program and funding provisions that the minister for the environment has delivered. As she rightly says, there is no time to waste on this issue.

The speaker before me in this debate, the member for Page, essentially got up and said, 'We're not going to back this. We don't back this sort of stuff.' I thought that was interesting. 'This sort of stuff' is trying to ensure that Australia's remarkable and distinctive environment and biodiversity persists—that it continues and that it is able to be healthy and sustainable on its own terms. Nature, the environment, doesn't exist for us. It should be able to exist, continue and be sustainable on its own terms. But it certainly means that the distinctive Australian environment will continue to be this precious resource, a part of our precious heritage for this generation, the next generation and generations to come. This won't be the case if we continue with business as usual. So, if anyone says, 'I'm not interested in this sort of stuff,' what they're essentially saying is, 'I don't give a stuff about the poor condition of the Australian environment. I don't care about species going extinct. I don't care about the disappearance of threatened ecological communities. I don't care about any of those things, and I don't care about the extent to which people in the future won't be able to live in a continent like Australia and experience and enjoy all those things, and take pride in the stewardship of that remarkable environmental condition'—stewardship which, of course, was provided for tens of thousands of years by First Nations people.

We've got a lot to learn from First Nations people in seeking to do a much better job when it comes to our environment and the biodiversity on which it depends. This is part of it; this is what the Albanese Labor government was elected to do.

We've come along after a period of time in which Australia's environment was put under more pressure, and it got worse and began to experience some acute forms of climate change pressure which we knew were coming, whether it was the massive bushfires, or the floods that we saw recently, or the incredible warm and dry spell we've just had in Western Australia, which has literally seen the Western Australian bush dying of thirst. If you went anywhere beyond the metro area—to the east or south-east of Perth—over the last six months, you'd see a landscape that features all these unfamiliar colours. You see browns, dry yellows and reds. If you came from the Northern Hemisphere you might think, 'This must be Australia in autumn.' But it's not. It's the incredibly beautiful and rich biodiverse forest landscape of Western Australia dying of thirst in a way we haven't seen for some time.

We're not going to accept that. We're not going to accept the kinds of things that have occurred over the previous 10 years, like 40 per cent cuts to the department of the environment. When it came to EPBC approvals, an ANAO report found that 79 per cent of all of those approvals involved conditions that were being breached with no monitoring—which of course is hard to do when you have a department that gets chopped off at the knees to the extent that the previous government was prepared to do. We saw species continuing to go extinct, and we saw species continuing to be added to the endangered and threatened list. We're not going to accept that, so we are making some significant reforms.

Reforming the EPBC Act is the No. 1 focus, and the minister is pursuing that consultatively, steadily and thoroughly. It's a thousand-page piece of legislation. It's a complex piece of work, and we have to get it right. While we get the EPBC reforms right, we're wasting no time with other aspects of the reform. Last year, we improved the scope and strength of the water trigger under the EPBC Act, and that's particularly significant when it comes to making sure that water resources aren't threatened by unconventional gas projects in the way that they have been in Europe and in the United States. It's something the Australian community will not accept, and the minister took the opportunity when it presented itself to make that change earlier than many people had thought would be possible.

Now we have come along here with the nature-positive reforms, and we are taking two big further steps. We are introducing, for the first time, a national independent Environmental Protection Agency—something the community has identified and called for for a long time. Environmental stakeholders and scientists have also called for it for a long time. It's quite a sensible thing to set up an expert agency that is properly resourced to make independent environmental decisions and ensure that we're not allowing this trajectory of decline that has been occurring throughout the 21st century to continue.

The previous government knew that something had to be done. Why? Because they received the State of the environment reports and each successive State of the environment report painted a darker and more depressing picture when it came to Australia's environment and biodiversity. More particularly, the previous government commissioned Professor Graeme Samuel to have a look at what would be needed to ensure that the EPBC Act actually did its job. The other side can say, 'We hate red tape and we hate regulation,' or, 'We hate this kind of stuff,' as the member for Page said, ostensibly about the kinds of guidelines and frameworks that protect Australia's environment. 'We hate all that.' But the bottom line is that the previous government received a comprehensive, cogent report and set of recommendations from Professor Graeme Samuel, and what they do? They did nothing. They literally did zero.

Graeme Samuel said: 'You've got to reform the EPBC Act. You've got to get the national standards working properly. You've got to have an independent cop on the beat.' Because what has been going on today has been that the decisions themselves have been bad, and then the decisions are not being applied or compliance with the decisions is not occurring at all. As I said before, 79 per cent of all decisions had conditions that weren't being met. We know that one in seven offsets provided under that decision-making framework weren't being delivered in the way they had been promised by project proponents. In fact, there wasn't even an accessible register of all of the offsets that had been provided in order to make some projects approvable, and there was evidence that in some cases offsets were being provided twice for state and Commonwealth approvals—all the kinds of things that can go wrong if you don't care and if you don't make sure that government works properly and that the Public Service is both resourced and encouraged to do its job.

The previous government received the 2021 State of the environment report. What story did it tell? It said the environment's in rough shape, it's getting worse, there's too much harm occurring, the regulation is rubbish and the resources aren't there—all of the kinds of things that you get in a recipe for disaster. The minister in the previous government wouldn't release the report. If you get a report you don't like, or you get a bad report, the Australian community might expect you to listen to it, front up to it, have the courage to accept what it's telling you and take some action. What did the previous government choose to do? They chose to bury it, ignore it, hide it from the Australian people and misrepresent the facts. With the EPBC reforms recommended to them by Graeme Samuel, who they commissioned to undertake the report, to fix the national standards, create an independent environmental protection agency and consider how you might streamline some of the processes, they said, 'No.' They had no interest in that. None of that ever came here. There was never a bill like this one, seeking to introduce those kinds of reforms, so we're not going to do that. That would be utterly irresponsible, and it would be a dereliction of the duty that any Australian government has to the Australian people and to the Australian environment. Instead, we are creating this independent protection agency and we're creating Environment Information Australia and that's important, because one of the reasons why so much environmental harm has occurred is we haven't been able to see the full picture. What we've tended to do is: people come along and say, 'I would like to undertake a particular project,' that gets assessed just on its own terms and, too often, things had been approved in ways that weren't really respectful of the environmental condition, the conditions that were applied weren't met and there was no compliance with those conditions.

But what we weren't seeing was the cumulative impact. You're getting decision after decision after decision after decision, in many cases involving reduction in habitat and other kinds of pressures on threatened species, and, while those decisions, one by one, might have been tolerable as far as the health of a threatened ecosystem or a particular species, in combination they were pushing species off the cliff and they were pushing ecological communities closer and closer to the brink. Environment Information Australia will help us stop that because it will give us that picture, and it will work really well alongside the other reform that we've introduced, the Nature Repair Market Bill. That falls under the same category as this sort of stuff.

According to the member for Page, it was actually an idea that the National Party came up with in the previous parliament, and it was quite a good idea, to connect up those who have significant landholdings, particularly Australian farmers who are interested in and have a tradition of wanting to improve country and undertake restoration projects, with the growing amount of capital that exists to see that work undertaken. It was an idea that the Nationals put forward—quite a good one. It didn't advance under the previous government; we've delivered it. Environment Information Australia will help make sure that that works well. Farmers will benefit from it but, more particularly, the Australian environment will be improved by it.

Those are among the programs and funding that the minister for the environment has delivered. We have the $200 million Urban Waterways and Catchments Program. We know that that's critical. Most of our major cities involve a significant watercourse, and the way that our cities relate to the watercourse—drain into the watercourse—obviously has a big effect on those ecosystems. We shouldn't forget that, when it comes to the environment, there isn't the chalk-and-cheese divide that the member for Page was trying to suggest exists. He used some weird phrase like 'inner city elites who don't understand what it's like in the country' and 'people in the country who don't understand what it's like in the city'. That sort of dichotomy is utterly false. We all spend time in the regions and the country. We're all connected to the regions and the country through family and friends, and the reverse is true from country and regional people with respect to the cities. But half of all threatened species in Australia are actually present in metropolitan areas, so programs like the Urban Waterways and Catchments Program are really critical.

The minister's quite right to say that this government won't waste time because there is no time to waste. When it comes to Australia's environment and biodiversity, it is one of our most precious responsibilities. There is nowhere on Earth like Australia. We are the custodians of this remarkable continent. We inherit that from the longest continuous civilisation on Earth. We owe it to the environment, on its own terms, to do much better than we've done because we've done a pretty awful job. The Australian environment has been hammered and it's on a trajectory of decline. The previous government couldn't give a stuff about that. They didn't do anything about it, despite all of the warnings and all of the expert reports. We're not going to take that approach. We've started the reform process. This bill continues with two significant instalments in looking after Australia's environment under the Albanese Labor government.

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