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

I'd like to thank the former minister for the environment for that question. I say to her—she received the report of Professor Graeme Samuel into John Howard's broken environment laws. She had every opportunity as the environment minister at the time to fix it, and she did nothing.

This amendment to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act is a very specific amendment that will apply in very limited circumstances to reconsiderations, a very small number of reconsiderations that meet four particular criteria. The criteria are that the original decision was not a controlled action, if undertaken in a particular manner; that the activity underway is ongoing or recurring; that the activity had been ongoing or recurring for five years before the reconsideration application was submitted; and, finally, that the activity is being carried on under the supervision of a state or territory government—for example, a state or territory environment protection agency.

Under the existing law—as the former minister for the environment should know—an activity, including an established industry, could be shut down overnight if an environmental assessment had to commence. The former minister for the environment could have fixed this problem. She could have fixed this problem in any way she chose to, when she was the environment minister, but she didn't.

As I said at the beginning of my answer, this applies to a very small number of potential decisions. Of the 7,000—

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