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

I rise to speak on the Nature Positive (Environment Protection Australia) Bill 2024 and related bills. Australia's natural environment is one of the defining features of our nation. From the koala to the kangaroo, the wallaby to the wombat and the crocodile to the cassowary, Australia is home to amazing animals, unique plants and diverse aquatic life. In my own electorate of Wentworth, the annual whale migration is now in full swing and dolphins are regular visitors to our stunning coastline. In the last two weekends, we've been blessed to have seals at Bondi and Bronte beaches, which is a wonderful reminder of the connection of our community to the natural environment.

Against this backdrop of beauty, 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 and the highest rate of mammal extinction of any country, and we are doing irreparable damage to the Great Barrier Reef. And things are getting worse. More than 2,200 species and ecological communities are currently listed as threatened in Australia. Ten per cent of these have been added since the beginning of 2021. Add to this the existential threat posed by climate change, and our environment has never been in greater danger.

Our failure to address this decline is in no small part down 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 they don't work for business either, who are tied up in a slow process driven approach to environmental approvals. The minister has rightly acknowledged that our current laws are not fit for purpose, that major reform is needed and I completely agree. But unfortunately, the bills before the House are not the major reforms that we need. They are more limited changes which, while welcome, still leave room for improvement.

There are three bills in this package, so let me take you to each one in turn, starting with the Nature Positive (Environment Protection Australia) Bill 2024. It has been clear for a long time that our environmental laws were not properly enforced, that environmental approvals were subject to inappropriate interference and that there was a lack of expert-led assessment of projects that have big impacts on nature. The community has lost trust in environmental decision-making and that is understandable. The government's commitment to deliver an environmental protection agency is therefore welcome. This introduction of a federal EPA is a significant and long-overdue reform, one which I and many across the environmental movement have argued for.

There are important changes in the EPA legislation that strengthen penalties for non-compliance, that alter stop-work provisions so that we get decisions more quickly and that enable stop-work orders to be issued where there are clear and present dangers to the environment. These are all important and welcome. But to be effective, to move beyond being just another environmental agency and to be trusted by the community to make environmental decisions, the EPA must meet certain standards. It must be independent in its construction, transparent in its decision-making and led by experts. It should have clear and legislated objectives and it should be properly funded from its commencement. The Victorian and New South Wales EPAs as well as EPAs overseas provide helpful examples of how this can be done well. However, as it is currently drafted, I have reservations over whether these minimum standards have been met.

The CEO of the EPA is to be appointed by the minister with no independent assessment process and no oversight from an independent board. While the CEO may constitute an advisory group to provide guidance on decisions, there is no legislative requirement for this advice to appear in a statement of reasons for particular decisions, so we may not have transparency over whether or not the CEO's decisions were aligned with expert advice. Furthermore, while the bill allows the minister to delegate certain functions to the EPA, there is currently no requirement for the details of that delegation to be made public. As a result, it won't be clear which types of decisions will be delegated to the EPA, which ones will not, and why.

Despite extensive consultations over the past year there is also not a clearly defined ministerial call-in power, so we won't know when the minister has decided to take over and make a decision instead of the EPA. This lack of transparency creates risk and, importantly, the perceived risk that environmental approvals will be shrouded in the same secrecy as flawed systems in the past. Thankfully, there are simple fixes to the problem requiring minor but meaningful changes to the legislation. I thank the minister for her constructive engagement with my team and I on addressing these issues. I look forward to continuing to discuss this as the bill moves to the consideration in detail stage.

Beyond these issues of transparency and independence, I also want to put on record some of the issues that the business community have raised with me about the bill. These relate to three key areas: first, ensuring the EPA and its CEO are accountable for their performance while maintaining independence from government; second, providing appropriate checks and balances on the new stop-work orders so that projects cannot be excessively or indefinitely delayed without due recourse; and third, ensuring that new penalties in this bill are applied in a proportionate manner. I encourage the minister to continue working with the business community, in particular representing those proponents of projects that are essential to our clean energy transition, to address these concerns.

I would like to turn my attention to the Nature Positive (Environment Information Australia) Bill 2024. This is a reform that will make a real difference. The creation of the EIA is an important step to ensure that businesses have easy access to the environmental data that they need and ensure the community has more transparent information about the state of the environment. One of the major inefficiencies in our current approvals regime is the continued collection and recollection of the same environmental data. It is costly and time-consuming and it doesn't work for business or the environment. Professor Graeme Samuels' independent review of the EPBC Act recommended a quantum shift in data collection and information systems, and this bill will help to deliver that.

One of the centrepieces of these bills is the requirement for the State of the environment report to be published every two years. It is important that we have more regular assessments of the state of our environment, so I strongly support this new requirement. But for the State of the environment report to do anything more than be a chart of continued decline of nature in Australia, we need real reform of our environmental laws. If these laws are broken, no amount of data will fix them.

This brings me to the disappointing aspect of the legislation before the House today, which is the narrowness of its scope. The gaping hole in these bills is the absence of changes to our underlying national environmental laws, which Professor Graeme Samuel described earlier this year as 'gobbledegook' and 'an abysmal failure at protecting our environment over the past 25 years'. It is crystal clear our national environmental laws are in need of an entire rewrite. That is what the government has promised but what we are still waiting for. The consequences of this delay are dire. Businesses will continue to face an inefficient and process driven approach to environmental approvals. Native forests will continue to be logged in New South Wales and Tasmania. Land clearing of endangered habitat will continue because much of it does not require referral for assessment under the act. And our national environmental law will continue to omit consideration of climate change—the biggest threat to nature in Australia.

I want to take a minute to talk specifically about climate and why it's so important that it is integrated into our national environmental law. The truth is that human induced global heating is having a devastating effect 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 doesn't even require them to be disclosed. As a result 740 fossil fuel projects have been approved since the EPBC Act came into effect, including four new coalmines during this parliament. On the other side of the coin, because climate is ignored our environmental laws don't recognise the positive long-term benefits to nature of renewable projects that reduce climate pollution. As the Clean Energy Council put in their recent submission to the department's consultation:

Climate and nature are not separate phenomena and treating them separately is leaning into a false dichotomy.

The government has indicated a willingness to incorporate climate into our national environmental law in a manner consistent with policies like the safeguard mechanism. But the can has been kicked down the road, and we simply cannot afford to wait any longer.

I conclude by acknowledging the road to real reform never did run smooth. It is not easy to rewrite our environmental laws. It is an incredibly complex process fraught with challenges and conflicting opinions. If these laws are going to work, they need to stick. The needs of the environment need to be matched with the needs of businesses, and this needs to be something where people can come together. I know the minister is sincere in her commitment to getting this right. I desperately want her to succeed, and I will be willing to work constructively with her to get a good set of laws through this parliament. But time is running out for our climate and for the environment. The reforms contained in these bills may present some progress, but we need so much more. I urge the minister to work with the crossbench in this House and in the other place to strengthen this important legislation.

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