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

I will. I'll just go to the Deputy Leader of the Opposition's exact quote in 2021:

The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 is 20 years old and needs modernising to ensure Australia can meet current and future environment and heritage protection challenges.

We made it very clear through our Nature Positive Plan and through our laws that we wanted to see progress—progress to deliver stronger protection for nature and progress to provide faster, clearer decisions for business. There's no business in the country that believes the environment laws are working to progress projects quickly, nor is there any environmental organisation or anyone with any common sense that thinks that our laws are working to protect nature effectively.

Now, we took a very balanced package through the House of Representatives. We took it to the Senate. Unfortunately, the Liberals and the Nationals once again teamed up with the Greens political party to delay and to obfuscate and to refuse to make progress on our environmental law reforms, which would have delivered a strong, independent EPA with strong new powers and penalties, but would also have delivered faster, clearer decisions for business, based on greater regional planning, more transparency, more data and clearer decision-making processes. Sadly, the Senate we have at the moment doesn't allow us to progress every piece of legislation that we put to it. We've taken the legislation off the Notice Paper because we see that the deliberate delays and denial of those opposite, teamed up with the Greens political party, mean that there was no path through in this parliament. (Time expired)

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