Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Science and Water) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a brief contribution to this second reading debate on the Environment and Heritage Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2006. I start from the premise that I have always thought that you cannot make bad legislation less bad. Most of the 136 submissions to the inquiry expressed very deep and extensive concerns about this bill and what it was looking to achieve. For that reason Labor has taken the decision not to support the bill.

We really believe that, if passed, this bill will weaken the protections of the current EPBC Act that currently provide some support for Australia’s biodiversity and heritage. As Senator Bartlett said, the bill is a lost opportunity to deal with the issue of climate change. Everyone expected that there would be some climate change triggers or some kind of signals in this bill. For them not to be there was a glaring omission that beggars belief.

It is very interesting that there are no government senators prepared to speak in this debate and defend this legislation. I think we got a good indication of why that is the case from the comments made by Senator Johnston about the explanatory memorandum and how pathetic and basically disrespectful the explanatory memorandum was in what was being asked of senators.

The bill is quite extraordinary. It is 400-odd pages long. It is incomprehensible. The additional amendments that have been provided make it almost impossible to understand. I certainly do not have any kind of legal training. I spent my time trying to work out what amendments to the proposals might actually mean and I gave up. That is why I do not intend to speak too long except to express my real concerns about what is going to be achieved here.

We know—the explanatory memorandum actually tells us—that this is about improving the circumstances for developers. They are going to be the major beneficiaries. The bill, as it stands, provides greatly enhanced discretionary power for the Minister for the Environment and Heritage. I am sure that he is going to tell us why he needs those powers.

The bill certainly curtails third-party appeal rights and we heard from Senator Bartlett and Senator Siewert just what the implications of that are for people who act in the public interest and have a right to represent the public interest and concerns about the environmental impacts of major developments.

The bill reduces transparency and accountability, and many examples of that have been provided to the committee through the submissions. Some of the submissions have taken extraordinary steps to explain what the implications are for the kinds of representations that they make on behalf of their constituency groups and how significantly they will be affected by the bill.

The bill certainly undermines the public consultation process. Surely a bill of this magnitude and this import requires that there be genuine and appropriate public consultation. Senator Siewert made the point so clearly about the issue of threatened species and heritage-listing processes. That was the part of the bill that I was flabbergasted by. I have found this whole process pretty instructive in the sense that it shows how a government that has control of both houses of the parliament can move so quickly and in such an extraordinary number of ways all at one time.

There were parts of the bill that really concerned most people who made submissions. As I read their submissions I started to understand just what was on their minds. They were concerned about this business about undertakings as to damage protections for those who seek to enforce the act by way of injunctions, and the fact that that has been removed from the bill. It is obviously targeted at active environmental groups, but there are a lot of community organisations and community activists who might be concerned about a major project being considered under the EPBC Act. They would not be able to have their voice heard under this legislation. I think that is truly a disservice to those communities and is grossly unfair.

We had quite significant and learned evidence from Dr Lee Godden and Ms Jacqueline Peel from the Faculty of Law at the University of Melbourne. In their submission they argued:

An important enforcement tool currently provided by the EPBC Act is the capacity for any ‘interested person’, including environmental civil society groups, to seek an injunction to prevent breaches of the Act—

under section 475—

Such applications supplement the enforcement activity carried out by the Department of Environment and Heritage, and play an important role in ensuring the accountability of developers for the environmental consequences of their actions ...

They went on to say that the changes were ‘likely to affect, adversely, the enforcement strength of the legislation’ because ‘environmental groups and other community members rarely have the necessary resources to meet demands for an undertaking as to damages’. That point was taken up by several key representative organisations: the National Trust, the Humane Society International, the Tasmanian Conservation Trust and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature. All these people were arguing against the repeal of section 478. The submission from those peak organisations stated:

It is instructive to note that third parties have used the court system very judiciously, and given the Australian Government has such poor surveillance arrangements in place to ensure compliance, enabling individuals and organisations to ensure the objects of the Act are achieved should be encouraged not dissuaded.

Isn’t that what we want? We want an active democracy. We do not want to clamp down and we do not want to say that we are not prepared to listen to dissenting voices, but that will actually be the outcome of this legislation. Where do the public interest tests ever get to have their chance in the legislation as it is proposed?

Senator Bartlett referred to the changes to collecting evidence and the way in which evidence and dealing with offenders would actually be incorporated into the act. He talked about marrying the Migration Act and the Fisheries Management Act, and now this environment and heritage act. In a way, that is a pretty insidious process to bring in quite punitive action against individuals on the basis of aligning legislation. These offensive kinds of processes are all part of this insulting legislation.

The majority report from the committee made what I thought was the most offensive comment of all. It was this clause more than anything else that, I think, would have offended those people who are opposing the report. Paragraph 4.42 states:

The committee notes some concerns raised by the Scrutiny of Bills committee in its Alert Digest No. 12 of 2006 in regard to the provisions above, and hopes that the Minister’s responses to the questions raised by that committee will allay any fears regarding these reforms.

I do not intend to proceed any further because I think that the committee stage of the bill will be very informative. There will be extreme pressure on the minister to actually respond to the many questions that will be raised about the reforms that this bill purports to deliver.