Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Warringah for moving these amendments. I know that her constituents place a very high value on the natural environment—they live in a beautiful part of Australia and really want us all to look after our environment better. I also believe that her constituents would very much support the setting up of Australia's first national independent environment protection agency. But we're not going to support these amendments, and I have already outlined some of the reasons for that: they complement some of the amendments that have been moved by other speakers.

This act sets up Environment Protection Australia. On the environmental objectives that the member has asked for—the objectives for the act, as she alluded to—my response to her has already been that these objectives exist in the acts that the Environment Protection Agency administers. I will give an example. In her amendments, the member for Warringah seeks to include an objective that EPA should enhance the protection of Australia's environment and prevent the degradation of Australia's environment. Environment Protection Australia is being set up to administer a number of acts, and just one of them is the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. The objects of this act include:

(a) to provide for the protection of the environment, especially those aspects of the environment that are matters of national environmental significance; and

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(c) to promote the conservation of biodiversity; and

(ca) to provide for the protection and conservation of heritage; and

(d) to promote a co-operative approach to the protection and management of the environment involving governments, the community, land-holders and indigenous peoples; and

(e) to assist in the co-operative implementation of Australia's international environmental responsibilities; and

(f) to recognise the role of indigenous people in the conservation and ecologically sustainable use of Australia's biodiversity; and

(g) to promote the use of indigenous peoples' knowledge of biodiversity with the involvement of, and in co-operation with, the owners of the knowledge.

I think that including objects that enhance the protection of Australia's environment when the acts that are being administered by the organisation already provide for the protection of the environment and promote the conservation of biodiversity makes this inclusion redundant.

As I said, the EPA will not just be regulating the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act and approvals under that. It will also, for example, regulate approvals under the Ozone Protection and Synthetic Greenhouse Gas Management Act. Those objectives include more specific things like giving effect to Australia's obligations under the Vienna convention and the Montreal protocol and replacing depleting substances and synthetic greenhouse gases. I'm very happy to continue to work with the crossbench on how the objectives of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act can be meaningfully improved in stage 3 of the reforms. But the purpose of this bill is to set up the agency as an administrative act. We need to do it in a considered and methodical way.

On the issue of the offsets register, this amendment is unnecessary because I've done it already. The member alluded to a review of offsets done by the department. I commissioned that review, and I commissioned that review because I was worried about offsets. I'm hearing the same stuff you are, so I asked the department to look at offsets and to evaluate whether they had been properly delivered. As the member said, in many cases they had not been properly delivered. What I've done is set up a register that anyone can look up online. You can look at the name. You can look at the location of the site. You can find the offset conditions for each project. This is just one of the changes that I've asked for as a result of the review that I commissioned.

We've basically set up a permanent compliance unit to look at offsets, because I've got the same concerns as the concerns that you've raised. We found, as the member said, that one in seven approved projects were potentially noncompliant. Twenty-one of them have already been subject to compliance actions, including either a request to fix their offsets or being issued with an infringement notice.

I want to go in continuation, if that's possible.

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